Argentina/Chile - Country and People

Unfortunately, our South America adventure is coming to an end, so one last entry from the airport in Santiago.

Before reaching our destination Santiago, we spent a few beautiful sunny and relaxed days in the Colchagua Valley. As one of the important wine regions, the Valley has a lot to offer, especially delicious wine. 😁 Instead of squeezing ourselves into buses, we explored the Valley by bike and got nicely tanned.

But now let's talk about the country and the people.

We thought that two beginner Spanish courses on Babbel would be enough. Surely young people in South American cities would speak at least 3 words of English... but we were wrong. In Argentina, hardly anyone speaks English, as we later found out in Chile, this is due to the years of bad political relations with Great Britain. Among other things, the Argentines still do not give up their claim to the Falkland Islands, even after losing the Falklands War. However, we do not know if that is the only reason.

Second realization: It's loud! Here, the term 'noise pollution' really applies. Especially in Argentina, there is hardly a car without a hole in the exhaust, the car can almost fall apart, but the main thing is that the music and exhaust can be heard from 3 km away. Not a single cell phone is set to silent mode, even at night on the bus... but apparently, everyone here can sleep well except us spoiled Europeans. The constant beeping kept us awake.

There are no rules in traffic! Not that we expected things to be orderly, but even the one-way street system is incomprehensible. In Chile, there are at least signs indicating the direction, and cars sometimes stop for pedestrians at crosswalks. In Argentina, the only rule is basically to look and run. No one pays attention to marked lanes, and suddenly a crossing street is 20cm higher in concrete, causing the tour bus to get stuck...

That was a lot about the country, not much about the people. In general, we can say that South Americans are super friendly and helpful if you can communicate with them. For example, a local helped us when we had a bicycle breakdown and made phone calls for us for 20 minutes to arrange transportation for us.

As friendly as they are, everything here is inefficient. Manpower is the number one priority, preferable to have five ticket sellers per train station instead of one (working) machine. Even if there are only two people in front of you at the supermarket checkout, you may have to wait twenty minutes. At road construction sites, the road is not made one lane to protect cars from falling stones, no, two workers are assigned to hold up a protective film. Only that the film is only the height of the truck being loaded and doesn't do much... and sags in the middle...

Everything is very relaxed here, of course, nobody cares about time, and many stores don't even have opening hours. But the intercity buses always leave on time! We almost missed one because of that.

The last realization: You should not travel to South America just to see the cities. Most of the cities, except for the city center, are quite run-down and ugly, but the landscape is all the more beautiful! The construction style is also a different standard. There are hardly any windows that actually close properly, so everyone is basically heating the surroundings. A hostel owner told us that last year, the gas for a whole month cost only 18 euros, and the electricity the same. However, prices are as unreliable as everything else, suddenly there can be an increase of 2000% 😳

But that should not sound all negative, South America is beautiful and worth a trip, but after 6 weeks of stay, you notice these things.

Here is our trip in numbers:

43 days

7626 km by bus

3000 km domestic flight

20 km by ship

546 km on foot

Love, Micha & Bekki