Category: Travel

Dates Explored: January 30 – February 4, 2016

This post is information-oriented, for those who might be interested in traveling to Easter Island and want to know a bit about the ins and outs. Pretty photos are forthcoming in future posts, I promise!

Last we left off, we were booked into the Hilton Garden Inn by the Santiago Airport. We had no problem booking and catching the shuttle (done at the hotel’s front desk) to the airport for our departure to Rapa Nui (Easter Island), but the airport was an absolute zoo once we were inside. We didn’t know it at the time – we thought so many Chileans were traveling because it was their summer –  but we had, quite by chance, decided to travel to Easter Island during the annual Tapati Festival, during which the Rapa Nui-ans celebrate their culture, traditions, music, dance, and athletics, some of which are quite unique. This link has photos and videos to show you.

Arriving during festival time was a surprise for us, but it’s a cool time to visit the island because every night you can go down to the festival area and see the competitions, mingle with Chileans, or arrange to watch some events (we were there to see the Moai, so only attended one event – more on that another day – but you could organize a trip around attending several events if you wished). I had heard about the festival, but we organized our trip around a 4-night cruise through the Patagonian fjords (to come!). We planned backward and forward from our cruise departure date of February 13th, much further south in Punta Arenas. So we happened to book flights to Rapa Nui during the festival as part of booking backward from our cruise.

The festival explained the busy-ness of the Santiago airport! Also, our flight was delayed six hours. There wasn’t really an explanation for this, other than there are only one or maybe two flights a day to Rapa Nui, and if one is delayed (they’re about six hours long), then the next is delayed, and so forth.

So if you’re planning on traveling to Rapa Nui, be prepared to be flexible (and cheerful during your wait in the airport). Also, I’ve never quite encountered this before, but when you board your LAN flight (or United Airlines coming back from South America), be prepared that someone might already be in your seat. I have no clue why – they’re trying to get a better seat and think the person who bought the seat won’t notice? This happened to us on United coming back during a red-eye and happened to someone else on our leg to Rapa Nui. If it happens to you, the flight attendants will quickly get things sorted out.

Travel Tip! I have no clue why, but we booked our flights through Expedia and on LAN airlines, and for reasons completely unknown to Moi, my husband and I were able to score Business Class seats (the kind that recline into little beds) round trip for $600 LESS than Economy seats. My sister-in-law booked a couple of days after I did, and their seats cost $300 more than ours and were only Business Class one way.

So…check flight costs often and be prepared to pounce when you see a deal! This was the first time (and so far only time) my husband and I have traveled Business Class, and it was quite the treat.

The Rapa Nui airport was every bit as chaotic as the Santiago airport. Travel Trip! You can buy your Park passes (which you need to visit the Quarry and Orongo – the main two archeological sites – at the airport. Look for the kiosk after you get off your plane and before you enter the airport arrival area to fetch your luggage.

There are plenty of accommodation choices on Easter Island, but during festival time things can book up very fast. We wanted to be walking distance to town and not spend $300 a night, so we chose Cabanas Tautira, which perfectly fit our needs and was very economical for all the space you get.

Jorge, our host, met us at the airport, which was utterly chaotic. My luggage was one of the last pieces to deplane, so we were there for awhile. Jorge greeted us with flower necklaces (quite common practice, we noticed) and drove us around the town to orient us before settling us into two adjoining “cabanas,” which had two bedrooms each (one with two single beds, which we used as a large walk-in closet), the large bed facing the yard, a living room and kitchenette, and a bathroom. The walls of our living room/kitchenette abutted the walls of BILly and SILly’s cabana:

That’s BILly sitting at their table. My only quibble about the cabanas was that I have a lot of hair on my head and could have used a change of towels during our five nights there. Now, I could have asked Jorge for a change of towels and I am sure he would have provided one, but I didn’t, so those towels were a little, uh, crusty by the time we left.

The other thing to be prepared for is when they decide to mow the lawn at the cabanas, because they do so with a weed-whacker type thing. 🙂 The grass is pretty dry in summer, so if your sliding doors are open you might find grass and twigs and such flying into your bedroom or all over your drying rack with your freshly handwashed laundry. But, honestly, that’s part of the charm of the cabanas.

The location couldn’t be beat. We could walk to town, and Jorge rented us a very clean vehicle for two days. Vehicles are just as easy to rent “downtown,” but it just made things simpler to rent them from Jorge.

If you popped by to see pictures of the Moai, do not despair, they are coming! Just not today. I know, I’m bad. The next Easter Island post should appear Thursday, March 31st.

Any questions about Easter Island? Just drop them in the comments thread and I’ll do my best to answer.

Date Explored: January 29, 2016

Continuing on with the street art of Valparaiso, a don’t-miss stop if you’re around Santiago. Do yourself a favor and go! Stop at a winery along the way.

Along with cool skinny streets and all that lovely art, Valparaiso boasts several “funiculars.” I’m not quite sure how to describe them, but they’re like taking an outside elevator/gondola up a hillside. You can google for images and/or visit this link. We only had time to ride one funicular, so we rode the longest. I rode a very short funicular in Quebec City once. It descended us from one street to the next. The one in Valparaiso stretched quite a distance. You could stay another night in Valparaiso easily just to explore the city via funicular. One night quite simply is not enough.

In the afternoon, filled with potato chips, nuts, cheese, salami, and bottled water, we explored a bit of Vina del Mar, where we stayed during our first night in wine country, just across the bay from Valparaiso. Honestly, our primary concern was finding a bank. But we hadn’t yet learned the ways of the siesta, and the banks were closed, even the ABMs.

We visited the newer areas of Vina del Mar as well as stopping at their famous floral clock. Then began the drive back to Santiago, where at least three transport trucks carrying flattened copper passed us. I’d never seen copper being transported before. Very cool.

We finally found working bank machines at a gas station, where we filled up on ice cream bars and set out on our way again.

Antonio dropped us off at the Hilton by the airport, because the following morning we were flying to Easter Island! We liked the Hilton fine. We like staying as close to the airport as possible the night before a flight we really don’t want to miss. There was also a Holiday Inn, I believe, much closer to the airport! Now I know why the Hilton was cheaper–it’s not a great distance but nowhere near as close. But it had great showers, and the meat lasagna was to-die-for.

Travel Tip! If you like to be super close to the airport, maybe try the Holiday Inn. It’s just across the road. Getting TO the airport from the Hilton via shuttle was a cinch. We just booked it for the morning of the 30th once we arrived on the 29th. Getting BACK to the Hilton from the Santiago Airport following our days on Rapa Nui was a bit more of an adventure….

We said goodbye to Antonio at the Hilton. My husband gave him a little gift he had packed from home. My husband packed two of these gifts to give someone who we felt had gone the extra mile for us, and the first of those two people was Antonio. Tears shone in eyes and big hugs were squeezed all around as he departed. What a great guy.

We wouldn’t see another tour guide until we boarded the Australis cruise for our adventure through the Patagonia fjords two weeks from this point….

Date Explored: January 29th

This was our third day with Antonio from Private Tours Chile. After our wine tour ended on the 28th, he drove us to Valparaiso on the Pacific Ocean. About seventy miles from Santiago, Valparaiso is a popular embarkation point for cruise ships traveling around South America. Valparaiso is one of those cool cities you could get lost in for days. We had one full night and morning of exploring the twisty narrow streets on the hillside before proceeding to Vina del Mar and then winding up back in Santiago for our next leg to Easter Island.

In Valparaiso, we stayed at The Fauna, a funky boutique hotel in a fantastic location for walking around. No air conditioning, but if you pack earplugs and open the windows you’ll be fine. The staff was great about allowing us to move our luggage from two rooms into one in the morning until we returned from our walking tour.

Valparaiso has a LOT of street art. It’s one of the city’s charms. It’s a vibrant, colorful place worth a longer visit than one night. I took so many pictures and have found it difficult paring them down, so I’m posting over two days. My pictures are great (if I do say so myself), but for an overall impression of the city do a browser search for Valparaiso “images.” You’ll see more fantastic examples of the graffiti.

We didn’t “dine out” in Valparaiso. We pretty much snacked in the touring van and then ate upon our return to Santiago. But we did search for bank machines in Valparaiso and Vina del Mar. The Canadian dollar was in the toilet during our trip, improving a little bit while we were there, but overall our experience was that Chile was pretty darn expensive for tourists. Our bank at home has a presence in Chile. We did find a branch in Vina del Mar on the 29th, but it was closed until 3 p.m. and we had to get moving.

Travel Tip! We took $1000 CDN in Chilean pesos purchased before the trip per couple and figured we’d handle the rest of our withdrawals through ABMs. I would suggest, if you are comfortable doing so, to take more Chilean pesos bought from your bank at home than you think necessary (remember, Canadian dollar in the toilet). And charge to your credit card when you can. I say this because, unless we happened upon a bank in our bank’s network (and in four weeks we came across ONE), our bank at home charged us $5 per transaction. That sounds acceptable, but the Chilean banks (those which accepted our cards, like Santander–the more local the bank, the less chance we could even use our cards) not only limited withdrawals to an amount approximating $200 CDN per transaction but then charged a tax on top that went to the Chilean government. Between Canadian bank charges and the Chilean tax on small withdrawals, we wound up paying $10-$15 CDN every time we took out money (it was even worse in Argentina, because the withdrawal threshold there was even lower).

But we were on holiday and felt lucky that some banks accepted our cards at all. Any money is better than no money, after all (which was our experience in Ecuador four years ago when only one of the four of us had a bank card that was permitted to withdraw).

More Valparaiso street art next post!

Date Explored: January 28, 2016

Day 2 of our Casablanca Wine Tour consisted of three visits to very different vineyards. I kept a travel journal, and here is what I wrote about Day 1: “Late night, another early start. Three vineyards today. I feel the need for a relaxing night. Not so late and not as much booze.”

Hah!

You see, drinking gives me insomnia. It puts some people to sleep…

But it makes my mind too active. Too much brain activity, and I can’t sleep. I know, weird, huh?

Actually, that photo of my darling husband was taken while we were waiting for the first tour of the day to start . He was just pretending he was zoned out. It’s his “walking dead” imitation. Honest.

Casas de Bosque means Houses of the Forest and was the largest of the wineries we visited, especially in terms of being more of a production operation, from what I could tell. But then, we’ve already established that I’m ignorant in the ways of the grape.

Love the staining on the caskets in the photo below!

Or are those barrels?

Well, if you drink enough of the contents you might find yourself in a casket…..

Just sayin’.

I learned during our 2-day Chilean Wine Tour and Beyond (as in my sampling of many future bottles of wine bought during our 4-week trip) that (1) Chilean vineyards are a heck of a lot more generous with their “tasting” glasses of wine than Canadian wineries. (2) That it doesn’t matter how many times I try to “cultivate” my taste buds, I can not stomach CabSav. (3) That there IS a red grape I actually like!!! It’s called Carmenere, and it originated in France but is now rarely found there. Chile grows masses of the Carmenere grape and uses it in red blends I quickly discovered were my favorite (if I have to have a favorite). I used to think “blends” were all the crappy grapes tossed together, but now, yes, now I have been educated. Blends are often the grape de la grape, the cream of the crop, especially when they include some Carmenere. I still can’t down an entire glass in two hours or less, but I can give it a good shot and make it about a quarter-way.

If you live in an area that grows some Carmenere (like California or Washington), give it a try.

Note, I discovered I love the “bouquet” of wine. The sniffing part. The swirling in the glass. It’s when I swallow the stuff that I have an issue. You know what they refer to as the aftertaste or whatever? That’s when it really hits me and I just…shiver. I guess I didn’t burn off enough of my taste buds at the back of my tongue as a kid to make an adequate connoisseur of wine. That’s my reasoning, and I’m sticking to it.

Our tasting at Casas de Bosque was held in a little room with folks from the U.S. and Europe. From there, Antonio (the designated driver) took us to Matetic Vineyards which, even by my picky standards (“Where’s the Pinot Gris?”), had some pretty good wine (but, alas, I could only sip, not quaff). Matetic is an organic winery, but a biodynamic organic winery, which means they have to adhere to very strict guidelines that a place like Emiliana from the prior day would adhere to, but then more standards on top of that. It really is very interesting and includes paying attention to equinoxes and solstices. Visit this link for more information.

We enjoyed lunch at Matetic. I had a fish dish with “bottoms of avocado” and olives. It was delicious.

We were quickly discovering that Chilean food is freaking fantastic.

I had ceviche (raw fish marinated in lime, etc.) for the first time at Matetic and quite enjoyed it. I am not at the point where I could eat a whole order of ceviche to myself, but I am certainly capable of stealing from others’ plates.

Winery #4 was very different. We nearly didn’t go, because we were all pretty wiped and Antonio still had to drive us to our hotel in Valparaiso, across the bay from where we stayed the night before in Vina del Mar. But we drew ourselves up by our sandal straps and continued on to Bodega Re, and I’m so glad we did, because this fourth vineyard was totally different from the rest. Bodega Re combines grapes and blends in unique fashions. Example, I liked the rose they called Pinotel, which was a combination of Pinot Noir (another red wine I can stomach, but usually gives me monster headaches) and Muscatel.

Really, Bodega Re provides such huge portions for their “tastings,” it’s like drinking a bottle of wine all to yourself. While I enjoyed the wine, it being my fourth winery visit in two days I sampled very teensy portions and filled up on cheese. But we bought a bottle of the Pinotel for “Cindy” to enjoy later on….

A lot of words for this day. Sorry about that. But if you’ve read this far, here’s a nice picture of the cool Chilean fences we saw both on our way to Valparaiso and on Chiloe Island a couple of weeks later. If you’re looking for a “basket-weave” style fence for your yard, here’s a sample. Ain’t it cute?

Date Explored: January 27, 2016

After recovering from three long flights to get to Santiago, including a 9-hour overnight flight, on Wednesday morning our foursome was picked up by the always cheerful Antonio from Private Tours Chile for a half-day tour of Santiago and a visit to Emiliana Organic Vineyards in the Casablanca Wine Valley. Our visit to Emiliana was the first of four vineyard visits over two days. If you’re thinking about touring around Santiago, be sure to check out Leo Cuzmar’s site. He’s the guy in charge of Private Tours Chile and they do a great job, but I found it a little difficult, after hearing about Leo’s business on Trip Advisor, to find the website. So now that I’ve provided it, bookmark it!

Let me say again that Antonio was amazing. Friendly, helpful, always a smile on his face, chock-full of information, the kind of guy you want to take to lunch (and we did). The half-day city tour of Santiago was just enough for me, especially considering that this was our third time in South America. I liked what Antonio showed us of Santiago, but really we were itching to get to wine country, and I don’t even like most wines. But I wanted to spread my wings, try to educate my taste buds, and my comrades were already way ahead of me in that department.

Before we could proceed to the tasting, however, we had to tour the vineyard. Emiliana employs a lot of different methods to protect their grapes, including growing flowers and shrubs that pests will attack before getting to the vines, keeping llamas to “mow” the lawn, and employing tons of chickens to eat the insects.

The Emiliana vineyard we visited doesn’t do any wine production. That was carried out elsewhere. So when you visit, you’re pretty much focused on the vineyard. The wine house, whatever you might call it (are we picking up my ignorance here?) was empty when we had our tasting. I enjoyed the tasting very much. I’m just not meant to quaff four glasses of wine in short order. Not to worry, the other members of my troupe were very, um, adept at picking up the slack for me.

The cheese was very, very good.

Everyone was very happy following this tour. We had already figured out that Chileans eat “lunch” late by North American standards. Our guide Antonio suggested we stop at a little local Casablanca eatery en route to our hotel in Vina del Mar, on the Pacific Ocean. We all had Pastel de Choclo, also known as Corn Pie, a hot casserole of chicken, boiled egg, raisins, ground beef and olives, topped with corn. It was excellent and hearty, but the portions were huge! (This was also going to become a recurring theme. Chileans don’t scrimp on wine or food portions. Honestly, you can get away with splitting a meal easily).

In Vina del Mar, we stayed at an old hotel on the rocks, right down by the water, called The Oceanic. I don’t know about you, but I like some character in my hotels, so we usually go for “boutique hotels,” and during this trip we really tried to mix it up. I don’t have any photos of The Oceanic, but you can check out their website. Or admire this sunset, taken from the balcony of our room:

 

It’s been a few trips since I did any travel blogging. The last time was Galapagos, I believe, 2012. Since then, my husband and I have traveled to China, Australia and Cuba, but for various and sundry reasons (beginning with the death of a family member in the days upon our return from China in 2013) I didn’t get around to it. Too bad, because I love organizing my memories this way, but blogging about travel when a loved one has just died seems in poor taste.

Fast forward to this year–we’ve recently returned from what we are looking upon as the “last” of our “big” adventures. The Aus trip was 4 weeks and so followed this year, a marathon of a holiday that took us from Santiago, Chile down to Patagonia and ending up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. For the most part, I’m going to let the photos speak for themselves (let’s see how good I am at that).

It took 2 days to travel from B.C. via Calgary and Houston to Santiago, Chile, including an overnight stay in Calgary so we wouldn’t stress about missing the next day’s flight due to winter weather. We stayed in Santiago two nights, at a gem of a place called the Matildas. It’s in a pretty old neighborhood of Santiago, but what charm!

Over the next four weeks, I would learn that when a Chilean menu says “avocado and hearts of palm,” that’s exactly what you’ll get. Nothing extra. I once ordered a salad to share with my husband that was described as “tomato, onion and Something Else.” Alas, I can not recall what the Something Else was, but dang if the salad contained tomato, onion and Something Else, and that was it. If you want a mixed salad, you have to order carefully. Because a description of “lettuce” will net you lettuce and only lettuce.

I also ate tongue this first night, just a bite, nothing crazy. We traveled with my sister-in-law and her dh. He ordered the tongue, so I had a taste. Not bad. If I hadn’t known I was eating tongue I might have barely noticed the spongy texture (texture can make or break food for me; I’ve never claimed to have sophisticated tastes). BILly claims his palate is much more adventurous than mine, but really I have more advanced taste buds capable of discerning a tongue from a rump (but that’s a debate best left for another time).

Our Fearless Foursome hit the sack early (11 p.m. or so, early by South American standards) because the next morning a guide was picking us up for a half-day city tour and transporting us to the Casablanca wine valley, where we visited four wineries in two days. A lovely time was had by all, but I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who remembers….