Santiago de Chile

From Iquique, we flew to the final destination of our South American Adventure: Santiago de Chile. (The 2 hour flight was much preferred over the alternative of a 26 hour bus journey!) There is not much to say about Santiago, it is quite a modern city and has a very European feel, and it was a pleasant place to spend our final two days.

It is perhaps noteworthy that the main avenue running through the centre of the city is called Av Berdardo O’Higgins after the first president, who was actually the son of an Irish man. During one of our days, we followed the suggested Lonely Planet walking tour of the city, which brought us into one of its renowned local pubs which sells, amongst other things, a potent local concoction of cheap wine and ice-cream in a pint glass. It sounds terrible but actually tasted delicious. Unfortunately, after 2 pints of it, we were in no state to continue with the walking tour and headed straight home to bed (we were lucky to find it!) That stuff should come with a health warning!!

The one notable “attraction” that we saw in the city was the FÉNIX2 rescue pod that was used to pull the 33 trapped Chilean miners out of the mine earlier this month. It was on display in the centre of the city and there was a very long queue of Chileans lining up to have their photo taken beside it!

This marks the first stage of our trip home to Ireland. From here, we will fly to Buenos Aires, then on to Frankfurt and finally to Dublin. We will visit Estonia next week. Although we are sorry to leave the backpacking lifestyle behind us, we haven’t been home in more than a year and a half so are looking forward to it. This will be our last blog entry and we hope you have enjoyed reading it – it has effectively become a day-by-day journal of our travels and we are very happy to have it for future reference :)