Live the life you have imagined: a gringa's chilean xmas & trip to Vilches.

I'm starting my Monday morning off with a strong cup of coffee, to be repeated next Monday after this New Year's weekend which I'm planning to spend in the beach town Viña del Mar with 9 others. For only knowing a certain amount of people in Santiago and not having family here, Christmas weekend was pretty busy for me. On the Friday night I went to Eduardo's house to celebrate with his family. Eduardo has a younger nephew, so to my delight after we ate dinner we had to go on a 'leave the house for santa to come run.' In Chile, Santa Claus doesn't come over night with the children waking up Christmas morning to open their presents. Instead he comes at midnight, so all of us left the house to go for a walk while the parents stayed behind to plant the presents under the tree. It was the cutest thing watching Pablo barely be able to contain his excitement as we got in the car to go to a house nearby in the neighbourhood that is known for it's Christmas lights. The street was packed with children and families, all leaving their houses 'empty' for Santa to come. We returned to Eduardo's home and opened the presents under the tree, then proceeded to his sister's house for another present opening ceremony. In his neighbourhood there were children awake late into the night running around and playing with their new toys in the streets. I guess I shouldn't be surprised how late they celebrate Christmas here, because as I've learnt here the Chileans really do know how to party.

Checking out the lights while they wait for Santa.


Me with Eduardo's lovely family. Eduardo is wearing the green striped top.

Christmas day I went to 'Fantasilandia' a theme park here in Santiago with my friend Marco and we spent the day making ourselves feel sick riding roller coasters. Too much fun. We headed to Chris's Xmas asado late in the afternoon to eat, drink and be merry with the other VE volunteers, then continued on to the surprise birthday of my friend Meghans's Chilean bf for more being merry and drinking. Going late into the night didn't really leave in me great form for next day where a few of us had been invited to tag along with Marco to his parent's friends house for another asado. Originally from England, they have been living in Chile for over 15 years now and have a beautiful house with amazing views in the foothills hills of the Andes. They were wonderful hosts and made us feel very welcome in their home for day. It still amazes me every time to see the contrast that can be found here between the fast paced, concrete jungle of Santiago's inner city, past the 'quiko' (rich) suburbia of Los Leones to the lush green landscapes sprawling out into the Andes.

Entonces here is my belated blog about VILCHES!

After deciding to go away for the weekend on a whim. We settled on Vilches from the guidebook after reading about the hike 'El Enladrillado' in the Reserva Nacional Altos de Lircay, which according to the lonely planet guide is 'the best single hike between Santiago and Temuco.' (middle Chile)

We arrived in Vilches on the 'servico occasional' bus service to find Vilches Alto literally consists of a dirt road. With not even a small corner store to buy food we considered our 2 'restaurant' options for eating. By restaurants I mean 2 houses where people had opened up their own kitchens to serve a basic menu and provide beer for trekkers like us. We could choose from churrasco, completo or a sandwich. A weekend ahead of bread, meat, tomato and palta. After choosing churrasco & beer for lunch, we broke up our time with a small trek nearby to be welcomed back for another churrasco and beer for dinner. The kind lady upon our request made cheese and tomato sandwiches for our breakfast and lunch tomorrow on our trek.

We set off early in the morning walking the 2km to get to the park entrance, then hiked the 10km up to the top in a little under 4 hours. The whole way up we enjoyed beautiful scenery and peeks of views of what was to come later out from the shrub. When we arrived at the top we were lucky enough to have the entire plateau to ourselves to enjoy the stunning 360 degree view for the hour we were up there. It was quite something. The trek down took us 3 hours where we rewarded ourselves for our hard work with completos and beer. I swear after that I did not want to see a sandwich or completo for at least a week (I ended up having 3). At 5.30pm we jumped on the occasional bus service back to Talca and were hoping to get over to the beach town Pichulemu that night. Unfortunately they didn't have any buses running there so we cut our weekend short and headed back to Santiago.