Day 3 - The end of car shopping

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Day 3 – Santiago

Well today has been a very interesting day. It started by going to the tax office to get some more information on cars to find that they were on strike or a public holiday or something. We couldn’t quite work it out. Anton and I decided to go to a car yard on the other side of town, North East. This was great in theory but we ended up catching the metro to the last station in the area, then walking for quite some time to find the address we had didn’t appear to exist. We had a second address so after another 30 minutes of walking found that car yard, however, the cars were all too new and expensive. The cheapest was about 7 million pesos which is roughly $14000 USD. The car salesman suggested another car yard which sounded like the ones we visited yesterday, but said it was about 5kms up the road. We decided to jump on a bus to get there, however we had no bus tickets and you cant buy them on board, luckily the driver was nice enough to let us on.

The cheapest was about 7 million pesos which is roughly $14000 USD

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Plenty of people helped us on our journey although some more than others, reception at a Subaru office even made phone calls and printed us out a map, in the end it took us a lot of buses and walking to finally reach the car yard at least 2 hours later. Unfortunately again it was full of newer cars out of our price range so after a great deal of the day we hadn’t actually achieved anything. Burger King for lunch although I am still struggling to even order that and get it right, ending up with a burger only rather than a meal.

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We felt guilty about getting on buses for free, so tried to buy a smart card which you need to use, however, we couldn’t find anywhere to buy one – plenty of places to recharge one though. In the end the cleaner at a mall gave us his and although we protested he insisted and told us not to worry. We refilled it and found it even had actual credit left on it – people in Santiago are very nice if you need help.

The day ended however with my travel partner and I decided to part ways and left me with a big decision regarding the car. After some thought I decided it would be unwise to attempt my massive itinerary alone and would just start the trip with an organized tour. I signed up with a tour that leaves on Sunday and fell asleep!!