Chile

We are sitting around at the airport at the moment waiting to catch a flight to Quito where we will overnight before flying to Miami tomorrow and leaving South America behind. Chile has been a great experience and the things we have done have given us a real impression of what it would be like to live here as opposed to the touristy things we did in Equador and Peru. Chile is a very comfortable place to travel in and the people are all extremely friendly and helpful.
Taking up from where I left the last post we, (Tammy and I) went flying with Barb. Barb had been getting her plane serviced at Concepcion which is a city on the coast, west of Chillan. We took a bus over, (the bus system in Chile is amazing) and picked her plane up from the airport which is also the same airport servicing Chile's second biggest city. Taking off on the same runway in between the big jets was quite an experience. It was a beautiful cloudless day as every day has been in Chile and the flight back to Chillan was picture perfect.
That night we went to a BBQ at some friends of Barb and Johns, Allan and Hermena (?spelling).
Allan is one of the most interesting agricultural businessmen I have ever come accross. Amongst many enterprises he has a huge pork production business that exports pork into Korea, Japan and China from the USA, Mexico and Chile, he has a business that has developed a technique for cloning blueberries and also produces seed for GM grain crops. They were also fantastic hosts and I don't know whether all Chilean BBQ's are like the one they gave us but it basically consisited of sitting around the BBQ for three hours while a succession of different sorts of meat were cooked and eaten as they came off one after another. All accompanied by extremely good red wine. We could barely move at the end of it.
The next day we went for a drive up to a ski resort in the mountains east of Chillan. No snow obviously but a beautiful drive and some lovely little rivers and streams through huge trees.
Tuesday morning we said goodbye to the Cotes who were wonderful to us while we were in Chillan. The girls stayed with them the while time while Tammy and I stayed in a hotel.
We drove back up to the outskirts of Santiago where we visited one of the biggest wineries in Chile, Concha y Toro. It was an interesting tour and we sample some exceptional wine.
We stayed the next two nights at a cabin the mountains to the East of Santiago. It was an interesting place that was basically a private nature reserve and hippy paradise. Tammy and Ally went horseriding while Rhiannon and I walked to some waterfalls.
The last two days we have spent in Santiago. Santiago is a great city as long as you stay at ground level. The smog is horrific as it it gets trapped by the Andes but there is not much of a skyline to obscure in any case because of a history of earthquakes that has knocked out any interesting buildings. At ground level however it has the most pedestrian friendly and green city scape I have ever seen. Virtually every major road, at least in the part we were in, is dual carriageway with a wide tree filled green belt running down the middle. The centre bit is full of winding paths and statues and fountains. There are parks everywhere and loads and loads of trees.
I'm finishing this post a bit abruptly because the plane is about to leave. Next news from Disney World!
ps more photos on the photo site will post link later