Chilling in Chille

One week in Santiago. This consisted of a couple of day trips, more tasty food, more cheap wine and the odd walk. Being our last week in South America we spent a couple of days planning our next steps for New Zealand, which meant we only had a few days to explore our surroundings, here's what we did with those days.

City living - We accidentally found ourselves in H&M and topped up our travel wardrobes so we look slightly less backpackery when doing city exploring. We're loving the backpacker life, but sometimes is nice to feel and dress normally again.

San Cristobal Hill - A 40 minute hike up to the top of the hill is rewarded with Panoramic views of the city with the Andes Mountains in the distance, a cute little church and a statue of the Virgin Mary overlooking the city. A decent walk and a good view to end with.

Santa Rita Winery - Loved this day! We got an Uber with some friends to Santa Rita, about an hour out of the city is a huge winery which provide tours. We saw the vineyards, the bottling process, what we renamed "the crypt" after Game of Thrones, which was a cellar full of oak barrels ageing the wine. We had three wine tastings and even got to take home our own glasses, we somehow got them to New Zealand without breaking them. After the winery we got a private tour of the hotel , the chapel and the beautiful grounds.

Valpariso - Another day trip to the seaside town of Valpariso. A small port town complete with copious amounts of markets, coffee shops and a collection of graffiti art to inspire any artist. The town itself isn't that special, but the graffiti tour took a few hours and gave us some decent views. We finished it off with some fresh strawberries from the market and wine in a tin, courtesy of the Irish friends.

As our South America journey came to an end we looked back over our blogs and our photos, we are reminiscing at what an incredible two months its been. We seem to have crammed so much in to this time, it doesn't seem like 2 weeks ago that I was sat tearing up on the train down to Heathrow at the thought of being away for so long. I can now confirm that what everyone else said is correct, the time is absolutely flying.

For those of you that are following our journey, you will be aware that we are extremely behind on the blogging. I'm actually writing this in the airport about to leave New Zealand, so we've got a lot more to write. Living in a campervan with no wifi and limited signal surprisingly makes it difficult to write and post updates, but New Zealand is a story for another time, and I can't wait to write about it.

S&J