Day 1, we arrive in Chile
8:21 am on the 4th of November, 2005Monday 4th of July 2005.
As I was saying, when we awoke, we were flying over the snow-covered mountains of Chile, stunning to see.
It was as though we were flying over a giant meringue and it just took my breath away. When we finally got off the plane the contrast from where we had just been couldn?t have been starker ? coming from 33? at midnight in Madrid we emerged into 6? early morning in Santiago. We had until about 5 hours to play with in the Chilean capital so we bought a bus ticket and did our best to get to the centre but we didn?t do very well, which is seems to be a common theme for the Stuart and Morven go exploring foreign countries series. Not knowing where to get off we watched two other traveller looking people who got off at a small looking market, we were unsure and stayed on a little longer and we passed a much bigger market, however when we stood up to get off the bus just carried on for about half a mile, by the time we did get off and walked started walking towards the market we were passed by the two others walking purposefully in the opposite direction to us, oh well. We went along to the market and found lots of interesting tat to be flogged to tourists, and even at that stage most places were closed, most shops didn?t open until about 10, South Americans have a relaxed attitude to time as we would find out in the weeks to come. While it wasn?t warm, it was with surprise I saw how wrapped up everyone was, big jackets, with scarves and hats and gloves and thick boots and trousers and me, walking along in just a long sleeved t-shirt.
Charged with the task of sending a postcard to my mum from each country we visited, the only thing we had to do was find a shop that was selling them, a stamp and a post box. This however was not an easy task. We were at this market that sold lots and lots of tourist tat but nowhere was selling postcards or anything similar, so we decided we should try to find the Plaza de Almas (main square) so we set off after some lunch, 
which we bought from an ice cream shop, in fact it was just ice cream if I?m being honest, but a huge one at that. We also bought some pastry things from a 5 year old stret vendor really cheaply (about 2 Pence for 4) and strode in the general direction we though would be right. However it very definitely wasn’t the right thing to be doing, we eventually gave up when we realised it would take us something like 3 hours. We were going in about the right direction we think but the scale on the map was a bit hazy. So, a good start to our adventure, we spend a day doing virtually nothing, but enjoyable notheless (mostly because of the ice cream) because we were on our way, this was the sort of culture we were going to be imersed in for the next 4 weeks. Some of the things we noticed: huge numbers of dogs jut lying in the streets asleep, not stray just out on their own with little to do; we saw very little Indians, almost all the people we saw were of European origin which was quite startling as we were not in a wealthy area, so that went against all of my expectations having done a little bit of reading before we left; everything was very cheap, we found that there was a lot of things cheaper here than in Peru, and as Chile has the strongest economy in South America this was a little but of a shock - les us to believe that Peru would be cheaper than it turned out to be.
And that was Chile, all that we would see of it, what more is there to mention? We made our way back to the airport without incident and then waited for our flight to Lima, the capital city of Peru. With no intentions to spend any more time there than neccessary we had flights booked straight our again the following morning to Arequipa. The downside of that was we had to spend our night awake* in Lima airport.
* incase of being mugged - we were pretty aware of what was going ojn around us all month, which meant we didn;t have any trouble with thieves, however neither did anyone we met who were much less vigilant, which makes me wonder if we maybe just looked typically British and more attractive to any potential assailants.
