The fun continued with a trip to Limache to visit my cousin Claudio. He has a nice restaurant. I won't go into the details, but the food was tasty and the place was nice. Here's a picture of the place and the fam:
Limache is about 40 minutes inland from Vina, and we rode the nifty metro. The metro isn't very old, and if you want to use it, you have to buy a 2 dollar card and then put money on it. To get to Limache costs about 2 dollars. I didn't see much of the town, but this street was nifty because of the trees that have been groomed to form an arch over the whole street:
Also in at Claudio's restaurant, I took a picture of the Chilean National Tree- the Araucano. It is pretty nifty:
Valparaiso
After the Limache trip, there were several birthdays where I saw my cousins and their little kids. They are all pretty cute, and I have posted many of these pictures on my facebook, as I am sure most of the readers have noticed. In the midst of these festivities, Cabanillas came down and we went and checked out Valparaiso one morning. I have written about Valpariso a bit before, but a here are a few more pictures that I took for your viewing pleasure (and one of the spiffy new metro):
Salamanca/Los Vilos
After these festivities, I went to a place I'd never been before to visit my cousin Daniel. He works in a place about 5 hours north and inland of Vina, and it's not a very exciting place. I liked it, but I wouldn't want to spend more than a few days there. It was a very small town, out in the middle of nowhere, lots of cacti on the road in though. Daniel was a hospitable bloke, as usual, and when I left, he accompanied me all the way down to the coast to a place called, Los Vilos. There we had some great empanadas, which I will describe in a later blog, and saw the beach. You can see what I saw:
The last one is of us on the boat, and the second to last is the Plaza of Salamanca. I'd put more pictures up of Salamanca... but there really isn't much more to see. Los Vilos was a pleasant way to spend a few hours, and I'm sure it would be a blast in the height of summer.
La Serena/ Coquimbo
After Los Vilos, it was on to La Serena/ Coquimbo to visit the rest of Daniel's family. His son Danielito, was the one who walked around with me the most while I was there. The high points of the stay was first, the Japanese Garden. Secondly, the Fuerte de Coquimbo (fort). There was also a trip to the dock, where I saw the welfare sea lions up close and personal. One of them was quite a brute who barked at me and made threatening waddles, but luckily, I was out of reach. They are ugly suckers I'll give you that. Another cool thing that I saw was the Mosque of Coquimbo, which is an active site for the few Muslims around. It is elaborately constructed and the inside tiling was supposedly done by Moroccan artisans. I wasn't allowed to take pictures of the inside, so too bad, you'll have to make the trip yourself. Everything I saw was free except for the Japanese Garden, and it cost 2 dollars. After a few days here, it was the long haul back to Peru, and man it seemed to take FOREVER!!! I had time to reflect on how long I've been traveling. I figure that since January, I've spend over 170 hours on bus/car/train. I'm a fan of the travel, but I think it'll be nice to rest for a while. Here are some slide shows to demonstrate how fun the tail end of my trip proved to be.
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