This post was supposed to be written in September, but I kind of forgot about it. Oops!
This year I visited Chile with her for 10 days. I'm going to begin saying that 10 days is definitely too much if you are only visiting Santiago and the cities around it (Viña del Mar, Valparaíso and others). If I knew this before the trip, I would have tried going to Patagónia for about two days.
We were hosted at the Castillo Rojo Hotel during the whole trip. I'm going to say that I quite enjoyed our stay there. They have a 24/7 reception, a wine hour that goes from 5PM to 6PM (or was it 6-7PM?) with free wine on a shared space. The furniture and ambiance are exactly how we expected, stunning!
The breakfast was absolutely meh. However, before you jump to the conclusion that this was the hotel's fault... No! We really felt like the cuisine there had no taste and everything had to have avocados on it. I mean, if you go to a Italian or Korean restaurant there, you are going to have that country's experience. As the breakfast had no influence of other countries, it felt exactly like the local food. I don't want to sound mean, because a friend of mine didn't have this impression when she went there. Well, I don't quite understand what happened, but...
On the first car trip, we went to the famous Valparaíso city. It's a beautiful city and throughout most of it you have a amazing view of the sea and some ships. However, I have to warn you, you are going to struggle finding a spot to parking your car there!
One thing that we discovered there was that the cities close really early in the afternoon, you can expect most places to be closed at 5h30PM. We are absolutely spoiled by São Paulo, which is a city that never sleeps. It was even worse over the weekends as some places don't even open. This is a lesson we learned for our next car trip there.
The second car trip had the El Yeso Dam as the goal. The driving experience in Chile is really nice, the roads are well maintained and people are not crazy driving. This was about 3h of driving (because we missed a turn 😅) and... we couldn't even see the dam. The problem was that it rained the day before and it made the snow volume increase a lot. In order to be able to access the Dam you were required special boots for snow, which we, unfortunately, didn't have.
I don't have words to express how beautiful the whole place was. She made a comment that can capture our feelings at the time: "The more we drive, the less appealing the old photos look". And she was right!
What I can say is that on the second day the trip already paid off by this experience alone.
One confession I have to make is that we didn't take as many pictures as we anticipated. There is also the fact that I suck at writing, so I'll conclude this post sooner than I expected. I can say that I loved Chile so much that I would consider moving there given the chance and that I will definitely visit it again in the future!