We arrived in Santiago after a red eye flight from Los Angles. Luckily the flight was about half full so we could stretch out a bit. The first thing you notice when flying in to Santiago besides the beautiful mountains is the smog which is not unlike LA. It is pretty normal for it to be smoggy apparently.
The customs entry fee was $140 per person. If we had our old passports we may not have had to pay that as it lasts eight years (?) but we had brand new passports. It was interesting that the customs person would not take any bills that had even the slightest tear in them and neither would the taxi service at the airport. The Afex money changing service in Santiago took them all and didn't examine them at all curiously.
The bikes made it through fine thankfully except that I needed to put more protection on under the chain rings. Both chain rings had worn through the bottoms of the boxes and one of them probably needs to be replaced although for the largest chain ring we could probably get by without. There may not be parts if we change our mind. - Live and learn.
We ran into a climber in the Dallas airport who was headed to Chile. When we asked him about his plans he said he was heading to a climbing spot by the name of Cochamo just west of Puerto Montt to "put up some new routes". He said it was like the Yosemite of the southern hemisphere only you have to hike into it about twelve miles. We had never heard of it but are now pretty stoked to go there right away as we have changed our plans a bit in favor of starting further south to do the colder latitudes in the middle of the summer. The plan is now to take a bus to Puerto Montt. The buses are much nicer here than the US. For forty dollars we are on the second level of a bus with lazy boy type reclining seats. Back to the topic of Cochamo we happened to see a picture of it in a book store and it does indeed look like Sierra granite. There is supposed to be some sort of reserve there where we could potentially store the bikes for a hike. He mentioned natural water slides. This guy was a classic dirt bag climber who said he had worked in Oregon at an "agricultural" job in Jackson County. We quizzed him a bit about that and if you know anything about the economy in southwest Oregon you can take a guess at what kind of agriculture he was talking about. He was a real nice guy and we are very grateful we ran into him.
Back to Santiago even though I do not remember seeing so many people in black suits and ties we saw two people come very close to being hit by cars including a young mother pushing a stroller. You definitely get the impression that if you have any reason at all to wear a suit and tie you would of course do so. Also i noticed that very few men where baseball hats or hats in general. This may be becuase they all have such nice heads of hair to show off. The women seem to be predominantly dressed like they are right out of Cosmo. Ice cream cone eating seems to be very popular which looks odd for a downtown urban area all these people walking around with ice cream cones. Even though Santiago is smoggy the hotel we are at has one building that is covered with a living green wall. The rooms require you to have your room card in a socket so that the lights will work. When you leave the room all the lights go out when you pull your card out. I booked a room at the Intercontinental Hotel for about $35 on points. This is a fancy hotel with a hot tub in the room and all these door men in fancy suits and little hats.
Before I left the US I tried to get some information about the residual effects of the earthquakes in the last couple of years. One thing that I picked up on in the forums is that Chileans think of themselves as a first world country and are proud of that. Well maybe they are compared to many other Latin American countries. Downtown Santiago definitely qualifies as first world. One of the questions i had was what were the building standards they had to build to after the quakes. In the US buildings would have to be built to probably a higher standard than they were before with many inspections and red tape. When you fly into Santiago and drive into town from the airport you see many structures used as homes that obviously have never had anything approaching a building inspection, unlike in the US where practically every screw and nail gets inspected. In the US if you are poor you do not have the option of such low income housing instead you just get to be homeless, so there is a price to pay for those higher building standards.
I will blog a bit more in the morning. I did not accomplish quite as much as i had hopped due to having to figure out how to set the browser to return results in English instead of Spanish and figuring out the keyboard differences which are quite a few.
We are not using our US cell phones but instead bought trac phones here with calling cards. The instructions for the phones are in Spanish. I feel slighted a bit on that one for all the trouble the US goes to to accommodate Spanish speakers. The best way to buy minutes is to buy international calling cards and seperate minutes for local calls, at least that is the best advice we seemed to get.
Well - off for some supplies like current maps that are hard to come by. The downtown bookstores seem hermetically sealed for display only and all the books are in Spanish pretty much so do not plan on buying a guide book in English if you come here. We ran into that problem before when we left a guide book behind.
Tom
