Day 9: Santiago
With a late night yesterday, we slept in today — but still managed to catch the end of the hotel breakfast buffet from about 10-10:30am. Plenty of (delicious) yogurt, granola, and pastries, but, alas, scrambled eggs were only for the early birds. Hard-boiled for us today. No worries, we had plenty of food and, more importantly, cappuccinos. Matt even figured out how to “hack” the espresso machine to make the perfect mocha latte.
Solid relaxing mode is the day’s plan, but more importantly, it’s blog-catchup time. We rode the elevator up to the rooftop bar/pool/deck area and posted a handful of blogs from the past few days without internet in Tierra del Fuego. Thank you devoted blog readers for your patience. The weather was perfect, the views were pleasant, and we were serenaded with the bar’s pop/dance music selections as a few other trendy people stopped by to eat lunch and have a couple drinks.
Time for some rooftop R&R&B!
Blog today, pool tomorrow
Construction to the east
Once we caught up on the blogs, we decided to go do our favorite Santiago activity – walk up San Cristobal Hill. It’s about three miles (and 300 vertical meters) from the hotel to the top where the giant statue of Mary stands. This is our third time doing this self-guided exploration, and we turned in out thrice-punched frequent visitor card for a magnet to commemorate (there is no card, fyi, but there is now a magnet). Next time, we’re gonna run a 5k up the hill.
We have an afternoon plan
Back at our favorite urban park
We will definitely see cyclists and mote con huesillo
Making good time
Approaching the top
As always, once we made it to the top, we visited Mary and followed with a break to enjoy a mote con huesillo – a cold, sweet drink/snack made of berry husks, cooked peaches, and peach juice. It’s a must-have at the top. The weather was relatively mild and cloudy today, so we didn’t even need to share our drink with the bees. We shared one drink between ourselves because we had big plans for dinner.
“Yo, Listen up, Mary’s talking”
Must get a Mote
We walked back down the hill using the same path we took up, except for a shortcut on a trail (rather than the road) to get to the bottom. Skies were pleasantly overcast (or perhaps overcast = smog), so it wasn’t blazing hot and we didn’t suffer any sun burns.
Nature! Even it probably just a pigeon feather
Shortcut! (Unless Jo is the mole)
Arts in the park
After crossing back thru the sculpture garden park and bridges, we walked a few additional blocks to La Burguesía, a burger place that Roberto recommended to us in 2019. We thoroughly enjoyed this place six years ago. Last year, we tried to go, but they were closed for Easter. This year, we are in luck! We arrived at about 6:15pm, easily beating the dinner rush, and were seated right away.
Hits the spot after that three-hour hike
With Jo’s limited Spanish and Google Translate, we ordered Calafate Ales on draft and a couple of the Special Burgers. Everything arrived quickly — the portions were generous and incredibly delicious. Matt had basically a brat burger – a regular burger patty with sauerkraut, onions, and German mustard. Meanwhile, Jo had a burger with poached pears, caramelized onions, blue cheese sauce, and bacon bits. Both were incredible. 10/10 would come back here again next time.
Both burgers A+
When we couldn’t eat any more, we walked back to the hotel, meandering into any shops that looked interesting. No luck, but we did a couple “Silo-like” malls that basically featured only stores pertaining to comic books, anime, weed, tattoos, and piercings. We passed on all options.
Back at the hotel, we spent the rest of the night catching up on emails and dozing off to sleep. Tomorrow we once again have most of the afternoon to walk around like regular ‘ol tourists before heading to the airport.
