Santiago, Chile

We're at the airport in Santiago waiting to fly home after six weeks in Chile, Argentina and Bolivia.

We spent the last few days of our trip in Santiago.  We flew through here twice on the trip, spending a night each time.  I've also flown out of Santiago on previous trips, but never really spent much time seeing the city.  This was finally our chance to see Santiago.

We flew to Santiago from La Paz on April 7th.  The flight stopped down at Arica and Antofagasta.  In Arica we had to deplane, claim our baggage and clear Chilean customs, then reboard the flight.  The customs people asked us to open up the extra souvenir bag, which messed up my careful packing job.  Fortunately everything made it to Santiago.  The stopover in Antofagasta was supposed to be 35 minutes; but then the Chilean air force had some planes take off, which shut down airspace to commercial flights.  This delayed our new flight crew coming in, and so we ended up spending three hours in the airport in Antofagasta.

We arrived in La Paz around 7pm.  Heather's backpack was the first to arrive on the conveyor belt, before she had time to even think about worrying about it.  Our other two bags arrived within the first five as well -- we were loaded up on the cart and out the airport in about two minutes after getting to the conveyor belt.  The restaurants in our area of Santiago close around 11pm, so we were cutting it close to get to the hotel, clean up and get to a restaurant.  We ended up at Ostras Squella, a seafood restaurant we ate at the 2nd time through Santiago.

The next morning we talked with Dennis, owner of Casa Bonita (our hotel) for sugggestions about what to do with our time in Santiago.  We arranged for a wine tour for the day of our flight home, as the flight was at night and it left us the full day in Santiago.

Friday we spent walking around the highlights of downtown Santiago.  Santiago is a city of neighbourhoods, each with its own character.  We stopped in at the market for lunch, I was expecting a low-key place with mom-and-pop places serving fresh seafood.  Instead it was a  very popular place for tourists and business folks to have long lunches with wine and dessert.  We tried the king crab, one of the specialties at Donde Agusto.  It was amazing.  It came out freshly steamed to our table.  Our waiter then expertly cut and served us the crab, so we didn't get messy trying to eat it.  It came with a heated olive oil and garlic dipping sauce.  There were also some other sides (fries and a mixed salad if I recall) that we didn't eat, because we were so focused on the yummy crab.  Mmm good.

After lunch we wandered through Barrio Bellavista, an artsy area with a lot of university students, mostly drinking cheap draft beer on patio bars.  Bought ice cream at Emporio La Rosa, and ate it while strolling through Parque Forestal.  Took a trip up the funicular to the top of Cerro San Cristobal for very smoggy views of Santiago.

We walked home down Av O'Higgins, the main street of Santiago, and were amazed at the number of pedestrians.  The other visits through Santiago had been on Sundays, and it's much busier on weekdays (as you'd likely expect).

Later that evening, we had dinner at Las Vacas Gordas.  We had lunch there our first day on the trip, which was amazing.  I had been thinking about eating here again the whole trip.  We arrived at 8:30pm, thinking we would be early and beat the crowds.  However it was already packed, and we added our names to the waiting list.  About 30 minutes later we were seated, which gave us enough time to try to remember the cut of wagyu we had the first time.  We both ordered the same meal (one of the few times we've done so), and then feasted on way too much perfectly grilled meat.  It was one of the best eating days ever.

Saturday we saw a couple art galleries.  Had lunch at Opera Cafe, which shares the kitchen with the acclaimed restaurant of the same name.  We had the chef's choice for sandwich, smoked salmon, arugula, avocado and some other toppings on a long thin baguette -- it was really good.  We had planned to have dinner at Tales, but it was closed because of work on the water main in the area.  So instead we took a taxi to Barrio Lastarria and ate at Patagonia Restaurant.  Both our dishes were excellent, which was four straight amazing lunches and dinners over the last couple days.  The wineries are also running a promotion at this time of year at many of the restaurants in Santiago.  If you order one of the promoted wines, you get a 2nd bottle for free to take home.

Santiago mostly shuts down on Sundays, so we had planned our day around the few places open on Sundays.  We stopped in at Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, which was one of the best contemporary art museums we saw on this trip.  Next was Palacio Cousino, unfortunately it was closed for renovations. We spent the afternoon browsing through Pueblito Los Dominicos, a small village of craft shops, with really good quality (and somewhat higher prices than La Paz).  It reminded me of the Distillery in Toronto, where there's a concentration of higher-end arts and crafts stores, and little bakeries and coffee shops.  We bought a few more souvenirs, then headed back to the hotel to pack up.  We went back to Barrio Lastarria for dinner, hoping to find other restaurants open, but only Patagonia appealed to us so we ate there again.  Unfortunately our streak of amazing meals ended, we shared the cheese and deli platter for two, which sounded good on the menu, but was very disappointing.

Our last day we spent on an organized tour of a couple wineries, Vina Cousino Macul, and Vina Aquitania.  Vina Cousino Macul is one of the oldest and larger wineries.  The tour of the winery was more museum-like, as a lot of the wine-making equipment was no longer in use, replaced by automation and high-tech containers.  It was still cool to see though.  They also had a cellar with bottles dating back to the 1930's -- again, just for display as the corks weren't designed to last that long, so all the wine would have soured.

Vina Aquitania is a smaller boutique winery, just inside Santiago city limits.  It was surrounded by subdivisions -- I guess Santiago is no different from any other city, growing out.  The view were nice, though, with the city core in the smoggy distance on one side, and the mountainside on the other.  They also had the better ambience for wine-tasting at the end of the tour -- outside, under a walnut tree, with an oak barrel as a table and right beside the vineyards.

We arrived back at the hotel around 3pm, cleaned up and then went to Tales for a late afternoon meal.  The setting was great -- overlooking Calle Concha y Toro, a beautiful little cobblestoned street with art deco and beaux arts mansions.  The food was also great, a nice way to end the trip.  The Lonely Planet says one of the best ways to experience Santiago is through the food and drink, and we gave it our best shot.

We took a taxi for the four blocks from our hotel to the airport bus stop, with the extra bags for souvenirs we were less mobile.  We had 10kg more weight in baggage than the start of our trip, according to the airport scales, but still under our limit.  After checking in we settled into the wait for our flight, and getting home!