We arrived in Santiago, Chile on Monday morning. By the time we cleared immigration and customs, waited for our luggage for over an hour in the baggage claim and then found Inez who was picking us up it was early afternoon when we left the airport.  Inez is an employee of Florus, the owner of the apartment we are staying in at the moment. Inez’s driving is scary! From doing 30-40km/hr on the highway (while everyone else was doing 80-100km/hr), changing lanes without checking (mirrors and shoulder checks, what are those?), and a number of near misses with other cars we wondered if after flying all this way we would make it to the apartment in one piece! But we did. And when we arrived, Florus was here to greet us in person and show us the apartment. It’s a nice apartment, in a great location, close to all the action.

We did everything by the book and stayed up the first day, meaning that Richard was awake for two days and one night, which was amazing.  He watched four movies in a row on our flight for your information!

The first couple of days here were spent taking it “easy” or as easy as you can take it when you’re on a mission.  We walked around the city centre, did some people watching in the plazas, and visited a couple of supermarkets.

Probably the most challenging thing we did during those first couple of days was try to buy a SIM card for Richard’s phone.  Claro is the major cell phone provider here, and there is practically one on every corner of every street. The funny thing is that each shop we visited quoted a different price, and they did it with different levels of helpfulness.  People often said they didn’t speak English so we persevered in Spanish which was always met with some shy giggling.  Eventually but not always someone spoke English back to us. It was also during this exercise that I failed to remember the Spanish word for ‘take’ (tomar) and used the word ‘touch’ (tocar) in its place.  It led to the uncomfortable situation of me asking if we could touch her, when all I wanted to do was take the quote with us. Hopefully that mistake I’ll only make once.  I continue to make plenty of other mistakes with my Spanish but not ones quite so embarrassing or compromising! Richard also had a nice one, where he asked for a ‘Christmas system’ (navidad), instead of a ‘navigation system’ (navigar).

Feeling a bit fresher and under pressure we started searching for a car on Wednesday.  It feels different to be tourists and not be out looking at all the sights but we’re here to buy a car, and to do that requires a lot of work, both in time and effort. We’ve had to figure out the best way to bring money to pay for the car, how to go about applying for a Chilean ID, what pieces of paperwork to check for, and then to actually look at cars, well all these things take time.  Luckily Richard has spent a lot of time over the last year or so researching what car to buy for the trip, and how to buy a car in Chile. Let me be clear, it’s nowhere near as straightforward as it is in New Zealand!

We visited areas far and wide off the beaten track, and definitely areas completely empty of tourists. Some of the car yards have been close enough for us to walk or get a taxi to.  While other times we’ve had to take long metro trips right to the end of the metro line, a couple of taxi rides, plus some walking.  It’s certainly been quite a mission, but interesting no less.  We have seen the poorer part of the city, which was rougher looking and with less well off people than in the city centre.  It was an eye opener and sad to see.  It made us realise how in a city of five million people you can have huge diversity of living situations.

Yesterday we visited car yards on the other side of the river, to the north of the city centre. The area had a European feel to it and reminded me of some of the cities in Spain with the wide tree-lined footpaths and large houses. We saw a couple of cars we liked, but we need to think about both.  In the meanwhile Richard has found more dealerships for us to visit today and on Monday so that if the car we like doesn’t work out we still have options.  Cars generally are quite expensive and a lot of the cars we’ve looked at are not worth the price they are being sold for. Quite a few dodgy or dirty cars around, so we keep looking until we find something we are comfortable with and then hope for the best!

Aside from looking at cars, we also applied for and got our RUT (Chilean ID) which is legally required if you want to buy a car. The paperwork and application process was done all in Spanish, but for the most part we were happily surprised at how straightforward the process was.

With the search coming to a bit of a standstill for the weekend we’ve decided to use this as an opportunity to see a couple of sights, do some shopping and hopefully see the Hobbit (or el Hobbit)!