On our second day, we ventured out of our surrounding cerros to see the rest of Valparaiso. Outside of the most touristy areas, the city does become less vibrant, but still has plenty of character. We walked part of the outdoor market, which had some very cool artisanal stalls. One of the things that surprised us was how different all of these markets tend to be from place to place. You would assume that they all make and sell similar things, but each town has its own unique and creative markets.

Another attraction in Valparaiso is the sea lions that hang around the coast. However, one thing you don't read about is the fact that they are next to the fish market - for obvious reasons - and so there are literally fish heads everywhere and seagulls pecking their eyes out, which is kind of distracting.

If we had one more day around this area, we would have taken a bus up to Vina del Mar, the next city up the coast, home to some very cool sand dunes and nice beaches. But, we wanted to get back to Santiago to have time to see the city before everything shut for Christmas. And so we got back to the bus, paid Pedro a short visit at the airport parking to pick up some more clean clothes and made our way to our Airbnb in Santiago.

Santiago

We arrived in Santiago on 23rd December, and treated ourselves to a nice Airbnb with a gym (borderline qualifies to be called this) and a rooftop pool. Our highlights of exploring Santiago were:

• Seeing the city from multiple viewpoints. Cerro San Cristobal - a large hill behind the city where we took an old funicular railway to the top and a cable car back down. We also took a lift to the 62nd floor of the Torre Gran Costanera, the tallest building in South America at 300m tall.

• We finally tried 'Mote con Huesillos' whilst, atop Cerro San Cristobal. We had seen this drink everywhere in Chile and gagged at the thought of drinking it because it looks like a brain fermenting in a glass, but it's actually a dried peach floating in peach juice with bulgar wheat at the bottom of the glass and was actually really nice.

• Spending a day in Barrio Italia, a district historically populated by Italian immigrants. Now, it's a bohemian area where what was previously houses with a courtyard in the middle are mazes of craft shops, markets, restaurants, and bars.

• And as always, wandering the streets getting a feel for the city, which feels very relaxed given that it is so large, and looking up at the end of every road to see distant mountains.

Termas Valle de Colina

The last time we visited thermal baths was in La Fortuna, Costa Rica, and if you have read that post you will know how disappointing that was. So we had high hopes that these 'Termas' would make up for that!

It took 2.5 hours to drive from Santiago, deep into the Andes. It was a 30°C day, and with about 45 minutes of the drive remaining, we entered a quarry where the tarmac road ended, and the pothole gravel track began.

The road then got steep, very steep, as we climbed into the mountains. As we climbed higher we dropped back into 2nd gear, then back into 1st gear. And pretty soon, we couldn't get back out of 1st gear it was that steep. Then Pedro's temperature guage started climbing very quickly, jumped up into the red, and we lost power! At this point, we were on an extremely steep hill so we battled to stop him rolling backwards, and finally managed to get him stationary. He wouldn't start up again.

We quickly got our little warning triangles out and put on our high vis jackets as on one side was a huge mountain and on the other we had huge quarry trucks passing from both ways. Popping his hood to cool him down, we considered our options, of which there weren't many. With him being too hot to try to open the coolant valve, we decided to wait 20 minutes for the engine to cool sufficiently.

After his 20 minute cooldown, he started up and we decided to waste no time and set off further up the hill. But this time very slowly keeping revs as low as possible, and thankfully the road quickly flattened out as we reached the top of the hill.

A few bumpy kilometres later, we arrived at the Termas, and they were definitely worth the drama of getting there. In the literal middle of nowhere, there were eight milky blue pools of volcanically heated water, surrounded by mountains stained red, green, and yellow from leaking minerals. The pools ranged from 25°C to 45°C, and when it's 30°C air temperature, 25°C feels cold so we spent a couple of hours soaking and floating across the warmer pools taking in the view.

Santa Ema vineyard and Oasis waterpark

Surrounding Santiago are many valleys of vineyards. After some research, we decided to stay in the Maipo Valley. Annoyingly, in December, it was still off-peak, meaning that a lot of campsites were closed so we had a lot of trouble finding somewhere to camp as we weren't in a wild-camp-friendly area. On the verge of giving up and picking just about anywhere by the roadside, we tried a waterpark that had a camping sign, and although expensive we decided to go for it because we needed to be somewhere established to return to after the next day's trip to the vineyard! We actually hit the jackpot, because as well as having a nice campsite all to ourselves, we got access to the waterpark too!

Naturally, we spent the morning hurtling down the waterslides like children and chilling around the pools before heading out to visit a vineyard. This also wasn't easy. With our first choice vineyard, Vina Santa Ema, closed according to its website, we drove around the valley asking for a tour at many others, all of which were also closed. Eventually, we decided to just turn up at Vina Santa Ema and ask, which resulted in a private tour, at a cheaper price than advertised, and turns out we were their first guests in 12 years, as they'd been closed for commercial reasons, and then covid!

The surrounding vineyards and architecture of the winery itself were beautiful and the sommelier had great English. In contrast to other wine tours we've done, we didn't have to hear things we weren't interested in, already knew, or listen to answers to other people's questions, because it was just us! We had a really interesting tour and tasted five different wines with pairings, our favourite being a Chilean Carmenere.

As if the day couldn't get any better, we got back to the waterpark just before the slides closed, quickly put our swimsuits on, ran across the campsite to the mat racer, climbed the stairs, and hurtled down one more time full of red wine.