CHILE : From Santiago to Puerto Montt

After arriving safely in Santiago on 15 September, (the same day we left as we crossesd the time line), we spent two nights in a cheap hostel in the centre of the city, wandered around, quickly discovered that the food, as we expected, is lousy - they have absolutely no sense of eating healthily - and you can´t get a decent coffee. But people are friendly, despite the numerous warnings to "watch out for thieves and it´s dangerous sometimes". It feels like a third world country desparately trying to be first world but failing. The buildings in some areas are quaint colonial but very run down, people dress drabbly as if they don´t want to be noticed, and I think the legacy of Pinochet has been a hard one to shake off. A house of torture was just around the corner from our hotel. Then we finally made contact with the friend of our Spanish teacher and spent 2 nights at her home. She is a very nice widow who was a French and Spanish teacher in Australia and has come back to live here after the death of her husband. After 8 years back in Chile she seems to still be in cultural shock.....
The good things we discovered include a very nice local alcoholic drink called Pisco sour and another supposedly also non alcoholic but doubtfully so - Chicha -which is a drink of grapes which have almost reached the point of fermentation. This we found at a "fonda", or dance fiesta huge feed-up on Independence day (18th September) at a large park in the middle of the city.
On Friday night ( 19 Sept) we headed south via a 12 hour bus ride - good semireclining seats in a Pullman Bus -for the colder climes of Puerto Montt, but don´t expect any improvement in the food.
Yesterday for lunch, we just had a local dish of which one plate was enough for two - loaded with mussels, chicken, sausage and meat, potatoes, bread and a bowl of fishie broth - not bad, at an area by the water at a kind of fjord. While taking in the view of the snow covered volcanoe at the end of the fjord, we saw a seal swimming 20 metres away from the shore.

Germans have been here and the local architecture and that food says so. Today we caught a bus to a charming german colonised area by a lake and the whole setting was so much like the lake of Annecy except that from the shore we could see across the lake and in line 4 snow covered volcanoes : beautiful! We are now back in our cheap hotel where we have discovered we have signal for wifi plus cable TV. So I am catching up both with email and silly movies. I have stuck to my decision of drying up and aprt from one pisco sour on our second night in santiago we have not even try yet one glass of Chilean wine. Tomorow we are taking a trip all the way to Punta Arenas which is a 33 hours bus ride! Crazy maybe but much cheaper than flying and also we though a bette way to take in the scenary. As there is no road in the southern part of Chile, the bus will go through the Andes and continue via the other side which is Argentina. We are due in Punta Arenas late Tuesday afternoon. And then a day or two later (after we've recoverd from the long bus ride) following my phantasms to reach this end of the Earth, we will take an other bus to get to Ushuaia, facing Antarctica.