Santiago Airport - Time to sample the airports sleeping facilities

The good news for this day was that the rain finally cleared in Valaparaiso so I did get to explore the city a bit before I left!  I made my way to Pablo Neruda's house which was one of the 'things to do' suggested by many a guidebook.  He was a Chilean poet that won the Nobel Prize back in 1971, and was supposed to have a quite a quirky house.  The walk up to the house was fantastic, giving great views of the coloured houses on the hills, and the fantastic scene looking out over the port, but the house itself was nothing special in my opinion.  A tight staircase here, some nice paintings there and the occasional embalmed bird, but nothing spectacular really. 

The real adventure for the day was in taking the hostel's advice to catch the 142 bus down to the bus station.

  This bus driver seemed to accelerate and decelerate while speeding downhill with complete disregard for any of us poor souls in the back. I mean why would you drive safely when there´s schoolkids getting on the bus! Just to bring it closer to being an amusement park ride, I had my backpack strapped to my back and my daypack by one hook across my chest, so I had to balance quite acrobatically to avoid hitting any other passengers.  One poor guy did get whipped in the face by my daypack with the first lurch of the bus, so I somehow managed to get the second hook to avoid an international incident :)

So after the bus adventure, I made it back to Santiago airport in late afternoon and unfortunately now had to bide my time to an early morning flight :(  There was really no point going all the way in to Santiago, and the hotels near the airport cost about $100 a night so napping on the airport seats was the winner. The intial hour or so was spent scouting the various locations suggested by sleepinginairports.com, but I managed to find the rarity of a set of 4 seats with cushions (honest to god cushions I tell ya!) away from the crowds, but near security so that gave me a few hours kip throughout the night (with the blessing of eyeshades that Qantas gave me at the start of the trip, I knew they'd be handy!)