Santiago, Tuesday

Tue 2226 Heading towards bed. Set alarms a bit earlier this morning, absolutely terrible but there you go. Got up maybe 1030.

Called Transvip to confirm my reservation and that I could pay cash to driver; not my smoothest Spanish but I managed it so yay.

Went out with vague goal of going to Cerro Santo Lucia and getting cash from Scotiabank for taxi and contingencies. (Had toyed with Cerro San Cristobal, maybe taking funicular, but decided against it. Have done it before and will be back to do it again. Plus saw something on news other day re fire at IIRC zoo up there and wondered if funicular and maybe even path might be suspended.)

Long story shorter: it seems to have been a fluke I got free cash wd at Scotiabank other week in Rancagua. After finally finding a machine I got told it would be CLP5.5k for privilege of withdrawing 30k. Tried various other banks on both Clarity and Starling and all in 5-6k range. Not paying that if can help it.

Tried to pay (from street) again by ccard but Halifax still not updated my phone number. Tried to pay with Starling but they don't take Mastercard debit, only credit. (Maybe saying it was a credit card would have worked, but didn't want to risk shit occurring as a result when it could impact my airport trip.) Bravely went up CSL without having resolved this and though thoughts were inevitably running on the next couple of days of intense and mildly stressful travel I didn't feel too bad and it was relatively nice.

Came back via ekono, bought a litre of beer for 1k with some change (including the last of the old ones I had which won't be valid next time I return) then went back round and bought some stuff to cook tonight on ccard.

Came home, managed to pay for taxi using Barclaycard Platinum Travel and then cooked, packed (moderately "thoroughly" ; taking stuff out of bag to some extent and trying to filter out certain accumulated crap and segment stuff appropriately for airport shit to come etc), watched bit of YT and had beer. Bit of shit backing up photos on phone (I accidentally unmounted internal SD card instead of external one, and that caused some fuckery with the photo sync to Google saying "preparing" for hours - I envisioned it draining my battery despite leaving phone on charge overnight - but it appears to have recovered itself after all) but not too big a problem. Thanks to paying for taxi on ccard I *shouldn't* need any money tomorrow - I'm not sure it's expected to tip driver but I may give him a 1k note (not a very generous percentage but since I think it's not expected to give anything...) anyway. I have approx 12k in cash, if things go tits up and I need to pay through nose for regular street taxi I will just have to dash to a cash machine and pay the insane withdrawal fee.

Got a bit self-ranty during the Scotiabank-misled-me-into-thinking-free phase in street, not my produest moment but hey, keep working on being Mr Cool and maybe I'll get there in the end.

2303 Bed. Don't know how quickly will get to sleep and have an alarm for 4, which bites, but maybe I can sleep on the plane.