Wednesday, September 22

We ate breakfast at Il Successo. I ordered the ave con queso (chicken and cheese sandwich), which was delicious even though it’s not something I would normally eat for breakfast.

We took the Metro (subway), which costs only 310 pesos (50 cents) off-peak and 400 pesos peak. The trains are clean, frequent, not delayed, and well used but not overcrowded. The trains run on rubber tires rather than steel wheels which makes for a quieter and smoother ride (rubber tires doesn’t perform as well at high speeds, but these are all local trains). The trains are well ventilated with outside air (free air conditioning) that doesn’t smell like crap. Why can’t NYC subways be like this?

We walked up Cerro Santa Maria, which provides a nice view of the city and the Andes mountains.

Around 6 PM we took the Furnicular (railroad) up to Cerro San Cristobal. It was getting close to sundown, so the view is not as clear.


Thursday, September 23

Our flight out of SCL left at 2:20 PM. This time we took Tur-Bus for 1,200 pesos per person ($2). Tur-bus has nicer seats than Centropuerto. We flew to LSC and then CPO where we had a one hour layover. CPO is a very small airport.

The next flight was to ANF, which has an interesting looking beach. We had a 2.5 hour layover in ANF, and then we flew to IQQ and ARI.

In ARI I picked up my rental car from Hertz. This time I asked the rental car lady if I could drive the car to Peru or Bolivia. The answer was no. This car was a Peugeot. Although it was a little bigger than the Fiat, I liked driving the Fiat much better. The Peugeot was unforgiving with the clutch while in first gear.

We stayed at Residencial Real, which was even cheaper at 6,000 pesos ($10) for the room. Unfortunately the shared bath had no hot water, and of course there was no breakfast.