Sharon and Andy's World Tour 2006

Monday 19 - Sunday 25 June

The guidebooks we’ve read and the travel documentaries we’ve seen suggest that for the novice traveller, Asia represents the greatest culture-shock. Not so for us. Asia is a breeze; everything is easily accessible, the majority of folk speak English and are friendly and helpful, and getting from A to B is rarely a major problem.

Nope; South America is the real culture-shock. The cities look nicely westernised and the people familiar, but if you don’t speak a word of Spanish, bewilderment soon reigns and the limitations of your phrase book quickly become apparent. OK, I'm generalising a bit here (how you fare depends enormously on the country you’re in and the people you encounter) but arriving in Chile and trying to negotiate our way around really opened our eyes… and tested our sign-language capabilities.

When I began this blog back in January I described our sense of awe at stepping off the plane in Cape Town, South Africa and being confronted by Table Mountain. We've been a bit awed by aspects of our world trip almost every day since, BUT - even before you step off the plane in Santiago your gaze is gripped by the Andes in all their majesty. Time for me to reach for the dictionary in search of new superlatives.

Santiago and the Andes

An apology; if my Santiago narrative seems sadly lacking it's because the bizarre time-zone hopping properties of our flight from New Zealand eventually left us thoroughly jet-lagged and incapable of taking decent notes and photos. Ian, our patrician host at the hostel La Chimba, is well used to greeting zombified lodgers and cheerily informed us that recovery would take at least three days. We held this thought as we duly fell into bed and passed out.

Already painfully aware of our non-existent Spanish skills, we had booked into a one-week intensive Spanish course through the hostel; two hours per night for five nights, and two five-hour 'practical' sessions out on the streets of Santiago at the weekend. The course turned out to be great fun, thanks to our enthusiastic tutor Phillipe, and the other 'students'; Stefan and Karin, and Cordula, all from Germany. We soon became good friends.

We spent our waking moments during the week exploring as much of Santiago as possible beginning with a climb up Cerro San Cristobal, a huge hill atop which an imposing statue of the Virgin Mary overlooks the city.

Like many capital cities, Santiago is huge, sprawling, busy and traffic-heavy. The predominantly dry and dusty conditions leave a pall of yellow smog hanging in the air; only after heavy rainfall does the air temporarily clear.

But a closer look reveals tree-lined parks, elegant architecture, many beautiful sculptures and statues, and a couple of fascinating museums.

And so our week passed, and on Friday night we embarked on a debauched night out to celebrate the completion of our last 'formal' Spanish lesson. Unfortunately, we massively over-celebrated, leaving the first of our practical real-life tutorials on Saturday a somewhat muted affair.

Attempting to recover the situation on Sunday, Phillipe asked us what we would like to do for the second real-life tutorial. An imaginative group vote secured a lunchtime trip to the pub to see England play Ecuador in the World Cup! For us, the scenario was surreal; an English couple, sitting in an Irish pub with a group of Germans, surrounded by Chileans, watching England versus Ecuador whilst eating Indian food. England triumphed, but our Spanish learning suffered...

Keen to get out and explore Chile, but hampered by our lack of the language we signed up for a ten-day tour of the country which would give us a taster of the highlights in a gringo-friendly package. We had to forego the first two days of the tour in order to complete our Spanish course, but taking an overnight bus from Santiago to Caldera would enable us to join the tour on the third morning.

Stefan and Karin were joining us on the trip, and so on Sunday night we bade a sad but fond farewell to Cordula and said au revoir to La Chimba (we would return for one night after the tour), headed for the bus terminal in downtown Santiago and journeyed into the night.