Santiago Skiing and Wine Tasting

Hola Amigos! Que tal? (means What's Up - notice my huge improvement in the Spanish Language!)

Skiing at Valle Nevados Chile

We wanted to share some of our recent Chilean adventures with you.  We went Skiing at the Valle de Nevados just outside of Santiago Chile right at the end of their ski season and we managed to catch a blue bird sky day to hit the slopes.  It was pretty warm and the snow was schmooy which is typical of Spring Skiing anywhere but it sure was fun to ski in the Andes mountains and see the beautiful views.  Gary was happy to get Day 1 of skiing in for the season.

Wine Tasting at LFE

We also managed to visit some amazing Chilean wineries and we have been drinking wonderful Chilean wine at every opportunity.  We went to the Santa Cruz wine region just south of Santiago and we had some wonderful tours of the wineries high up in the hills.  One of our favourite experiences was an outside tasting in the vineyards really high up at Luis Felipe Edwards.  The view was spectacular and so were the wines.  We then visited Estampa vineyards as well and enjoyed their fabulous wines. This region experienced a lot of damage from the Feb 2010 earthquake so it was very interesting talking with all the vineyard folks to see what happened.  We had a bit of an adventure getting to the wineries because our rental car had a flat tire and we were not sure if we would actually make it to the vineyards or not.  We managed to pull into a small town off the highway and we felt like Indy Car drivers because the 4 guys who patched our tire did it in record time and it cost 4 dollars.  We still don't know how to say flat tire in Spanish but hand signals and pointing at the obvious can get you pretty far sometimes.

Capsule that saved Chilean Miners Valparaiso

We went to Valparaiso just west of Santiago on the coast and we saw the harbour and all the painted houses on the winding streets.  Valparaiso is a huge port city and the Naval presence is everywhere.  We visited the Naval museum and we saw the capsule that the Navy used to save the 33 trapped miners in the Northern Chilean Atacama Desert mine last year.  It was the one year anniversary of the accident so they had the capsule on display for everyone to crawl into and look at.

We found this cross made out of wine barrels in Santa Cruz wine country where we stayed and we thought it was just a perfect use for empty barrels.
We will now continue to move south as we target the end of the world and Ushuaia.

More tales to come!
Salud,
Pat and Gary