At some stage during this holiday we knew we would have to have a long drive between the Lakes and the Santiago / wine region. We have been putting it off by moving further up through the lakes but today we grabbed the bull by the horns or the steering wheel by the knuckles and spent over six hours zooming through the flat fertile farmland at 80 mph. Fortunately the roads in Chile are very good so even in our rather decrepit hire car which features a dent in every panel and a rattling exhaust we soon achieved our goal of getting 450 miles further north.
Generally the Chileans are good drivers so there are no major problems although there are a few annoyances; Police cars, ambulances and fire engines leave their flashing lights on all the time, it is a handy warning of a police car ahead if you are speeding but several times I have pulled over to let an ambulance pass only to find he was not in a hurry and all the other cars just ignoring him.
The other annoyance are the tolls on the main road. We have some sort of electronic tag on the car but this facility does not seem to be valid outside Santiago so every half hour you have to stop at a toll booth and pay a fee. This fee is not advertised until you are almost at the booth when you need to scrabble round to use up loose change, if we used notes each time by now we would have a mountain of useless change, the toll roads seem to be the only place where you can't use a credit card.
One issue we have been trying to avoid / resolve over the past week was where to stay after the lakes. We were keen to stay in the wine region where we might sample a few glasses of Chilean red but many of the places mentioned in the guides were either very expensive (we are talking £1,000 a night plus, way outside our budget) or run by Frenchmen (we have suffered Frenchmen outside France before, they think they are gastronomic geniuses on account of their nationality, it always seems to be a disaster).
So last night sitting in bed after updating the blog we searched on Booking.com which came up trumps. We are the only guests in a large commercial vineyard about 150 miles south of Santiago, we are in the main house, it is a ranch style, single story building with lovely cool rooms which have been beautifully decorated, there is a nice warm breeze, a small swimming pool, a hot tub made out of a big wine vat which we have just used and about five staff to look after us. All the pictures in this entry are taken around the property. Tonight's menu is cauliflower soup (a bit of a surprise), rabbit in wine sauce and home made chocolate ice cream with of course lots of the local produce. We have booked for two days so tomorrow we might go on a wine tour but not much else I hope. Apparently some other guests arrive tomorrow so I had better practice my pool skills this evening I case we get challenged to a game, there is a full sized pool table!
I may be a bit too relaxed to update the blog tomorrow especially as Barnet won this evening, can you possible wait another day - I expect so.