Heaven on Earth

Aside from the fact that we are living on credit cards and sweating whether we have enough cash to pay the tolls back to Santiago to collect our passports and Brazilian visas, we are fairly certain that we have landed in heaven. Our hotel, the Vina La Playa, www.hotelvinalaplaya.cl is awesome. With seven double rooms and 4 suites, it is small and intimate. We have been here 24 hours and we feel as if we know Maria, who serves our breakfast and cleans our room, Barbara, the manager with whom I negotiated our reservations, the front desk guy (no name yet) and our waiter (also no name yet). With the exception of Barbara, an Australian born Chilean with a parent from each country, they speak virtually no English. Most of you know that we speak comparable Spanish. We order our food and request things like a bottle of water for the pool with a combination of rapid fire Spanish (them), dumb-founded but friendly looks (us) and sign language to signal a response of some sort to a question we don't understand. Regardless, we seem to have found a place that feels like home. The resort is miles from anything except the fields of the Chilean Central Valley. Once we got off the main North/South highway, the Panamerican, in the small town of Santa Cruz, we drove for about an hour on small roads to get to our lodge, then turned in and drove a bumpy dirt road to get to the hotel. Believe me when I say that we weren't sure this was something we wanted to try as we approached the place. Yet, once we saw the picturesque lodge and met Barbara at the front desk we were won over.

The lodge is set too far away from anywhere to make it easy to take meals elsewhere. The food has been quite good though. Last night's dinner was a choice of garden salad or garden salad with shrimp(and lucky for us they were headless and shelled), beef fillet or salmon tandori, and ice cream or pudding. Because this is both a lodge and a winery, the wine glasses are bottomless. We have tried several and have landed on the unoaked chardonnay and the Cabernet as our two preferred wines, with a preference for the red. I have no idea if that is winery specific or true to the region, but we will have to drink more at other places to let you know. Maria, quiet and polite, served us coffee, fruit,and scrambled eggs this morning for breakfast. Every meal has been accompanied by biscuits. Lunch today was almost exactly like dinner, and the menu board for dinner has announced that dinner has replaced the fillet with chicken (pollo is a word we understand). So, over the course of the week we are here we may sicken of the food, but so far it has been great.

I didn't spend much time on our visa problems, but they have been a major source of concern. On the last leg of our trip I obtained our Australian visa on line by sending them our credit card numbers for the $40 charge and our US passport numbers. I really never focused on the need for visas for this leg of the trip until a few days before flying down here when I recognized to my horror that we are okay for Chile, Uruguay and Argentina, but missing a necessary visa for Brazil that could not be obtained at the airport upon entrance to the country like the Chilean visa, or by e-mail like the Australian visa. Mike was calm about the entire thing, trusting that we would be able to obtain one once we got to Santiago, or if all else fails, we would miss the cruise. As helpful as his calm demeanor was, I was still really nervous.

We showed up at the Brazilian consulate our first full day in Chile, after a long hour drive from the beach town where we are staying and a harrowing drive through the one-way maze of Santiago. We had all of the paperwork we needed for the visa with us except a copy of our exit itinerary that included both our names. The print out I had from the airline taking us from Rio de Janiero to Santiago did not have our names. I did have a copy of our itinerary from Santiago to Dallas, however, and a copy of our cruise itinerary, and that seemed sufficient. All we had to do was go to the consulate's designated bank and deposit the Chilean equivalent of $140 US each. That is when we found out that our ATM cards don't work in most of the machines in Chile. We finally scrapped together all of the US cash in our pockets and went to an exchange office where we converted enough cash to make the required deposit. Later, we called the bank and discovered the complexities of ATM networks. It turns out that Washington Mutual subscribes to the Maestro and Star networks but not the Plus network, the one installed everywhere we were trying to get cash.

So, we are sitting in our beautiful hotel with just enough cash to get back to Santiago on Wednesday when our visas are supposed to be ready for pick up. Hopefully we will find the right ATMS to obtain more cash (we searched the websites of the ATM services and got a list of places to try) so that we won't have to sweat the tolls and the parking fees. Until then, we are holding on to tip money (big pay off coming to the staff of the hotel at the end!) and every other peso we can find. We are charging all of our meals to our room account (unfortunately the dinner bills come without a price attached so we have no idea how deeply in arrears we are getting, but that is a problem for a later day.)

So, in the infamous words of Scarlet O'Hara, "I will worry about that another day..."

So long, Deanne