Alone Again Or*

Our organised tours are over and we’re back to our own devices, which this morning meant getting a taxi to the airport at 04.30 (this is a holiday?) in order to catch a flight to Santiago – which for some reason has its clocks two hours ahead of Peru – this coupled with it being further south means that it stays light until gone 9pm. Santiago is so beautifully located, standing in a wide plain surrounded by the magnificent Andes. Despite it being a bustling industrial capital it has so many parks and because today was so warm and sunny we took a walk through a couple of them – one was a sculpture arboretum full of strange trees and even stranger sculpture, but there were one or two bronze busts, including one of Pablo Neruda.

The other park was the huge Parque Metropolitano which contains the (very big) hill of San Cristobal which we had intended to reach by the teleférico ( a sort of cable car) but this was closed for maintenance...so we decided to walk up. Mistake. It was a steep climb and the sun was still shining brightly and the temperature was still very warm but we were spurred on by the knowledge that somewhere near the top is an Enoteca with a display of Chilean wines – many of which it is possible to buy by the glass. Dear reader we have to confess that we never made it, the climb and the heat beat us back to our jewel of a hotel that we discovered on the internet called the Meridiano Sur with bougainvillea rambling over the front door and has poems painted on the walls – including one by Pablo Neruda.


In the evening we went to a wonderful vegetarian restaurant just around the corner and sat outside beneath a starry sky. They had a vegetarian version of a traditional Chilean dish called pastel de choclo which was vegetables with onions, olives and large raisins, topped with a maize meal mash and baked in an earthenware dish. We also had a very good bottle of Chilean carmenere reserve wine – when the bill arrived we thought perhaps we had ordered a very expensive bottle by mistake but had momentarily forgotten that 1000 Chilean pesos is equivalent to about £1.30.

* Alone Again Or is a song originally recorded in 1967 by Love. It was written by band member Bryan MacLean and was the opening track on the album Forever Changes