SANTIAGO

Monday, 21 December (p.m.). On leaving the Plaza de Armas shortly after noon, our tour bus headed away from the city center. We passed the Cultural Center in an old (1905) train station, the Fine Arts Museum, and the most unusual Central Market. The Mercado Central (1872) is in an old wrought iron building that was fabricated in England and assembled in Chile for a National Exposition.

We continued on to San Cristobal Hill, the second highest point in the city (2851 feet). The hill is in Parque Metropolitano, southeast of Santiago There is a funicular to the top. One train goes up as the other comes down.

As we got off the bus (after 12:30), there was an argument between our guide and some of the passengers, among other things, about the fact that after more than four hours he still had not allowed us a rest stop. Showing absolutely no empathy, he said there were rest rooms at the top. Obviously, though, it would take several trips (and nearly half an hour) to get our whole group up there. Some passengers declined to go up.

On reaching the top of the funicular, we discovered that the rest rooms were still a long climb, up about three flights of very irregular stones, and with no railing. By sheer coincidence, since the guide had failed to mention it, I discovered that, at the peak, well above the rest rooms, there's a lovely church, an amphitheater, and a gleaming white 70-foot tall statue of the Blessed Virgin (donated by France in the 1920s). But the view of the city was only fair. We couldn't see the mountains through the smog. We took the funicular down and were on the bus about 1:30.

There was an incident at the restaurant involving a severely handicapped woman in our group and her husband. On entering, her husband was already angry that they had to walk up about a dozen wide steps from the parking lot to the restaurant. Then he saw that our group was being seated in an area that, though with the best view, was up several more steps. He argued with the guide until they were seated alone in the bar where there were no steps. Then after the meal, as the husband was walking down the steps outside, he leaned heavily on the metal railing and it collapsed, throwing him to the ground. He wasn't hurt, but he certainly was mad, again berating the guide for taking us to such a handicapped-inaccessible place.

We left the restaurant at 3:15, and the bus took us to a very upscale gift shop where we spent 20 minutes. Only a few passengers went in, and most of those came out within five minutes when they saw the ridiculous prices, most items in the hundreds of dollars. I concluded that this was a shop that gave the guide a hefty commission on sales, a common practice on even the best tours.

It was here that I also realized that the guide was trying to kill time. Most of the passengers on our bus were going to be taken to the airport at the end of the tour, and they weren't supposed to get there before 6:00 p.m. With multiple buses making this same tour, HAL easily could have segregated passengers going to the airport from those going to the hotel, who would have preferred a shorter tour.

Next we drove to a handicraft village on Santa Lucia Hill, generally know as the Pueblito (Village) Los Dominicos because it's located next to Los Dominicos church. Jane and I weren't interested in buying anything, but it was an interesting place to visit, also very picturesque. We were there for 45 minutes, leaving at 5:15.

And with that, the tour was finally over. The bus got us to the Sheraton Hotel at 5:50. It had been more than nine and a half hours since we left the Veendam. It was really too much for Jane, and she had to lie down as soon as we got to our room. Meanwhile I scouted the hotel and also checked on tours for the next day. The only interesting one available was a full day tour to visit some ski resorts in the Andes, less than an hour away. Jane wasn't too eager about going back into the snow and, in any event, we decided to wait until morning to see how she was feeling before we decided.

We had dinner in the hotel's El Cid dining room, getting a surprise when the risotto turned out to have tomato sauce, which Jane wasn't supposed to eat. The service was exceptionally slow, especially considering that there were so few diners.

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