Before heading to the south of Chile, I was meeting up with Ellen in Santiago to play tourist for a couple of days. She came in on a night bus, and instead of wanting to sleep all morning she came out with me and we checked out the seafood and produce markets in Santiago. While the seafood market didn't smell all that great, it had tons of things I didn't recognize. Massive fish and eels, weird stuff in shells, big squids, you name it. I stopped at a restaurant on the second floor of the produce market and got ceviche. It was more fish than I could have eaten in two meals. Phew. For those of you that don't know what ceviche is, its chunks of raw fish that are covered in lemon juice. The acidity essentially cooks the fish and its served tossed with slices of onion.
The next morning, we woke up early to take a bus out to one of the wineries close to Santiago. I had been looking for a few days for some sort of cheap wine tour we could take, but none of them were really all that cheap. So I found a winery we could get to by public transport. It was called Undurraga, and was one of the older wineries in Chile. We got a tour of the grounds, got to see the differences in a bunch of types of grapes, and see the process they take the grapes through to become wine. Carmenere is a type of grape that used to grow in Europe, but they thought had pretty much died and no longer grew in Europe. When Chile started winning lots of awards for merlots, a grape specialist came in and examined the plants. Turns out, Carmenere grows way better in Chile and it has now made a huge comeback. Woohoo!
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| Its a winery tradition to plant roses at the end of each row. Pests will go to the roses first. This gives the wineries time to take action to prevent the pests from getting the grapes. Red wine grapes always get red roses and white roses always go with white wine grapes. |
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| Fermenting the champs the traditional way, resting in the bottle with the yeasties. |
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| LOOK! I"M WINE! |
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| Group photo |
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| After winery meal: aka more food than I could ever eat. Eggs, fries, grilled onions and a quarter of a massive chicken. |
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| Not gonna give anyone on the internet a chance to ruin this for me. Saw it. Loved it. Learned that Chileans put both sugar and salt on movie popcorn, so that was unexpected. |
The next morning, we bussed out to the airport and hopped on a plane down to Punta Arenas. Turns out we were lucky our flights weren't cancelled. The 17th-20th had been a strike for all of the airport workers, and it essentially shut down all domestic airports. Apparently, the Air Force had to fly people off of Easter Island because the entire island was running short on food and medical supplies. For the rest of the tourists I talked to, it was just a pretty massive inconvenience.
Punta Arenas is the furthest south in South America that you can drive. Its the last city on the mainland, so we really were pretty close to the bottom of the world. And it's summer. So it's light by 5am and dark until 10pm. Although the weather was a bit chilly and blustery for what we would call summer weather. The entire area is known for having crazy weather. Essentially all four seasons in one day or even one hour.
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| An old dock full of birds! |
After we checked into our hostel, we went for a wander down to the beach. Can confirm that it's just as windy here as people said it would be. The town was decently busy because it was right before Christmas. In one of the main squares, there was a group of high schoolers dressed as Santa offering people smiles and free hugs. Very cute. For dinner we decided to eat sushi after I made Ellen walk to a market that sold sea urchin. I really wanted to try it! But the market was closed for the evening, so hopefully I can hit that up on my way out of the south.
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| This stray dog came SPRINTING over towards us, let us throw a stick for him, and took a massive sand bath right in front of us. |
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| My restaurant! |
They next day, we spent most of the morning freaking out about the plans we had in the afternoon. Aka PENGUINOS! From Punta Arenas you take a two hour ferry ride to an island. This island is full of penguins. And you get to spend about an hour freaking out and watching penguins. Not. enough. time. And there were baby fluffies!!
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| So maybe its not totally a pun... but its cute! |
These penguins mate for life, so every year they meet back in the same place to make their nest (aka a hole in the ground). It was so funny watching the penguins walk around on land because they looked like little drunk guys in tuxes. But they swim so fast in the water! So much more coordination. We were also really lucky and got to see a dolphin playing in the wake from the ferry and the spout of a whale fairly far from the ferry.
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| There were thousands of penguin pairs on the island. |
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| Nappin' |
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| You talkin' to me?! |
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| ITS SO FLUFFY IM GONNA DIE |
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| Zoomzoom |
It took me a while to calm down about the penguins. Not gonna lie. But the next day Ellen and I were on a bus to Puerto Natales, and I started to get excited for the next bit of our adventure. We were going to be filling out backpacks with food and warm clothes and walking around in Torres del Paine National Park.
When we got to Puerto Natales, we went to an info session that Erratic Rock, one of the hostels, holds. After the talk we basically decided to do the longest trek the park has. It's usually done in nine or ten days and is approx 130km. In one of the areas of the world with the most unpredictable weather. Even in summer. Why not right?! We have the time. When else are we going to be down here.
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| More wind in Puerto Natales |
With that in mind, we spent the day of Christmas Eve running around renting all the equipment that we would need and buying all of the food we would eat (basically pasta, soup, and trail mix). We also picked up some salmon to cook for Christmas dinner. Don't worry, I maintained my holidays-in-foreign-countries tradition and had pizza for Christmas Eve dinner.
Christmas Day was a much more relaxed affair. By dinnertime, we had all our equipment and food, and we had opened a bottle of champagne. I had managed to successfully cook salmon and quinoa on an incredibly old wood oven (that had been retrofitted with gas). It had no temperature control and heated up the entire kitchen in the process. In addition, the apple crisp I made turned out quite well, and was shared by most of the people in the hostel. Funnily enough, two of the guys in the room across from ours were Boeing engineers in Everett. It amazes me sometimes how small the world is.
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| I'm pretty proud |
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| Happy Xmas selfie! |
As we were cleaning up from dinner, I looked outside and noticed that the clouds looked quite colorful. We all threw shoes on really fast and ran up the hill to a playground to watch the sun set over the water and some mountains across the way. What an incredible Christmas present from nature.
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| One of the best things I've seen |
