Fine arts & horse riding

Its been a big couple of days here in Santiago, Chile. Yesterday we did a double-decker bus tour around the city and visited, among other places, the fine arts museum, a huge fish market and a very ornate hill near the middle of, and overlooking the city. The next day a horse ride in the Andes.

We stayed in a hostel called EcoHostel Even Bob Brown would be proud stay there. The hostel staff and management are very environmentally aware with separate bins for cans, plastic, glass, paper, batteries and organic waste.

There were plenty of posters around showing of the Chilean environment.

We ended up meeting two Irish blokes that had great senses of humour and had plenty of bad stuff to say about Ireland. They had been living in Australia for about 9 months. As they had just flown in they were suffering a bit from jetlag so they stayed up late at night and slept a fair bit during the day. They were drinking the local beer which can be purchased from the supermarket.

Alcohol is amazingly cheap here. A really good bottle of wine works out about AU $3, a six pack of beer about AU $4 and a bottle of Chivas Regal about AU $40. Everything else seems about equivalent to Australian prices though.

After a pretty relaxing first day at the hostel we went on a tour around Santiago.

The fine arts museum had some great sculptures and statues, as well as some interesting paintings dating back to the 1600s.

The statue on the right was part of a larger set. It reminded me a bit of the Easter Island statues. You see a fair bit about Easter Island here as it is a part of Chile.

The next day we went horse riding in the Andes.

We had to be ready by 8:30 am which wasn't easy for me ;-) and got driven about 30kms into the base of the mountain range.

Everything was catered for us with a barbeque near the top of a large hill. We had chorizo sausages in bread, pork ribs, turkey and beef, with a rice salad and some red wine.

I think our altitude was about 2000 meters, not far below the snow line. We got a pretty good view of the mountains and the ski fields.

Going up was much easier than coming down. We were both pretty exhausted at the end of the day. Strangely I didn't end up with sore buttocks. Maybe all the push bike riding has paid off. :-)

Here is a brief video from the back of my horse. Kim overtakes me on her horse before it stops for a quick snack, on the way up into the Andes.