A Place Both Wonderful and Strange – Tash & Ricki's Career Break Travels

After enjoying the historic sights of the Rome region, we pressed pause on our overseas travels and returned home to Scotland for a week. This was to attend a family wedding, and we had a fantastic time celebrating the nuptials of Stuart and Clare. It was also lovely to have a chance to catch up with friends and family, and bore them even more about our travels than this blog no doubt already has done!

The week almost felt like the busiest week of our year so far, and so we definitely return to our travels for a break!

With no immediate plans to return to Europe, we are going further flung on this leg and have headed to South America. For the first time this year, we are visiting a country we have never been to before – Chile. In fact, this is our first time in South America as a whole.

We don’t even have our return flight booked. Unfortunately during our return to Scotland, Ricki had it confirmed that he wouldn’t be able to get the yellow fever vaccine and so once again we are in the position where we won’t be including Brazil in our travels. Differing advice has had us going back and forth on this point over the months of planning, but it seems this is now the final position. So just as well we hadn’t booked a return flight from Rio de Janeiro. Although at one point in time, we did have a return flight booked from Sao Paulo, but Virgin Atlantic had other ideas (sadly this is NOT a first for us – my tip, if booking with VA, only go for established routes as they seem prone to cancelling recently launched ones).

Spotlight of horror for now goes to British Airways and Heathrow Airport though. Our second milestone of note for this blog entry is the Heathrow – Santiago flight is the longest single flight either of us have taken. In fact, it is the longest of British Airways’ routes. After psyching ourselves up for the 13 hour overnight flight, unfortunately the third milestone was that this would be the first major hiccup of the year.

After spending an hour or so at the allocated flight gate, our fears that a delay caused by “technical issues” would morph into a longer drawn affair proved well founded. There was a collective wail at our gate as the ground crew announced the flight wouldn’t be able to depart until the next day. Given we are going to be taking many flights of the course of this year, we were mentally well prepared for at least one not to go to plan, so this didn’t cause us personally any great distress. In fact, this is the first time in my life I’ve had a flight delayed overnight, so I’d say I’ve been very fortunate until now, and was somewhat curious as to how it would be handled. My biggest fear was being told that the new departure could be any time in the next 24 hours and that after staying up past midnight, we would have to brace ourselves for a 5am start the next day.

On the whole BA handled it fairly well, with an alarming amount of regularity to it all. Our luggage would be kept checked in with the plane (thank god I’d pulled out some spare underwear for my hand luggage at the last minute at home); an airport hotel and shuttle bus were all arranged and we were assured the flight could not leave before midday. Good news for us, although less so for those with time pressures.

Thankfully we were put up in a perfectly comfortable Ibis overnight. 

After a reasonable night’s sleep and decent breakfast, it was time for take two. Unfortunately, the gate number from the previous night had been incorrectly kept on the departures board, so we certainly got our wish to stretch our legs before the flight, navigating Heathrow’s eerie subterranean corridors several times more than usually required.

We ultimately left at 2.30 in the afternoon, 16 hours later than originally scheduled. I’ll be honest, aside from the time wasted inside Heathrow airport, I was quite happy with the turn of events. I’d rather not spend British Airway’s longest route on a plane with technical issues, especially given Boeing’s recent bad press! I had also been dreading trying and inevitably failing to sleep on the overnight flight, arriving in Santiago at 10am then trying to defeat jet lag over the rest of the day.

Flipped on its head, if I could doze on the flight, great, if not, I’d be heading straight to bed at our hotel on arrival. Though it is a little nerve wracking pitching up at a very closed up looking building, on a deserted street in an unfamiliar continent at 2am!

Having lost a day, we would only have the weekend to explore Santiago before heading onward again. 

We made the most of it and took a pretty classic itinerary for 2 days in the Chilean capital. So much so that we ended up inadvertently following the same four Brits around. I understand being tourists will lead you to the same places, but it does feel ridiculous when you end up in the same admission lines at the exact same time. We must have looked like stalkers or particularly incompetent spies.

The schedule included stopping off at the lively Plaza de Armas before visiting the Museum of Precolombine American artefacts. This provided fascinating insight into the history of not just Chile, but the whole Latin American region. The ancient civilizations were so sophisticated in their technologies and I was surprised at how colourful and modern looking some of the artefacts were.

On Sunday, we spent the late morning and early afternoon in the large hillside park visible from our hostal patio, Cerro San Cristóbal. Given the temperatures, we didn’t brave it on foot, and made use of the funicular railway instead. I hadn’t appreciated the scale of Santiago until the train started inching its way upward.

Our arrival at the peak was well timed to coincide with the last half hour of mass at the Santuario Cerro San Cristóbal. The service was broadcast from loudspeakers surrounding the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception statue, adding to the atmosphere – and also to the amusement when a small child apparently went rogue and grabbed the microphone.

Aside from this area, we barely made a dent in the park, so will definitely be returning, as well as to make use of the other mode of transport there – the cable car.

We have also been getting our first tasters of Chilean cuisine. As we are confined to hostals for this stage of the trip, without our own kitchen, we have an excuse to eat out in the evenings. On our first night, we found a well rated restaurant nearby where we could have a four course tasting menu and bottle of wine for the equivalent of about £85, which is a pretty good deal. It lived up to its reviews and provided delicious interpretations of Chilean specialities from different regions.

On Sunday night, we went more casual, returning to a bar we had liked so much at lunch. This was where I opted for Pastel de Choclo. Given “Pastel” is Spanish for cake, you’d be forgiven for mistaking this for chocolate cake, which would be a pretty horrific error. It is in fact layers of minced beef, chicken, a little egg, a tooth-endangering hidden olive, topped with mashed corn. Essentially a Chilean cottage pie and just as comforting (though perhaps a bit more heavy going).

I washed this down with a new favourite drink for the summer – a Borgoña. Red wine, pisco, strawberry and sugar.

I’m very much looking forward to trying other Chilean delicacies that we’ve been reading about over the course of the next few weeks.

Altogether, I love what we’ve seen of Santiago so far and am really glad we’ll be spending another week there soon. First though, it’s time to hit the desert. It’s great to be back on the road!