We have now left the care of Harry Hastings and his crew - at least for the next 10 days - and have entered the realm of Hughie Arbuthnott, who will be showing us some of the sights of Chile. We left Tierra Atacama with a large box of stuff, mainly excess clothing, to post back to the UK and subsequently flew from Calma to Santiago - no excess baggage to pay!
Our first night in Santiago was spent at the Ritz Carlton where the highlight was undoubtedly breakfast - for Jemima at least.
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| Breakfast at the Ritz |
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| Franciscan church |
A morning tour of the city took in a 500 year old Franciscan church which managed to survive the 2010 earthquake unscathed and was really quite impressive. A visit to the Pinochet regime's detention (torture) centre at 38 Londres, where a number of left wing sympathisers entered never to be seen again - some of their names are commemorated in brass plaques embedded in the pavement outside. Lunch al fresco was followed by a 2 hour drive South to the Vina de Playa (VP).
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| Jemima with Aristotle |
View of modern day Santiago featuring the tallest
building in Latin America
VP is a 400 acre vineyard which produces some excellent wines - especially of the Carmenere grape variety. The main house surrounds a courtyard and there is a very welcoming terrace overlooking the main lawn where we took tea and lemonade.
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| Vina de Pl |
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| The pool at Vina Playa |
There is also a very nice pool area where we were treated to a wonderful barbecue. This was only a 2 day stopover and we were given a great tour of the winery by Hughie followed by a very civilised wine tasting.
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| Inspecting the barreling process |
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| Wine tasting at VP |
The following day we drove for half an hour and stopped off at what we thought would be a fairly bog-standard, provincial museum in Santa Cruz. How mistaken we were: it proved to be one of the most wonderful museums any of us have ever been to. Owned by an extremely wealthy arms dealer, it covers the ages, starting off with a spectacularly large lump of meteorite, moving through amazing fossils, Chilean history, entry to the era of industrialisation (displaying old British made printing presses, telephone systems etc) right to the modern day.
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| Mummified face |
The finale was a presentation on the rescue of "Los 33", the miners trapped in the Atacama desert, 700 meters below ground - and their subsequent rescue. The museum bought just about ALL of the artefacts from that rescue - right down to the clothes they wore and the telephone that was first used to make contact with those trapped. This is a must-see if you are in the area.
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| the actual vehicle used for extracting the miners |
On leaving the museum, we drove to some truly wonderful friends of Hughie's - Jose Luis and Consuelo Callejas, her lovely parents, Don Mario and his wife Carmen and Consuelo's daughter, Consuelito. Given that 8 strangers turned up on their doorstep and that their collective English (with the exception of the two Consuelos) was not brilliant, they were unbelievably welcoming and gave us a superb lunch.
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| Consuelo and Jose Luis |
The last 2 days have been spent at a gourmet retreat where the owners, Ruth and Vicente, also run cooking courses.
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| How to make Cervice |
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| Relaxing after a heavy cooking course / lunch |
Ruth is an extraordinary woman. She runs this upmarket B&B (it is called Mapuyampay) for 5 months of the year and for the rest of the year she is the chef for the Concha Y Toro (the wine house) marketing road show, touring the world providing food to compliment the wines. She is a superb cook (and teacher) and, together with her husband Vicente, are great hosts.
We had a wonderfully relaxing time with them and the 2 days passed all too quickly.
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| View from our terrace |
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| Another wine tasting |
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| Philippa hanging up the washing |
We drove back to Santiago on the evening of 9th Feb, spent the night at the airport Holiday In (which wasn't at all bad) ready for our departure at 0730 the next day for Balmaceda - in Patagonia........
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