La Serena, Valparaiso and Casablanca

Our first destination after San Pedro de Atacama was a very relaxed small city of La Serena. Right after disembarking from the bus we were approached by a local who insisted we go and stay with at his mom's house (Maria's casa). He sounded legitimate and the hostel is also listed in the Lonely Planet, so we decided to give it a go, especially since it was close to the bus stop. The family that owns the house is very nice and right of the bat told us where we should go for some cheap, but good food. Well, we didn't hesitate a second and took their advice and went for the local Menu del dia deal in the restaurant Los Pinos. If I tell you the truth, it wasn't far from perfect, very very good. Unfortunately, we didn't have great weather in La Serena, so we just took a short stroll around the beach and visited Plaza de Armas which is a square in every city. I'd definitely recommend to stop in this city on the way to or from the North of Chile.

From La Serena, we headed to a much bigger city Valparaiso which with its hilly scenery and colorful buildings reminds a bit of San Francisco. The situation from La Serena's bus stop repeated itself and we scored a great accommodation deal with very nice local folks. This seems to be the standard for how the locals travel and it gives a great insight into the living ways of the people. We had only one full day in Valparaiso, so we spent it browsing around the city and also took an old funicular up one of the hills (Cerro Concepcion) from where there is a pretty good view on the harbour and also some nice restaurants. However, we learned from San Pedro and didn't succumb to the great smells of food here, but rather made our way down towards the plaza Victoria where the restaurants seemed to have good deals on Menu del dia.

Our last stop before Santiago was a smaller cozy town of Casablanca where one of my college buddies (Jaime) has family, so we had to give it a go and pay them a visit.It turned out to be one of the best days we had in Chile. First we met his uncle Enrique at his cafe called Willys where we enjoyed one of the Chile´s brews and then Enrique´s wife Ximena offered to take us to a local vineyard called Casas del Bosque. Here we tasted about 8 different kinds of Chilean wine which Jenni confirmed to be very very very good and we also found out that the vineyard exports to Finland. After that we visited Jaime´s grandma, had a great lunch and then checked out their house which was quite nice. We definitely saw how the locals live here and most importantly, how hospitable they are. The communication between us was difficult at times, however, our Latin American dictionary came in handy. After our visit we got on the Tur Bus again and headed back to Santiago were we prepared for our trip to Peru.