January 26, Thursday – Santiago, Chile

Today we had to get up in the middle of the night (3:30am) for a four hour drive to Puertos Arena to catch our flight to Santiago. 

The upside of that horrid hour was that we left the lights off in our room and opened the shades to see the sky full of stars.  The down side is we couldn’t figure out how to take a picture of the starry sky. 

The first two plus hours of the drive were in the dark and we dozed most of the time.  After a bathroom break in Puerto Natales we headed onward, arriving in plenty of time for our 9:30 AM flight.  The flight stopped in Puerto Montt, where our ship had stopped almost four weeks ago, before heading on to Santiago.

We were picked up at the airport for a drive to the hotel in downtown Santiago.  After checking in we walked a bit of the town near the hotel...

stopping in the Iglesia San Francisco, the oldest building in Santiago and the only one to have survived some of the earliest earthquakes. 

After a quick dinner of sandwiches and French fries (patatas fritas) we went back to the hotel for an early bedtime.