After getting the killer of a flight from Auckland New Zealand which left on 12/02/08 at 17.20pm and arrived at Santiago, Chile 12/02/08 at 13.30pm. So in theory we are time travellers! with one hell of a case of jetlag. We were brave though and decided to jump on a local bus and the metro (guess who made the metro? jack cained me for spotting this one) to get to our Hostel, took a while and we didn´t realise just how hot it was until we nearly crawled through the gates of La Chimba.We braved out the most surreal day you can imagine and went to bed at a normal time for Santiago, we got up at a normal time in the morning and were made up that we thought we had Conquered Jetlag! How naive were we, especially waking up 4 in the morning.

The main thing that was making our job even harder was the fact that through New Zealand we had to put up with clique hostels full of mom and daddies little princess´, here we were in probably one of the most freindly sociable hostels we have ever had the misfortune to suffer jetlag in. This meant that we had to drink the local beer (woo hoo its cheap again) and the local wine (woo hoo its not goon) and stay up till all hours in the morning making our jetlag even worse. Soon after we noticed that we were slowly aclimatising to South America time were nothing happens till way after midnight.

Well anyway Santiago itslef isn´t that pretty to look at, apart from a few grand old buildings; its smoggy full of batterd old cars and has a fast flowing river through it which colour resembles the bottom of the toilet i used after my first case of travellers belly. Its the carachter that keeps it going, we were staying in the arty bohemian part called Bellavista which was full of lovely old coloured buildings and smelly artisan hippies (which we could pass for these days) selling jewlery.

The first day was spent wandering through town getting our bearings very tiredly, the next was finding out that we really need to learn Spanish as we even struggled to order our new favouraite food empanadas and beer. empanadas are basically a south american pastie. We wanderd around taking pics of the palacio de la Moneda which is another place Maggie Thatcher is not welcome and getting climbing up Santa Lucia hill to enjoy a panoramic view of the city, but it was full of couples celebrating valentines day, we almost though for a minute we were in Amsterdam it was enough to make you blush.

On the monday we treated ourselves to our first night out in 6 weeks by having a meal and beers we a few of the gang from the hostel before we left for Mendoza, here we learned that half a chicken does mean half a chicken (it was massive) and never talk to strangers especially drunk chilean strangers.

Lots of Love

Miles and Jones XXX