Santiago Day 5 - Museo Bella Arte and Santa Lucia hill

View down from the top of Santa Lucia hill

If you have been following this blog over the past few days, you will have discovered that few things have gone as we would have anticipated. Add the Museo Bellas Arte to the list. I anticipated a national gallery with a permanent collection of lovely paintings and maybe some sculpture. Instead, we found an unbelievably beautiful shell of a building built in 1910, housing very little. All of the exhibits in this part of the museum are temporary. The main theme of the installations was an examination of the concept of gender identity and how it relates to power and submission. My favourite exhibition was Verónica Büttinghausen: El objeto souvenir de mi cotidiano a series of still lives, any one of which I would have been happy to hang in my own home. 

Down a corridor, we discovered the other part of the museum, known as the Museum of Contemporary art. Another beautiful building, in need of some repair, but housing more permanent exhibits of mostly mid 20th century painting. 

After the museums, we wandered and discovered, not far away, Santa Lucia hill. This is one of 2 hills in Santiago (the other being the one with the funicular). It is the site of a famous battle from 1817. After the steep climb all the way up, one is rewarded with a view of the city and some lovely gardens. While we were up there, they fired a cannon, which surprised not just us, but all of the visitors. 

My time in Santiago is up. I board my plane back home in just a few minutes. It has felt like a visit to Europe, but instead of flying east, I flew south.

Santiago Day 4 Vina del Mar

It was a beautiful, sunny day for a trip to the seaside. Vina del Mar is about 1 1/2 hrs away along a good highway. Knowing that, I really wanted to see the ocean! I know I've seen the Pacific from BC, but this is different, and as my son put it, it's the South Pacific (sort of).

The Museum Fonck owns the only Easter Island statue off Easter Island. It was gifted to Chile in 1951. Originally when we were first discussing a longer trip to Chile, we had planned to take the 6 hr flight to Easter Island. Given that my trip is a whole 5 days, finding this guy was a close as I would get, and I'm ok with that!

We wandered the promenade along the seaside, and stopped for lunch at a cafe. Lots of stray dogs. Unlike the Santiago dogs, these ones don't have collars, and most of them don't have coats either.

Then I got to play in the water! I wasn't about to miss the chance to put my feet in the Pacific in Chile! It was cold but not desperate. The waves were huge and the undertow must have been something else too, but 2 men decided they'd swim anyway, in spite of it being winter. Now I say that, but it must have been 20 degrees.


Our dinner reservation was at a place called Tierra del Fuego. The joke is that after watching an episode of british tv show "Top Gear", I want to drive the road to the real Tierra del Fuego, which happens to be in Argentina, I think. The Top Gear guys had a lot of trouble with the Argentinians, and we had our own challenges at this restaurant too. All week, I have travelled with a spanish phrasebook. It has helped us with menus to no end. Today, by mistake, the book stayed home, so we had to rely on Google Translate to decipher the dinner menu. Not good. PP thought he was ordering paella. Waiter told him no it was soup. OK. He'd have the king crab. I was expecting full crab, legs and all. Not so. PP received a large mound of crab meat. The end. My googling led me to believe I was choosing crab cakes. Sounds safe. Guess what - not crab cakes. When mine arrived, it was a bowl of warm melted cheese. With crab in it. Sort of like cheesy crab fondue, but without the stuff to dip. Tasty, but definitely not what I was expecting. I've never eaten a bowl of cheese before. The capirinhas were the saving grace. While not the national drink of Chile (that's a pesco sour), PP likes capirinhas (from Brazil) much better. It's cachaca, lime, and sugar. Very nice.

The whole point of this particular restaurant was the location. One goes to Vina del Mar for the sunsets, and this place gads a fantastic balcony right on the water. Judge the pictures for yourself. The sunset was spectacular, as was the drive home under a full moon and a sky full of stars.
                                      

Santiago Day 3 Underraga Winery

Today, we decided to let someone else to the driving. We signed up to do a tour of Underraga winery with Turistik, the Chilean bus tour company. It was terrific!

Underraga is located about 40km WSW of Santiago in the Maipo valley, near a community called Mélipilla. The Underraga family bought the land the winery is on in the 1870s and planted the first vines in 1885. Today, the company owns small plots of land in many areas. They are known for experimenting with the effects of different soil compositions on grapes and their resulting wines. 

The Camenera is a uniquely Chilean wine. The vines were originally brought over from Europe in the last century, then lost, as in confused with other vines. There were plagues of pests in Europe that wiped out the Carmenera and it wasn't until the 1990s that DNA tests were done on the vines to rediscover them. So, although the vines have been native to Chile for over 100 years, the Carmenera is still considered a new varietal.

We tasted 4 wines - all winners. And they let us keep our glasses - that never happens in Niagara.

This one was the winner.

This one is like an ice wine - very sweet and syrupy, but better than ice wine, I thought.

Santiago Day 2: avenuturas para las montanas

Cars waiting to be allowed back down at 3pm
Ad for Banff film festival in the background

Santiago doesn't get snow, but its residents love the stuff. We set off to go up into the Andes to see the ski resorts, Faradelle, La Parva, and Valla Lavado. There is only one road to get there and while it was constructed as a 2 lane road, the police make it a one way road. Each day, drivers are allowed up until 3pm, then down after 3pm. The road has 40 switchbacks to get up to the first resort village and having travelled them, I see the value in only allowing traffic one way. I can't imagine trying to get 2 vehicles around those corners at the same time. 

The road up is pretty. A few shacks. Some green. Lots of cacti. Then comes the snow. Just enough to cover the ground. Fortunately, the pavement is dry. I can't imagine trying to do that road

the road up

in snow. Hence the reason for the mandatory (sort of) tire chain rental. Before you get to the switchbacks, 

there's a piece of road lined on one side by a cliff face, and lined on the other by a wall of I'm not sure what. It's a metal wall and it hides little spaces for the people who eke out a living by corralling drivers into renting their tire chains. One can try to just drive past, but when PP and a friend tried to do that on a recent hiking trip, the police turned them around and they had to go back to get the chains. Today, when we approached the police checkpoint, we were waved through. Oh well, better to have been prepared I suppose. 

They're tobogganing with garbage bags.

The traffic up was fine. Once we got up to Faradelle, the road got stupid. People had parked everywhere and anywhere, not leaving much room for the rest of us to get through. We carried on through toward La Parva, and were doing pretty well until the tires caught on some slush and we slid. Should have put on those chains! Short version of long story, we backed partway into a parking spot, but our nose hung out into the road enough to block all the traffic travelling both ways on this tiny road. First PP drove while I tried to push. Then I "drove" (note: car is standard, and I haven't touched a stick shift since 1989) while PP pushed. No luck either time. Finally, a couple of local men decided to solve things and actually lifted the car back onto the road. Once we were safely stuck in traffic going the other way, PP realized the parking brake had been on the whole time (loops) and without that, either one of us could probably have pushed the car out on our own.

Time to go to Valle Lavado. Or not. Remember my telling you about those families who liked to come up into the mountains to play in the snow? They park on either side of the road. Not a lot of room left for tour busses or regular cars after that. At one point, we inched our way around a family in a blue car who had set up a hibachi on the road so they could have lunch.

We never made it to Valla Lavado. The police turned us around promptly at 3pm, whereby we sat in line until the parade started moving back down. This may all sound like a wasted day, but I don't feel it was. I spent the day up in the Andes. I saw snow in July. I witnessed lots of happy people enjoying winter in beautiful scenery. There are worse ways to spend a day.

Santiago Day 1

It's a long way up.

View from the top

I don't know what I was expecting from South America. I knew Santiago, Chile was a big city. It feels european. It has a lot of green spaces, which are green even though it is the dead of winter (apparently in summer, they're brown because it's so hot and dry). The weather is funny. Dress in spring jacket, gloves, and scarf, your'e too hot in the sun and take it all off. Standing in the shade, you're too cold and put it all back on. The mountains are everywhere. Santiago is in a bowl surrounded by mountains, which is great for pretty scenery but bad for trapping air pollution. Chileans seem to have the same sense of unyielding ownership of sidewalks that Swedes have - they aren't going to get out of your way to let you pass - it's a bit of a game of Uncle.

We started our tour with a walk to the subway, then an easy ride to Bellavista district and another walk to San Cristobel Hill. San Cristobel came to fame in 1923 with the construction of a Funicular. It is now a national monument. The hill is also the site of a zoo. We found it to be significantly busier than PP expected yesterday afternoon. In addition to the requisite stray dogs wandering and sleeping everywhere, the entrance and line up for the Funicular is home to many stuff stands. If you are looking for hats or mitts or masks or kids toys or snack food, there's a vendor happy to sell it to you. After waiting in a very long line for a very long time, it is our turn to get pulled up the side of the cliff. At the top, the view of the mountains and the city is beautiful. The big draw, other than the view, is the enormous statue of the Immaculate Virgin Mary. She watches over the city similar to the Christ the Redeemer statue that watches over Rio in Brazil. 

Time for lunch in Bellavista. There's a square full of restaurants and we found one called House in the Air or Casa en el aire. Here, regardless of the temperature, people eat outside and so did we. Sopapillas and grilled fish - perfect afternoon snack.

Santiago Metropolitain Cathedral

Now back to the subway and on to Place des Armes (de la independencia something something something. This is a very large pedestrian square, surrounded by museums and a magnificent cathedral that dates from the mid 1500s. We toured the Museo National to learn more about the coloured history of Chile. Took some work though - all the captions were in spanish so we had to do some deciphering. Next up, the Fish Market. Housed in a beautiful old building with a beautiful ceiling, the fish market is quite literally stall after stall of fish vendors. I'd like to know what they do with it all if they don't sell it, or for that matter, how old the fish we saw actually was. We saw 3 white cats wandering around inside, having snack, and they didn't seem to be at all bothered by the freshness of the fish. 

Back to the subway. It is now 5:30 on a Friday, and the busy-ness indicator says medium. Ha! We had to wait 4 trains just to squish into a car. It was an up close and personal get to know the people kind of ride. By the time we got back out at our stop, it was dark, and it was cold. Time to switch to the ski jacket before heading back out. 

Dinner. Steak and a nice Caminiera. Tomorrow - las montanas.