15/10/2019 – Travel day Pichilemu to Santa Cruz, Chile

We got up, had some coffee and packed our things up. We checked out and walked 10 minutes down the road to the bus terminal where we bought a ticket and were quickly ushered onto a minibus. There was not much leg room even for my legs, so I can’t imagine what it was like for Josh! After about 20 minutes at the bus station waiting for the bus to fill up we left, and started driving through the beautiful countryside, as usual picking people up and dropping people off at random places along the way. The landscape was very green and leafy, a big contrast to the landscapes of Peru! It is Spring here, and it was a lovely sunny and warm day. It took us about 2 hours to arrive in the Santa Cruz bus terminal, quite a big bus terminal for a relatively small place. The guys from the hostel in Pucon had recommended us coming to Santa Cruz, so without a second thought it had become part of our itinerary. We found a taxi and got dropped off at our hostel ‘Vida 2000’. We were welcomed in to a house full of incense and crystals, and they offer Reiki and massages here! We were ushered through the house that we could see had some smart guest rooms, and to the beautifully peaceful garden and into a circular shed, which the lady told us represents the sun! This was our room for two nights. It was nice, a simple small double with a bathroom attached. I think it is a bed and breakfast but they make the most of the space in the garden with a cheap room for the odd backpacker that swings by. We dropped our bags and then walked into town. We found food first, a set lunch menu on the main square – chicken and rice. Then we went a couple of doors down to a coffee shop, which we enjoyed in the sun in the back garden. We went to the Colchagua museum – voted as one of the best private museums in Latin America. (I don’t know by who, but it was surprisingly impressive, especially for the random location!) The ladies we bought our tickets from seemed genuinely pleased to have something to do, the whole town was rather quiet, and we had the whole museum to ourselves. My student card is coming in handy with the discounts! The things on display ranged from huge fossils to old newspaper presses to carriages. It was pretty cool! The reason we had really wanted to come here though was because there was an exhibition about the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped 700 metres underground for 60 days, back in 2010. The exhibition was fascinating, we saw the handwritten letters hat had been sent up by the miners to their families in little test tubes, the way the rescue had been organised, and there was even a space that was supposed to show what the cave had been like for the miners trapped inside. It was quite emotional really, what an amazing thing for them all to have come out alive!

After the exhibition we went to the supermarket and bought some bits to have a picnic dinner in our room. We walked home and chilled for the evening.