Too much walking

This morning we did an excellent walking tour of Santiago, which gave a really good overview of the city and its history, then James and I settled into an Irish pub (yes, Irish) to watch the Spain-Portugal game, where I enjoyed my first Pisco Sour, which was really nice and strong... so strong I had a bit of a nap near the end of the second half, but managed to recover to see Spain finish one-up and go through to the next round.

Next was the funicular up the San Christobal hill, where unfortunately the grand vista of the city was pretty much covered in smog - we could still make out the mountains, not that it really matters since we'll be going over them ourselves soon enough!

Unfortunately I was overruled about buying a return trip down the hill, and we ended up walking... 7.2km back the long way down the vehicle road. As I had suspected, the more direct pedestrian route was completely unsafe to use near sundown, in fact security guards were posted along the entrances to deter dumb tourists from going down, which is probably quite a good idea.

After a dinner of traditional Chilean comfort food/home-style cooking, we took the metro back to our hostel - the metro system here is noticeably cleaner and more modern than Buenos Aires, but still not as good as Hong Kong. =)

Tomorrow we're off to Valparaiso, hopefully can fit in a visit to one of Pablo Neruda's houses there too!