Whew– we’re behind in posting after 11 wonderful but essentially wifi-free days in Patagonia.  We were sad to leave it (and Chile, and Aileen and Robbie…) but are delighted to be settled in Buenos Aires for a little while. Before…

Herewith, random but key statistics for our first month of frolic-and-detouring: Countries visited: 1 Beds slept in: 8 Long-distance bus rides: 7 Rental cars: 2 Flights: 3 Empanadas consumed: 15 Miles traveled (approx): 9,142 Favorite hotel (splurge): Posada Colchagua, Santa…

We left our cozy Valparaiso hostel on January 29 and picked up our first rental car of the trip, excited and slightly apprehensive about the 3-4 hour drive southeast to Santa Cruz in the Colchagua Valley, Chile’s main (red) winemaking…

Just a small sample of what we saw everywhere in the city. Click on any image to expand.    

We arrived in Valparaiso after a mere 26 hours of travel– 24 hours on a bus from San Pedro to Santiago (one disadvantage to our “avoid excess planning approach is that flights tend to be prohibitively expensive at the last…

On our final two full days in San Pedro, we made two longer excursions.  The first (and my favorite, even though it came early after a night of watching American football in a rowdy backpackers’ bar and imbibing appropriately), brought us…

We arrived in San Pedro on January 16, after a surprisingly pleasant 16-hour bus ride from La Serena.  It’s a tiny town in the middle of the Atacama desert, catering largely to backpackers and other tourists in town to see…

The first week of our Chilean adventure brought us from Santiago to the Atacama Desert, in the extreme north.  On the way, we spent four nights in La Serena, a small coastal town seven hours north of the capital. Naturally,…

And we’re off! After two gloriously uneventful flights, we arrived in Santiago early on the morning of January 9. We left the east coast still reeling from the Polar Vortex and emerged bedraggled from the airport to find 90-degree heat–…