Struan and Anna in Chile: Cajon del Maipo

As of this weekend we've been here in Santiago for a month! We decided it was time to get out of the city. The nearby river valley - Cajon del Maipo - is where the Santaguinos go to get some of the great outdoors. The valley itself is populated with one or two small towns and pueblos y pueblitos - we headed out, very cheaply by bus, to San Alfonso, a village mainly consisting of restaurants and cafes and great mountain views.

The river is fed from Andean snowmelt so you can follow the valley up into the mountains. As previously reported, the river that flows through Santiago (Rio Mapocho) becomes a sad polluted drain once it has been through the "Big Smog". The river that cut this valley (Rio Maipo) is a different much more more pleasant affair up in the mountains.

What do you expect for 650 pesos?

Once you leave the high rises of Santiago the scenery and architecture changes very quickly:

Note the Chilean flag: this is probably here all the time, but the national flag is popping up even more than usual because by law every building has to be flying a flag on Chilean Independence Day (Sept 18). As a quick aside, here's the one that's appeared on the huge "mobile phone" that we mentioned in an earlier post:

Back to the journey up the Cajon:

San Alfonso

In the background of the picture directly above you can see a metal frame tower. In this photo directly below you can see better that it's a bell tower for this little red church - we've never seen anything like this before:

While in San Alfonso we had crepe, or panqueque, at a little family-run mountain cafe. We were the only customers, and while we were there the daughter was sitting on facebook occasionally arguing with her little brother who kept trying to sabotage her session, granddad shuffled out for his lunch, and mum cooked.

Anna and two excellent huge crepes!

Brrirroooerp

At some point we picked up the trail of a strange four-toed creature... but didn't manage to spot the beast.

Lucky you didn't get stuck perro

Here's some other pics from our rambling:

San Alfonso is not very high into the Andes, only 1100 metres (about 3,600 feet) above sea level - Ben Nevis is taller than that. We're really still within the foothills of the Andes - by contrast the altiplano (the Andean plateau running through northern Chile and Peru - where Lake Titicaca is - which we'll visit later in our stay) averages 12,000 feet!

After lunch we went looking for ice-cream, and found this mysterious little cafe styled as an almost alpine grotto - great fun! No ice-cream until the summer apparently, but awesome chocolate caliente (hot chocolate) with a special fairy dust secret ingredient...

"Kuchen", and skis - transported to Austria!

The Faraway Tree

Yes, hello, I'm in the land of the fairies

Once upon a time there were two English people looking for ice-cream, but they found hot chocolate instead...

A woodland creature enjoying some hot chocolate

We sat outside as it was so sunny, but we're defo coming back here in the winter as the inside was great and spookily cute:

The bill, not an epic, just a small slip of paper inside a hollow book

Santiago is gearing up for the celebrations for the bicentennial of Chilean Independence Day (as above, Sept 18, 1810) so it's a great time to be here as there are plenty of cultural happenings like street music and performance. When we got back to Bellas Artes there was a band of young guys thrashing out some tunes - not very Chilean admittedly, mainly the Beatles!