Chile

We hopped a flight from Cusco to Santiago, Chile and got in in the wee hours of the morning. For some reason it didn't really cross my mind that it was a different time zone, but turns out it was about 2 hours ahead of time from Peru...which is on East Coast time. So that put us at about 4am Chile time for getting to our hotel to check in. Clearly we were in need of a few hours of nap time before we did anything productive. We ended up spending most of the day walking through the city and wandering up a hillside park that had great views of the city...and awesome playgrounds!

Heading down from the park we took the tram down which was literally almost straight down the cliff. Definitely saved some time and energy after walking up it. We ended up in a cute little restaurant area of Santiago just in time for supper. After wandering around a bit we ended up at a little wine bar. We asked the waiter for suggestions on good Chilean wine and he brought the Owner/Sommelier out who spoke English. Turns out he also spent half his childhood growing up in Birmingham, AL at a high school that we know a lot of people from! Super random. He also was really good at suggesting wines and we ended up with a Chilean Pais. He also recommended some fabulous food, gave us a little Chilean wine history, and some recommendations of places to go in Valparaiso the next day!

After dinner, we decided to spend the evening enjoying the fabulous rooftop pool at the Ritz. We pretty much had the place to ourselves, and the bar tender brought us beverages in the hot tub, it was quite divine.

The next day (I don't even remember what days they were at this point...) we got a little bit of a late start before heading out to the bus stop and hopped on a bus to Valparaiso. Busses left for there every 20 minutes or so it seamed like, so we were able to jump on one really easily. I may have slept through most of the bus ride, but I did see a few mountains and tunnels that we went through on the way. We got to Valparaiso and I had a vague idea of where our hotel was so we just started walking. The streets were strangely empty and we soon found out why. As were kept walking our eyes started to burn and water and we couldn't stop sneezing...there was definitely residual tear gas in the air! Turns out the president of Chile was there earlier giving a speech and riots broke out and they were all gassed away. So we got there just in time to walk through a desolate tear gas filled downtown Valparaiso...not an awesome start. After consulting the GPS, we finally found our hotel which was up the hill from the downtown area in a super cute area! This is where Valparaiso started getting good!

After checking in, we started out with drinks on the roof deck while watching the sunset over the city. This hotel was pretty awesome and the views were amazing!

We spent the rest of the evening wandering around the hill checking out the AMAZING street art. It was everywhere.

The next day went about the same. We wandered even farther and onto other hills in the city checking out the amazing street art. It was so exciting to turn every corner to find out what's you'll see each time!

We spent one more night there before catching a bus back to Santiago and spending a couple of more nights around that area. We checked out the historic area of the city and did a lot more wandering and caught up on a little relaxing too.