Finding Santiago

In my first terrifying foray into Spanish I had successfully (I think) made a reservation at the Hotel Foresta. After arming myself with more Spanish phrases and then failing to find a baggage enquiries office, my bag had mysteriously appeared on the carousel with all the others, so I took a van from the airport with a few other people in. As we were driving I kept having to remind myself to look out of the window – to see where I was, what it was like. I was in Chile! What was Chile? I had no idea what to expect. I remember those first taxi rides from the airports in Hyderabad and Bombay, how I would always drink in the atmosphere, the experience of India! The only feeling I got from Santiago was that of a city. Just any city. I got to the hotel where the clerk spoke enthusiastic English, a little old man carried my heavy case up in the lift, I tipped him (probably not enough) and finally collapsed on the bed in the small room looking at stripy wallpaper with flowers on.

Having arrived on Sunday evening, I ended up staying another two days in Santiago before flying out. Having found the two other volunteers for the project who were also due to catch the same plane, I set out to find Chile. I found mountains! They had snow on!!!! I may have been illogically overexcited by this, but – there was snow! And they were huge! Just sitting there next to the city! Anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever seen snow-covered mountains before so I thought that was pretty cool. We also found a zoo, in which lived elephants, lions, tigers, two polar bears and some condors in some quite small enclosures. The condors’ cage did not resemble jungle. We found various unhealthy types of food, a posh Italian restaurant that didn’t open till 8pm, cheap clothes that we didn’t have room to buy, museums that were all closed on Mondays and some hummingbirds on a hill. On the night before we were due to leave, after dinner and a hot chocolate, we failed, for some time, to find an ATM at which to withdraw all the money we would need for our 2-3 months stay on the bank-free island. We eventually reached a room of cash machines in the centre of town which you used your card to get into and withdrew some quite large sums of money – I had 200,000 Chilean pesos (about 200 quid) stuffed into my back pocket. It was around 10pm. Coming out of the ATM room I didn’t see anyone hanging around looking suspicious which was reassuring, and we set off back to the hotel. We were particularly wary after an incident earlier in the day when two young guys had run into us from behind (quite hard) and then made off down the street followed some time afterwards by a poor man yelling; they had made off with his laptop and he seemed to have little chance of catching them. Halfway back to the hotel Kelly (who it turns out graduated from APU in 2005) commented that she may have been being paranoid but a guy with a lip-piercing had passed us while we were getting out money and had then changed direction twice and had been following us. Worrying, but he’d luckily disappeared. At the next crossroads a skinny guy passed in front of us then started up the same street on the other side just slightly behind – “that’s him” muttered Kelly. I decided she wasn’t being paranoid. We marched back to the hotel really rather fast, hardly speaking until we got there. We decided that next time we’d get money out in the day time.

On Wednesday morning we left early in a large multi-seater and ended up in a pretty posh-looking lounge in a building round the back of the international airport. In the car park-sized space in front of us were two small planes and a helicopter. The luggage allowance was 10kg so I was charged 25 pounds for the extra 9 kilos of my large suitcase, but luckily not for my suddenly 87kg person. I drank my first latte – it was very nice. We squeezed onto a plane with about 10 seats in the front and the luggage in the back and the pilots visible through the open curtain at the front. I accidentally sat on my lunch, packed into a brown paper bag. Less than half an hour in we had left the coast of mainland Chile behind us.