A little after the event, but a few words seem appropriate to cover our journey from Auckland to Rio last weekend. However, it would be decidedly inappropriate for me to offer too much opinion or perspective on Santiago, Chile as, along with the brevity of our stop-over, I managed to sleep through important phases of our stay.
The cause of this unseasonal confusion was a flight that left Auckland at 18:00 on the Saturday, crossed the international date line and landed at 13:00 on the same day. A ten hour flight in the middle of a 40-hour day seems to have weakened my resolve slightly and whilst Caroline revelled in the opportunity to shop on 2 continents, 6,000 miles apart without the calendar changing I wilted badly under the usual responsibility of map reading and having the navigational duties for 2 people.
It is likely that the lack of suiatble rest over the previous 34 hours of the day was the main cause of my falling asleep mid-conversation with Caroline whilst sitting on a bench in Santiago´s central square. Another contributing factor is that we have both now admitted to the fact that, having been on our travels now for over 3 months, we each have an uncanny ability to tune-out to the sound of the others voice. Conversations variously take on the form of white noise, utter silence or occasionally the sound of the adults talking in Charlie Brown. The plus side to this has been a relatively harmonious passage around the world with barely a cross word offered or less still received.
Anyway, following my most obvious sign of weariness, we retired early, where again I managed to be asleep in moments – Caroline may or may not have been telling me something at the time.... I awoke ´refreshed´ at midnight to find that nobody else in Santiago was sleeping and that most were directly involved in one of the South American continents better parties directly outside our hostel window. Owing to a lack of currency and energy, we opted not to join them, instead taking the opportunity to lie, Bill Murray-like, listening to their fun until 05:00 the following morning. The brief joy accompanying their departure was lost somewhat when a Canadian film crew arrived at 05:10 and proceded to set up to shoot a mobile phone commercial. Oh how we laughed.
Given that our body clocks were either broken or reading 01:00 on a completely different day and month, we were surprised to feel much stronger at breakfast and set out shortly afterwards to spend some quality time in the city before our flight out to Rio later that afternoon. The city – the bits we saw of it – is quite similar to Madrid or Seville, which given that I saw the former on a stag-do lends further weight to the inappropriate nature of my perspective in this matter. However, there were some fine old buildings which had certainly been missing over the previous 2 months and a very European feel to the place. In addition to the architectural plus points, we also got a pretty decent view of the Andes to the East of the city which provides an impressive backdrop.
In the few hours that we had available we managed to climb a small hill in the center for some excellent panoramic views and hopefully photographs that we´ll post at some stage soon. We also managed to view 3 museums/art galleries, helped in no small measure that all are free on a Sunday and all descriptive text was written in Spanish meaning that we weren´t required to think too hard. After that, we made our way back to the airport and the flight across to Rio, over the Andes and through some electrical storms which were either excellent or terrifying depending on your point of view – we did discuss it, no firm conclusions were reached but Caroline didn´t look happy!
Caroline is currently committing her thoughts on Rio and Buzios to the blog so I won´t go any further with this other than to say that when we arrived and were driving through Rio to our hostel, there was still a game of 6 a-side football going on on the astro-turf pitches at one in the morning. Marvellous.
RJH
