Anyone monitoring my progress with the help of Google Maps may notice a rather substantial distance between the current location and the last one. It’s a long and tragicomic story, boring to tell, but basically circumstances compelled me to stay on a bus which I wanted to get off halfway through, and that’s how I came to break my personal record for Longest Bus Ride Ever. 31 hours. (The previous record was 23 hours: see September 2008 below and select ‘Hue, Vietnam’).
Arica to Santiago is a thousand miles as the crow flies, but the crow did not fly, and the bus certainly didn’t either. Two consecutive nights on a bus, and a full day inbetween, with my partial comforts (reclining seat, a blanket, splendid daytime views of the Atacama desert) more than counteracted by the presence of an idiot with loud earphones, whose loud and idiotic earphones were consistently loud and idiotic for just about the whole 31 hours…it was a small consolation, as I sat there unable to sleep, to reflect that he’ll undoubtedly be deaf as a post before he’s 40. Fingers crossed he gets leprosy too.
Santiago is very liveable, not too crowded, and refreshingly modern compared with the somewhat ramshackle places I’ve been through in recent weeks. In fact, apart from the temperature (30 deg C and more), and the surrounding mountains, at times here you could easily imagine yourself in the nicer parts of Leeds or Birmingham city centres. The city views you see in the pictures are taken from the top of a funicular cable car type thing, which ascends a little grassy knoll called Cerro San Cristobel; there was a zoo halfway up and I took a few pictures there too.
On Saturday I took in some football: Colo-Colo 1 Universidad de Concepción 2, at the Estadio Monumental David Arellano. Colo-Colo is a funny name for a team. (I’d like to see them sign Kolo Touré, and possibly also Bolo Zenden.) They’re the biggest and most successful team in Chilean football history, but this was one of their off-days. My amateur video of Colo-Colo’s consolation goal is below.
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| Weird creature in Santiago zoo (1) |
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| Weird creature in Santiago zoo (2) |
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Oh, for f***'s sake. There's always one.
Note how it's the fat and dippy-looking one of the three. |
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| Estadion Monumental David Arellano. Colo-Colo in action. |
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| Santiago |
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| Santiago |
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| Santiago |
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| Santiago |
