The 2018 Blog / September 23, 2018
Alright, so I’m exaggerating a-lot again when I say that there was nothing to do. But, there really wasn’t much to do…. And maybe it’s just because we were right at the tail end of our trip and were ready to be back in America, I don’t really know. But to start off with, we visited three different places in Chile.
San Pedro De Atacama
So this is the place where we got dropped off at after our Uyuni Tour. It’s located right at the top of this pencil thin country and is apparently the driest place on earth? IDK how accurate that is though to be honest but we’ll just roll with it for now.
So we got to San Pedro, said goodbye to our Canadian friends and tried to find a place to live for the night. After finding a nice hostel, we quickly realized that Chile IS EXPENSIVE . And not just any kind of expensive, especially in San Pedro, it was like New York City expensive!
Anyways, we were here so nothing we could do now. At this point in our trip we still needed to figure out how to get home. So, we looked into tickets back to Lima because we already had tickets booked back to LA from Lima so we had to get back there. We then found out that the cheapest way to do that would be to fly to Santiago, Chile and then fly to Lima. So we booked our tickets and quickly figured out what to do next. What do you do in the driest place on earth!?!! Well star gaze of course! I think thats what San Pedro is famous for and probably the only thing you really do there. But in order to really see them to the best of our abilities we had to actually get out of this little town. So we booked a nice little overpriced tour for the night and headed off to see what they claimed as the BEST Stargazing experience ever! I mean, not to ruin it, but it wasn’t the best.
So we got picked up at our hostel and headed out into the dessert where we all lined up around a fire. I remind you, Sarah and I had no idea what we got ourselves into or what to expect. So someone then came out and started giving us information about the stars. She pointed out multiple “llama constellations” which was honestly the biggest stretch known to man. She then pulled out two extremely large telescopes where viewers could look at the stars. Only thing was, when you look through the telescope, the image is not any bigger than if you just looked at it with your own eyes! These telescopes were about four to five feet tall too…. But you know, they gave us a couple of glasses of wine so I ain’t complaining. Well, actually i guess this whole rant is complaining so scratch that.
Santiago
So then we went to bed, woke up the next morning, hung out all day, and headed out to make our flight to Santiago. The flight was good and we arrived into Santiago at around one am checked into a nearby hostel and went to bed. The next day we decided to explore the city. This was truly the most westernized city that we had seen since coming to South America. It was super similar to any kind of city that you would see in America.
Anyways, we took it easy a bit and just explored town. Oh, also protip, if you see places with blacked out windows that say “Cafe” on them, well they aren’t actually cafes. They are strip clubs. Found that one out the hard way at 10am and got a nice little wake up shock!
At this point in the story, I am just going to gloss over the next 24 hours because this was an experience that made me truly despise Chile.
I mean clearly because I’m still here alive. oh and yea I lost my phone too. So that sucks
We then had troubles with AirBnB, got stranded, almost didn’t have a place to stay, finally found a small hotel room at night and ordered papa johns to drown our sorrows and celebrate our lives that were almost taken.
Valparaiso
So now moving on from the horrid that was Santiago, we decided to leave the city as soon as possible and headed to the artistic town called Valparaiso! It took us a short two hour bus ride to get there where we immediately went to our AirBnB to settle in. We walked around and enjoyed the nice architecture, but again regarding point 1, there really wasn’t anything to do here.
So the next day we decided to head over to Vina del Mar. This was the supposed “Resort Town” that everyone told us we had to go check out. But let me tell you, THIS WAS NOT A RESORT TOWN. It had no resorts at all, which brings me to my last and final reason why Chile is the WOAT.
So at this point, we only had a couple days until our journey back to the states. So we pretty much laid low until our flight. But to wrap this up Chile really wasn’t that bad, and reading this over, the story that I didn’t tell makes it sound a lot worse than it was. Don’t worry y’all it really wasn’t that bad. But anyways, until next time, thanks for listening to my rant about Chile.
Originally published September 23, 2018 / See the Santiago gallery
