9th January 2015 – Car Preparation and Valparaiso

9th January – Our observations of Chile to date:-  We’ve been out of wifi contact for a couple of days now so we have a bit of catch up. Everywhere we go there are Chile flags flying, they are an incredibly proud nation.  We are both wearing Chile flag pins along with our Kangaroo pins. We are greeted in every town that we travel through with tooting horns, waving hands & smiling faces it makes you feel embarrassingly like royalty. When we stop a crowd always appears and they just want to take photo’s of each other with the cars. I guess that because there are 8 cars & we do have an impact on what is happening in that place at the time.  The cars on the roads are mostly new with many Jeeps, Japanese, Korean & Chinese (Cherry) model vehicles including the MG6! plus the luxury Mercedes, BMW & Audi models that we see at home.  So our conclusion is that Chile is not a poor nation.  There are universities in many of the cities that we have visited.  The main tollway roads are in excellent condition I guess that’s because the users pay approximately $5 per 100 kilometers to use them. The minor roads so far have been pretty good also with a few pot holes but not as bad as the road to Toowoomba!  The food so far has been fabulous.  The fruit, cherries, strawberries & rock melon are so full of flavour and the seafood is a local specialty & very tasty.  Today Michael did the last minute car preparation for the trip and then 6 of us drove into Valparaiso for the afternoon, which is the next town along the coast.  We visited the Melbourne Cafe and had the best coffee since we left Melbourne.   Then we caught the Funicular about one third of the way up the hill and wandered through the lane ways looking at the street art to get back to the cars. We had the very important team meeting preparing us for the start of our journey the next day. We rounded the day off with a visit to a seafood restaurant next to the fish markets.