Santiago

Our first full day in Chile kicked off with breakfast provided by our hostel accommodation. Toast, jam, cereal and fruit were accompanied by a platter of biscuits and cookies. This dedication to sweet treats is a tradition that we would see continue throughout the day.

The kick-off was slightly delayed owing to jet lag. Having moved from GMT+12 to GMT-3, we are technically only 9 hours 'out of sync' but the dislocation feels as though it has taken the full 15 hours' toll implied by the shift in timezones. Actually, Chile should currently be GMT-4, but the president recently decreed that the clocks wouldn't be going back for daylight savings this year!

We dropped into the language school where we will hopefully start to improve our Spanish beyond the bare minimum next week. After that, we exercised our existing competencies in the pretty La Starria area of town by ordering coffee. After observing that Chileans have a lunchtime eating culture, taking their main meal in the middle of the day, we also settled on pasta from the menú del día.

Mushroom and spinach spaghetti

Presenting a meat, fish, and vegetarian option, the daily menu at El Mulato and other restaurants is a reasonably priced way to enjoy a two- or three-course meal with a glass of crisp Chilean wine.

After lunch, we convened with a group of other tourists in the main square, Plaza de Armas, for a four-hour tour of the city.

Santiago was founded in 1541 by the Spanish conquistador, Pedro de Valdivia, and was named by him after "Sanctu Iacobu", Saint James, the patron saint of Spain, whose image appears in the cathedral on the square. The square is named after the armas (weapons) that the Spanish held there. These they needed to protect the settlement from aggressors, principally the local Mapuche people who opposed the Spanish presence.

Mapuche statue in Plaza de Armas

Unfortunately for Pedro de Valdivia, the Mapuche became even less well disposed towards him when he started taking their children as slaves. He went on to settle other parts of southern Chile amidst an increasingly hostile environment. According to our guide and other accounts, he met a bloody end at the hands of the Mapuche, who apparently flayed, dismembered, and (if some accounts are to be believed) cannibalised him while still alive.

Guarding de Valdivia

De Valdivia chose the settlement location in a valley, protected on either side by mountains and the sea. This area also proved excellent for cultivating vines. In fact, in later years the grapes did not succumb to phyloxerra, which wiped out much of Europe's crops. However, the valley also has the effect of holding in the city's pollution, casting a pall over the snowcapped Andes.

Our genial guide

Our guide, Nicholas, when not leading tour groups, studies gastronomy. This bias was obvious in his patter, as we first took a tour of the fast food available - its popularity among Chileans apparently visible on their waistline - chief among which is the hot dog (completo), which comes with a wide variety of toppings, closely followed by hamburguesa, and charrasco - a kind of steak sandwich topped with green beans.

There is a surprising unpopularity of coffee in Chile. They are apparently mostly tea drinkers until an enterprising businessmen opened a cafe where the tall waitresses serve the predominantly male clientele while wearing short skirts - known locally as 'café con piernas', coffee with legs. An even more ruthlessly enterprising businessmen topped this by, behind tinted windows, paring down the waitresses' uniform further still and introducing an occasional "happy minute", during which they remove the top half of what little they are wearing.

La Moneda

Our next stop was La Moneda - originally the Mint, as its name suggests, but later the seat of government. The grey edifice is not apparently noteworthy, until one remembers (or is informed) that it was stormed in 1973 under a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet against the socialist government under Savlador Allende. Allende's efforts to narrow the poverty gap by redistributing wealth and nationalising many Chilean industries (including valuable copper trade) had upset some powerful people. So began Pinochet's 17-year dictatorship and a period of fear and suffering for the people of Chile. We would find out more about this terrible history at the Museum of Human Rights tomorrow.

Statue to Salvador Allende

Meanwhile, on the tour, we wound our way northwards around Santa Lucía hill, stopping coincidentally at our lunchtime venue, El Mulato, for a break. It seems that we had independently sniffed our guide's recommendations, as he also singled out El Naturista in passing, which we visited yesterday evening. Rather than return to a restaurant where we had - owing to a miscalculation with the as yet unfamiliar currency - tipped an order of magnitude too low, I chose to wander a few doors down to one of the "25 best gelaterias in the world" and enjoyed a rather nice dulce de leche.

Santiago's Wall Street

As we rounded each corner to a new street, a dog would present itself, as though to welcome us to its domain. On the busier streets, the dog was often passed out, no doubt exhausted from greeting all the passers-by, but the livelier ones often accompanied us to the next intersection, handing us off to his colleague over the road. The reason for the high canine population is that they are often turfed out of homes unneutered and allowed to reproduce and live as strays. Coincidentally, we saw very few street cats, who must have been making themselves scarce.

Santiago's old and new

In the Parque Forestal, there is an incongruous bust of Abraham Lincoln. This was a gift from the USA in 1985 and, according to the plaque, seems to have been pointedly given in the spirit of freedom and democracy - "values which the two nations share" - during the Pinochet regime. There is no love lost between the US and Chile, and the statue is heavy in graffiti. This attitude sits uncomfortably with the fact that we had just passed a restaurant that had changed its name and decoration overnight following an impromptu visit from President Clinton.

Mopoche River and St Cristóbal hill

Crossing over the distinctly unmighty Mopoche River - a tiny trickle at the bottom of the brown riverbed, as there has been no rain to speak of since last year - we reached the Bellavista area of town. We ended at the former house of esteemed Chilean poet, Pablo Naruda, and bade farewell to our guide.

'Cellphone' tower

Having eaten at lunchtime, we embraced the Chilean culture of 'once' (teatime) and enjoyed a pisco sour at El Biógrafo in La Starria, as the dusk fell and the musicians struck up on the pavements. The drink was mouth-puckeringly sour despite our guide's insistence that most alcohol in Chile is served sweetened so as to disguise the poor quality - pisco and Coco-Cola (piscola), beer and Fanta (fanschop), and, the most frightening of all, white wine and pineapple ice cream (terremoto, meaning earthquake). Despite deriving its name from the eleven (once) letters of the spirit 'aguardiente', apparently to take 'las onces' does not necessarily, nor even in the majority of cases, involved alcohol. In fact, it is normally taken between 5 and 7pm, and involves a cup of tea, some bread and toppings and perhaps a piece of cake.