We ended up arriving at our hostel in Santiago rather late. Not really according to plan. Our flight from Punta Arenas had been delayed by 3 and a half hours, turning a latish arrival at 23:00 into a ridiculous 02:30 in the morning. Credit to Sky Airlines (a Chilean discount line) they told us very promptly that our flight would leave at 19:30 instead of 16:30 and come 19:30 everyone was aboard and the plane pushed back from the gate. And I suppose it was also nice that there was no traffic on the way into town from the airport.
Thankfully someone was awake at the hostel when we arrived, so we actually managed to get 5 hours or so of sleep before checkout… We’d only reserved one night and the place was booked solid the next day (or maybe they were just annoyed at us waking them up at 2 on a Wednesday morning?) but thankfully another nice hostel around the corner had room (has anyone else in North America noticed the glaring lack of budget/hostel accommodation? Santiago has 20+ hostels. Wellington has at least 10. While I can think of less than five in Toronto. And Toronto’s better than most cities in NA!)
The tiredness and the change of lodgings meant that it was already comfortably into the afternoon before we got around to actually doing anything and seeing any of the city. Santiago had been well lit but slightly run down and creepy looking when we’d arrived the night before. But in the bright summer sun it was anything but.
Big Chilean flag in the sun. Well, relatively big. It’s modern democracy big, not Tajikistan or North Korea big
[read on]
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