Yes well…We’ve actually been home nearly 5 months and finally I am getting around to finishing off the blog.
We had our last night in Colombia back in beautiful-but-sweaty Cartagena and by the time we arrived at our hotel after our flight from San Andres Island, it was really too late to do anything except eat, have a quick re-pack and fall into bed. The air conditioning was set at 25 degrees and it felt absolutely freezing because outside it was about 36 degrees and incredibly humid. Next day we had a short-ish flight down to Bogota airport, then another 6 hour one from Bogota right down to Santiago in Chile, our final departure point. I sometimes forget how enormous this continent is and how long it takes to get anywhere, even by air. Yawn.
Talk about a shock to the system: suddenly the temperature had plummeted from Too-Hot-to-Wear-Anything degrees down to Oh-My-God-It’s-Freezing degrees. And where the hell did we pack our merinos? We were in Santiago for only three nights but it was overcast or raining pretty much all the time and really the best part of it was the lovely boutique hotel we stayed in , which was in a lovely leafy street of the district of Providencia. Our particular street really felt like a little corner of Paris and it had a lovely little restaurant attached to it, where we ate on two out of the three nights. The rest of Santiago was kind of forgettable really, or maybe it was partly the grey weather, drab buildings and the fact that we were at the end of a long trip. Anyway, we had a day tootling about on the Hop On Hop Off bus around Santiago city, and then did a whole day bus trip over to the (west) colourful coastal towns of Viña del Mar and Valparaiso, about a two hour drive away.
Valparaiso is famous for its colourful houses and wall art, and also its ancient and rickety funicular “elevators”, called “Ascensores” in Spanish, which transport people up and down the hillsides at a scarily steep pitch. There used to be around 30 of them and now there are only about 13 or 14 still operating, but on one particular downward journey I found myself wondering idly if this would be the last and possibly fatal trip down on that particular elevator. Unfortunately it rained pretty much the whole day, with a bone-chilling wind, which detracted a bit from the beauty of the places we visited, mostly on foot. But we did come across the ultimate in ghastly Christmas ornaments there – a nativity scene inside a pottery llama (see photo).
Back in Santiago, the day we were due to leave they had an incessant downpour of very heavy rain the entire day, with flooding everywhere. But we sloshed around the nearby streets for a last airing and met a very dejected-looking dog with two different coloured eyes who stuck to us like glue for ages after we said ‘Ola’ to him (he only spoke Spanish) and gave him a pat. There was some doubt whether we would be able to get to the airport by taxi for our Midnight departure, but luckily we made it. I managed to talk my way – in Spanish I might add – into getting an exit row for us on the flight back to Auckland, which was a definite bonus.
We arrived in Auckland at 4.30am local time and our favourite fellow Frosty Top Tour friend, Bill, who lives in Auckland, very kindly came out to the airport at that inhuman hour to meet us and have a coffee with us before our flight to Nelson.
2 Frosty Tops Do South America 