Our Saturday in Santiago was fairly relaxed as well, the 4 of us headed out to do a self-guided walking tour of the city. I'm not sure whose idea it was exactly, but the first stop on our tour was a small, hole in the wall local drinking spot. This place served a famous drink of wine with icecream. It was very tasty and we stayed at our first stop for almost 2 hours. We finally made it back out into the sun and wandered around a nearby fruit marked before heading to one of the smaller hills in Santiago. We climbed to the top of Santa Lucia hill to get a nice view of the city. While it was good to get a perspective of how big the city is, unfortunately most of Santiago had the same idea and the platform at the top of the hill was jammed with people. We got out of there quickly and then took our time wandering down the roads that wound around the hill. We grabbed some groceries and beers and headed back to our hostel to make dinner and hang out.

Sunday morning, we headed to the bus terminal and hopped on at 10:40am bus for Valparaiso. We left our big packs at the hostel so it was much easier to roam this city with just our small weekend packs. Valparaiso is about 120km from Santiago and set on hills framed by the Pacific Ocean. It is a gorgeous city full of colourful buildings and lots of artistic graffiti. We walked up one of it's many hills to find our quirky hostel - Casa Verde Limon - a beautiful tall green building with a great indoor courtyard space (complete with it's own trapeze!) The sidewalks and plaza in that area were all tile mosaics and so colourful. Sunday is a great day to be in Valparaiso because it is very quiet - most things are closed the the streets are mostly empty of cars. We spent the day wandering the hills around our hostel. We visited an ornate hilltop cemetary that overlooked the ocean and rode one of the funicular elevators in city up to another hill. We wandered down by the shipping docks and finally back to our hostel to make another tasty mexican dinner. Mark and I streamed the second half of the Lions game, although it wasn't really as fun as we'd hoped!

We got up Monday all ready to head out and have an adventure - we had reserved the bikes available at our hostel and were going to make our own bike and wine tour while we road the path along the coast. Then it all went wrong. There were 4 bikes with only one bike lock and 2 helmets. And one of the bikes had a flat tire. The guy working at the hostel assured us we could just head to a gas station and pump it up, but Mark could see the tire was fully split and wouldn't hold air. We headed away from the hostel without the bikes, assuming we could rent them any number of other places. Wrong! Even the lady at the Info desk in town couldn't point us in the direction of a rental place.

So instead we hopped on the "metro", which really was just a train that ran along the shore. It brought us into Vina del Mar, the next town over on the Ocean - the place where we had hoped to ride our bikes. It was a beautiful beach town and we walked along the boardwalk all day. We even had the chance to rent these crazy tuk-tuk like bikes (where Mark and I sat next to each other and both had pedals, as well as a canopy over head - they have the same ones on Toronto Island). We rented 2 of those and Mark and I and Burrill and Courtney raced around the boardwalk, trying not to run into cars, dogs, or people. It wasn't quite the biking experience we were looking for, but it was ridiculous fun.

We walked most of the way back from Vina to Valparaiso along the boardwalk, checking out the cormorants, the pelicans and even a couple of sea lions! It was such a beautiful sunny day and felt like a tropical vacation being on the beach. We hopped on the metro for the last few kilometers and hung out drinking margaritas until it was time to catch the bus back to Santiago.

Today is our last full day in South America. We're going to the Chile vs. Paraguay futbol game tonight and tomorrow, we fly to New Zealand. It is incredible that our first stop on our round the world trip is already coming to an end. South America has been such an amazing trip. Peru was beautiful with it's mystical Machu Picchu, Bolivia was all around awesome with it's amazing culture and the feeling that we were the only outsiders there, Argentina was short-lived but had gorgeous nature, and Chile has been an excellent surprise. So much diversity in terms of what to see and experience here - from the big city to the lakes and mountains and old fashioned farms. Chile is a country that I could see us returning to, and spending months just exploring North to South.