Mendoza & Valparaiso & Santiago

It has been quite a while since the last update, we are very busy, so this one won't cover everything we did until today, but eventually everything will be there ;). The last post ended with the bus to Mendoza, after the stop in Tinogasta. We arrived in Mendoza early in the morning. The easy thing of many of the South American cities is that they are build up according to a straightforward pattern, so you know that you have to get to the main plaza to find many of the things you need, such as hostels, the tourist information office, tourist agencies and streets with shops. So we walked to the Plaza de Armas, which had a nice fountain, and we walked around in that area for a bit. At the tourist agencies we looked at all the tours they had on offer, and since Mendoza is famous for its wine, we decided to go on a trip past several bodegas (place where wine is made) and an olive oil bodega. They showed us vineyards, machines used to press the grapes, barrels to store the wine and eventually we could taste (and buy) the wine. In the first bodega they even had a wine I liked! It was a very sweet white dessert wine, which we bought for our Christmas dinner. In the olive oil bodega they showed us how olive oil is made and we could taste bread with several olive oils and tapenades. They made several types of olive oil, one classic, another with rosemary, and another with garlic. They also had organic toiletries with olive extracts.​

After we visited the wineries, we went back to Mendoza and visited a park in the north of the city. We had a nice ice cream here (Argentina compares itself with Italy when it comes to ice cream, you see heladerias everywhere), and we sat next to a lake for a bit. However, when we wanted to get back to the bus terminal to catch the last bus to Valparaiso, we found out that this was easier said than done. The bus terminal was in the southern part of the city, so it was too far to walk. We couldn't take a local bus, because you needed a special card to use it and you couldn't buy a ticket in the bus itself. When we tried to catch a taxi, all the taxis that did drive by were already occupied. We had been walking to the south when looking for a taxi, and luckily, at some point we reached a better point to catch a taxi and we found a free one. When we arrived at the bus terminal only a couple of minutes were left before the bus would leave, so we had to hurry to get tickets. Then something confusing happened; many people were at the ticket desk to buy the last tickets in the direction of Valparaiso, Santiago or Vina del Mar. We didn't really care to which of the three cities we went, we just wanted a ticket in that direction. We asked someone what everyone wanted to have, so we could try to get something else. Someone said they were going to Valparaiso, another said Santiago, and then the guy behind the ticket desk asked us where we wanted to go, we said Valparaiso or Vina del Mar. It was not our turn at all, but he started to help us anyway and he sent us to a bus that was ready to leave. We were the last ones to get on the bus! So maybe Valparaiso wasn't the direction everyone else wanted to go to and since the bus was leaving he wanted to get us on it. Whatever the reason, we were on a bus in the direction of Valparaiso!​

Valparaiso is a city on the coast of Chile. Until the completion of the Panama canal it was the most important harbor of South America. It's a really nice city, and people we met before had told us to take the free 'Wally' walking tour through the city. This was a very good tour indeed! It didn't really show the main attractions of the city, but places that had something to do with its political and social history. We saw street art that is everywhere around the city, and we saw the three oldest pubs. They showed us a building with a park that used to be a prison for people that were tortured and imprisoned during the dictatorship of Pinochet. We saw some nice viewpoints of the city and we used the trolleybus. They gave us some typical bread, ice cream and drinks (cheap red wine mixed with coke) and recommendations for the rest of the city. We liked the tour, so in the afternoon we decided to join their afternoon tour as well. This one did show the main attractions of the city, so we went to the plaza mayor, the harbor and some cemeteries. Also with this tour we saw some of the street art (it's everywhere in the city) and we used a typical elevator to get up one of the hills. We also visited several churches. After the tour Ariana and I walked through the rest of the city on our own. ​

The next day we went to the town Vina del Mar. It's very close to Valparaiso and it has a nice beach. It was our first beach day, with some sunbathing and strolling along the water. We thought the water was a bit too cold for swimming though.. After Vina del Mar we went back to Valparaiso where we searched through all the shops to get all the ingredients for our Christmas dinner, since most shops will be closed on the 24th and 25th. It was quite difficult to find everything we wanted to have, but we managed to get everything together in the end. ​

The next place we visited during our trip is Santiago de Chile, the capital city. We went there with an evening bus, so we arrived quite late. It was already dark and we hadn't arranged a hostel yet. We had looked up some on booking.com already, so we wanted to get to them. However, when we were walking through the streets of Santiago, a little bit lost, we asked a guy for directions. He told us that we were in a very dangerous area and that we shouldn't be walking there on our own in the dark. So he helped us to arrange a hostel via the phone and he insisted that we took a taxi to get there. Apparently, Santiago is a dangerous city at night! ​

On the 24th of December we walked two walking tours by ourselves. We had a map with some routes and guide Ariana showed me the right direction. The first route was in the neighborhood of our hostel and it brought us to many nice buildings and plazas. The second route was in the centre around the main plaza. We got a real Christmas feeling there, listening to people singing Christmas songs (while wearing Christmas hats) and walking around Christmas markets. The plaza and many of the streets were nicely decorated with Christmas trees and lights.  We also saw a performance of a guy making salsa music and some people dancing to his music. After that we still visited a church and the governmental building called Moneda.

Then it was time to head back to the hostel for the Christmas dinner they had organized there. In Chile, Christmas Eve is the more important evening to have dinner with family. The dinner in the hostel wasn't fantastic, but it was nice. We were only with a small group; a Brazilian couple, a Brazilian family and us. The main course was chicken with potato pastry and all kinds of salads and vegetables. They had told us there would be a dessert, but there wasn't any, so that was kind of a disappointment.​

On Christmas day most things were closed, so we couldn't really go to a museum or anything. We decided to go to the Santiago equivalent of the Wally tour we went to in Valparaiso. This one took us past several markets, although not all of them were open, and to a big cemetery. The guide could tell many interesting stories about the cemetery. Since many people had to be buried there, they made a very special kind of graves. It's like a flat for dead people, so you had a building with many small rectangles on top of and next to each other, each fitting exactly one body. Also, you can buy (or rent) a grave, and every so often you can then bury another dead person in the same grave. So the corpse in there would be condensed to fit in a smaller box and the new body would get the rest of the space. When a child dies, it sometimes turns into an 'animata', which is kind of a local saint. People will ask favors to it and they will bring flowers and presents to the grave. After the tour we went to a park called Santa Lucia. On top of this was a Spanish fortification with a nice view over the city.

In the afternoon we had to cook our own Christmas dinner, for which we had already bought all the ingredients. We had a lot of fun during the preparations! We started with the chocolate mousse, since that had to stand in the fridge for some time. However, there was no mixer so we had to mix the egg white, egg yellow, chocolate and whipped cream all by hand. This took a long time and we had to take shifts because our arms got tired. After that we made red bellpepper filled with meat, corn and cheese. For the main course, we had broccoli with rosemary baked potatoes and beef wrapped in serrano ham. Everyone in the hostel was jealous of our dinner!

The next day was mainly spend in the Museo de la Memoria, which is all about the things that happened when there was a dictatorship in Chile. In 1970, they got the first democratically chosen socialist president, Salvador Allende. On 11th September 1973, the military told Allende that they would take over the leadership of the country and when Allende didn't want to leave the governmental building La Moneda, they bombed it. Allende died that day, it is said that he was murdered, but the official story of military leader Pinochet is that he committed suicide. For the next 17 years, a very cruel and violent dictatorship existed in Chile. Many people got tortured or disappeared, many were killed. In 1990, the country became a  democracy again. In the evening, after we had visited the museum, we took the night bus from Santiago to Temuco. From Temuco onwards, we will be visiting a region called the Lake District!​​