Charming Santiago Chile, I Was En-route to Darwin

I arrived in Darwin yesterday afternoon after a 3 days flight from Costa Rica, as with all flights they are shite, I am really starting to hate flying, they have back breaking seats, they have plastic food, they are always late, they are run by aliens making us all suffer for ruining the planet. But on this flight to Darwin i was forced to fly via Santiago in Chile as all the flights through the USA were full and very expensive, I can tell you that flying south saved about $10,000. You may think i am joking but I am certainly not, the cost using the USA was almost $25,000 and using Chile to fly through cost $14,478. This is a crazy amount to charge for a seat that isn't even comfortable.

Anyway I arrived in Santiago at 2.00am, i had to get a taxi into towna dn luckily i found a nice genuine honest taxi driver and as we travelled into the sity he rang a hotel and found it was full and then he rang another and got me a room, pretty cheap at $69 a night, he took me inside and maybe got a bonus for bringing me in but that is OK, he even arranged to pick me up later and take me back to the airport, which is OK by me, I had to pay him in Dollars as I didnt want to buy any local crap money, the Peso, and i was able to survive all day eating and drinking using plastic and I walked around a bit, i found the local art gallery but they wouldn't take plastic so i walked to a castle on a hill,

Castillo Hidalgo




The Gardens of The Castle




it was sunny and not windy and i enjoyed the pleasant weather, even though it is winter here, from the hill with the castle i could see all of Santiago, that was visible in the fog and I was shocked to see some monster mountains that were almost hidden in the fog, they were huge and snow-capped, I was told there were lots of skiers in town, taking my bedrooms obviously. I walked around and found some lovely flowers in bloom which is crazy as it is winter, the temperature was about 15C during the day, not sure what it got down to at night, i think i saw 6C, but can you belive there were hummingbirds flying all around the place, they wer fighting over the flowers, it was so funny and so entertaining, i spent 3 hours watching them, they were tiny as normal but they had this crazy cap, in a brilliant flaming red/gold, depending on which way the sun hit it,





an unbelivable display of nature at its best, the only thing was we were in the middle of the city surrounded by 5 million folks all doing there best to survive and destroy the planet. Just a little chink of light at the end of the ecological tunnel. Darwin was sunny warma nd quite refrreshing actually when i got off the plane, it was almost nice to get back to, but as my wife willnot be joining me for the next few months while she gets her visas and passports for herself and the little tinker then, I am going to be miserable.