The first twenty-four hours of the trip were about the same as any trip: lots of time spent miserably sitting uncomfortably or waiting in line. We connected through LAX and Panama City and then landed in Santiago on a cool Tuesday evening. After hitting up the currency exchange and securing our baller status with hundreds of thousands of colorful pesos (which I affectionately refered to as “Monopoly money”), we hopped in a cab for downtown. Becca was able to chat up the driver a bit with her Spanish, though we realized later that that poor driver now mistakenly thinks San Francisco has eight million people because (at the time) we weren’t able to say “eight hundred thousand” in Spanish. Oops.
A short while later, we arrived at our hostel (H Rado Hostel) in Barrio Bellavista, a neighborhood reminiscent of the Mission in San Francisco with its nice restaurants, dive bars, and youngsters. The hostel was certainly on the swankier side with its large wall murals of American icons, a large, sunny common area on the top floor, and a huge roof deck. I’d say it very much epitomizes the idea of a “boutique hostel” and our stay there was very pleasant, especially considering we had a private room with a private bathroom.
After dropping off our stuff and cleaning up a bit, we wandered the neighborhood in search of noms. Much like San Francisco neighborhoods, downtown Santiago neighborhoods are very walkable and you get a great feel of the city and the people simply by walking around. We stumbled upon Patio Bellavista, which Lonely Planet describes as “upmarket eateries and posh souvenir shops ranged around a huge courtyard”. That’s a pretty accurate description and the area does feel a bit different than the rest of Bellavista, but we still found it to be a pleasant part of the neighborhood. If nothing else, it’s a nice respite from the hordes of college students drinking shitty beer and eating hot dogs.
After taking a lap to survey all the options, we settled on a jack-of-all-cuisines restaurant (MosaiCafé) that had some balcony seating with a nice view of Cerro San Cristóbal. Luckily our waiter spoke English and was able to make some suggestions for food, as I was having some trouble finding a good veggie dish (a not uncommon problem in South America). My first meal in Chile was a hot stone bowl filled with veggies and molten cheese, which is as delicious as it sounds. As would become our custom over the course of the trip, Becca and I split a bottle of Chilean red wine at dinner. We thought it apropos to treat ourselves to a very nice Carménère, a grape that was originally French, then thought to have gone extinct, then rediscovered in Chile, and is now decidedly Chilean.
Once we finished dinner, we wandered the neighborhood for a bit, noticing the popularity of the small tables on the sidewalks in front of the bars. Even with the relatively cool weather, most people opted to sit outside (which we noticed in almost all the cities we visited). The bar scene in Bellavista mostly entails sitting at an outside table with a small group of friends and conversing over drinks. And by “drinks”, I mean “cheap beer”. The rule of thumb for drinking in Bellavista is to order cheap beer by the liter, be it Escudo or Cristal (yes, spelled exactly like the expensive champagne). For the sake of doing as the Romans do, we stopped into one of the bars and split a bottle of Cristal ourselves. Our entertainment for the evening was the video jukebox in the bar, which was monopolized by a couple locals who evidently love 80s metal music videos. After getting our fill of Chilean light lager and Guns N’ Roses, we turned in for the evening.
The next morning, we grabbed breakfast at the hostel and then went for a stroll to get a feel for some of the surrounding neighborhoods. We walked through several of the parks next to the Mapocho River, worked our way south through Barrio Providencia, then walked west and ended up in the downtown shopping district around lunchtime. Clearly Chileans enjoy shoe shopping, because I’ve never seen so many shoe stores in one place before (even Becca thought the same). We stopped at a hole-in-the-wall Peruvian place for lunch, which delighted us with bread and (really good!) sauces, a heaping mound of veggie noodles, raspberry juice, and a TV that played only Spanish-language club bangers.
After lunch, we walked to the Plaza de Armas (the main square of any respectable Latin American city) to partake in one of Santiago’s free walking tours, which are offered every day of the week (multiple times a day). They are completely free (other than your tip for the tour guide), are in English, last anywhere from three to four hours, and offer some thorough historical and cultural insights into the more popular parts of the city. Our tour guide was Filipe, who became an inside joke for the rest of the trip because of his unusual, yet delightful personality. He maintained a constantly serious countenance, yet was very pleasant; he was animated and almost theatrical, but in a very controlled and subtle way. (We found out later from his walking tour colleagues in Valparaiso that Filipe is an actor, which explained everything.) The tour was very entertaining and informative and really helped us familiarize ourselves with some of the neighborhoods and some local places we should visit. Filipe insisted on a brief stop in Barrio Lastarria, where we had enough time to sit outside and enjoy some pisco sours.
That night, we went to a more traditional Chilean restaurant in Bellavista (Galindo) that Filipe had recommended on the tour. The food was certainly good (I had the porotos granados, which is a bean and pumpkin stew), but the critically important discovery at this meal was drink-related. As we were ordering, our waitress brought us a separate wine menu and tried to offer an explanation in Spanish (and her limited English), but the language barrier was a bit too high for us to fully understand her. We picked a bottle (Chilean red, of course) and had a quiet, enjoyable meal. As we were settling the bill, she came back to the table with another bottle of wine in a plastic bag. As I looked confusingly over the bill and tried to explain to her that we didn’t order another bottle, she was able to cobble together enough English to explain:
“Two bottles. One for the restaurant, one for the home.”
It turns out that every year for the last twelve years, Chile has organized a rather large-scale promotion whereby participating restaurants and bars (in certain parts of the country) offer a two-for-one deal on reserve bottles of Chilean wine. The first bottle you have with your meal and the second bottle is to be taken home (and cannot be opened in the restaurant). All told, you get two bottles of delicious Chilean wine at a restaurant for about $20.
Game. Changer.
Cue the Kenny Loggins, because we’re heading into the fucking danger zone.
It was around this point (my memory is fuzzy from consuming massive amounts of wine) that Becca and I made a pact to have at least one bottle of wine (between the two of us) every day for the entire trip. Special consideration was given to any restaurant that proudly displayed the reserve wine menu in their window. Sometimes we’d have the second bottle that same night, sometimes we’d take it on the road with us, and sometimes we’d donate it to a particularly nice employee at the hostel we were staying at. In any case, I feel pretty confident that we thoroughly tasted every red wine on that menu.
After dinner, we dropped the wine off at the hostel and went to a small bar (Cuatro & Diez) a couple blocks away. Semi-swanky, candlelit, with live music, it was a great spot to enjoy some cocktails. I tried a Piscola (pisco and cola), a somewhat common local drink, though I wasn’t a huge fan (pisco sours are much better). After a couple drinks, we went back to the hostel and took the aforementioned second bottle of wine up to the massive roof patio (did I mention this was a boutique hostel?) to enjoy the skyline and the sounds of the city.
Fast forward six hours to a healthy hangover at 8:00 in the morning. We grabbed breakfast and then hiked up Cerro San Cristóbal, which was a really nice way to work off the lingering effects of the previous evening. From the top of the hill, you get a breath-taking view of… well, mostly smog. I’m told that after a rainfall, the smog is gone temporarily and the view is spectacular. Nevertheless, we still appreciated the beauty of the view of a sprawling city with the Andes in the background. We enjoyed some quiet meditation time before descending back to Bellavista.
For lunch, we went to the fish market so that Becca could try some seafood soup (another Filipe recommendation). After fighting our way through the gauntlet of outgoing (read: annoying) restaurant hosts, we settled on a small, unassuming spot that was mostly filled with locals eating lunch by themselves. After explaining to our waitress that I was vegetarian, she responded simply with “Ensalada.” and reached for my menu. I resigned myself to eating bread, sauce, and rabbit food (Becca’s term for my salad that looked like a plate of condiments) while Becca enjoyed her cauldron of seafood.
After fighting through the restaurant gauntlet on the way out, we walked over to Cerro Santa Lucía, a small hill in the middle of the city with facades, stairways, patios, fountains, and really great views. We walked around the grounds for a while, snapping photos and enjoying the weather, until it was nap o’clock. With lack of sleep, a food coma, and sunny weather all conspiring against us, we laid down on the grass (amongst the usual collection of Chilean teenage couples) and checked out for a while.
That evening, we hit up a nice Italian spot in Lastarria for dinner, then wandered around Bellavista for a bit before settling on a karaoke bar. Surprisingly, a good amount of the music was English-language and a few of the singers really killed it.
The next morning, we checked out and took the Metro (Santiago’s light rail) to the bus depot. Another commuter (who spoke English) offered his help when he saw a couple gringos unfamiliar with how the Metro system worked. (It was one of many acts of kindness we encountered during our trip.) Once at the bus depot, we hopped on a coach to Valparaiso, a nearby coastal city that we had heard a lot about while in Santiago. This was probably the first point at which our itinerary diverged from our pre-trip plans and, unbeknownst to us at the time, would eventually lead to a completely different trip than we had initially imagined.