A last minute browse of the Lonely Planet before we landed in Santiago had prepared us for the US$56 dollar "reciprocity" tax that Chile charges Australians. Never the less I was annoyed, and for the first of many times on the trip had to remind myself not to get angry at things that were outside my control - just chalk it up to experience and inform myself better in future.
It also turned out we'd made a bad choice of hotels for our stopover in Chile. The quality of the hotel itself was reasonable - but the information provided (from Gallileo I believe) by our travel agent had indicated we were just a few kilometres from the airport making it cheap and convenient for the short time we were there. It turned out it was 20km away in a satellite business district and would cost us $US 30 for a cab as there was no direct public transport or shuttles.
We were determined not to let it ruin the trip of course, this was not a tragedy just an annoyance and it was "only money" which on day one of the trip was still in adequate supply.
To revive our tired and jetlagged spirits we decided to make an adventure out of getting to the hotel rather than dwell on our ignorance and managed to find a crowded local bus to get us into the city centre. We sat on our packs in a luguage compartment and watched as the city came to life around us. Practicing our few words of spanish at any opportunity.
We were helped by a very friendly local named Jose who was commuting on the same bus. He worked in customes at the airport and helped us connect from the bus to the metro and showed us on our map how to get to the Raddison in the city from which we could get a complimentary shuttle to our hotel Cuidad Empressario. Total cost of the journey was about $US5 rather than the taxi fare and we had fun doing it.
We left our luguage at the Raddison and had a walk around the neighbourhood. Restaurants seemed pretty expensive, so just had a very ordinary tasting coffee and a cheesecake before going to our hotel.
Our flight left in the morning well before breakfast (which had been included in the cost) was so we booked an early morning wake up call and ordered a taxi and went to bed.
