My penultimate weekend in Santiago I got the chance to escape the city for a bit and I went down to the Maipo valley, which lies to the south of Santiago.

If you have enough people with you to make it economical to hire a car (and/or you’re happy to drive) you could easily drive down here yourself. I took a trip with one of the many tour companies that offer this.

We travelled through San Jose de Maipo and from there climbed on up to an altitude of around 2,500 metres to the reservoir Embalse el Yeso.

I enjoyed the tour, but I always prefer to travel independently if I can, to see what I feel like doing when I get there and go home when I’ve had enough.  It turns out you can get a public bus quite easily to San Jose (simply travel virtually to the end of metro line 5 to Bellavista de la Florida, and then get on bus number 72 from there).

Note: I haven’t done this but I’m reliably informed that it works.

Once at San Jose there is a plethora of exciting activities you can arrange depending on what you fancy, from rafting and hiking, biking, hot springs and even bungee jumps.   I made plans to go back independently for my last weekend.

In the end it didn’t happen though; the storms they’d been predicting all week finally arrived and brought the city to a standstill. So my final weekend in Santiago simply disappeared in a huge storm cloud.

Well I suppose that’s what happens when you keep putting things off; sometimes you find you run out of time at the end. A bit like life.

So that’s it for Santiago and I, although I’d really like to come back sometime. Meanwhile I am now enjoying the delights of Lima, where I will be for just a short time before heading off through the rest of Peru in pursuit of Inca trails and the road to Bolivia.