Monday 31st Jan 2011

Today we headed out to go up to Parque Metropolitano which is a mountain (national park) in Santiago.

We headed there at around 11am to be told the 'funicular' (like a tram that runs up 485m) didn't open till 1pm (everything is very laid back here!) so we went for some breakfast - poor Joe: me and Craig are relying on him so much to speak Spanish but he's doing really well!

After breakfast we headed back up to the Parque Metropolitano to wait for the funicular to open and we were approached by a Chilean journalist that asked us to pose outside the gates of the park to show we weren't happy that the park didn't open till 1 - was quite funny posing pretemding to be grumpy!

So we got on the funicular and went into the park, we walked up to the San Cristobal and the views were amazing! you could see the whole city with the Andes in the background, we even saw a massive mountain with snow on top - which was strange being in 35'c heat!

We were told there were 2 public pool in the park so the hunt began! No signs, maps or leaflets to guide us! We ended up getting a bit lost trekking down a very long windy hill for about 3 hours which seemed to be leading to nowhere and was never ending - so me and joe got into our first argument as we didnt know where we were going so Joe thought it would be a great idea to walk back up the hill we'd walked down! So we started walking back up - me stomping 30 metres ahead until we found a side sort of nature trail which i decided we would go down! Really randomly in this nature trail there was a map, not easy to understand so we guessed but it did lead us to one of the pools - but it was empty!!!!!

Laughing we decided to look for the second pool but gave up after walking another 2 miles uphill just to see the hil seemed to go on forever! We gave up and decided to head back down the mountain - coming across a massive fallen tree that we then had to climb over. We stopped on a bank to chill for an hour and take in the amazing views!

We headed back to the hostel to chill for a while then went out for dinner - I ended up not ordering any food as i didn't understand the menu so I ate half of Joe's - It was delicious - chips, steak, chicken, chorizo with cheese on toast on the side (a popular local dish!) After a few drinks we headed back to the hostel for some zzz after a very eventful day!