Day 135

     Today Kevin, Mike, and I took the day off from Surfing and went and toured Santa Cruz, Chile’s wine country. It was a two hour bus ride from Pichilemu but we woke up early packed a lunch and hit the road. Unlike Mendoza in Argentina, Santa Cruz is a lot more spread out, exclusive and expensive to tour. The bus dropped us off though on the side of the road about a km from our first vineyard. The tour was great. He took us through the vineyard and we got to eat as many grapes as we wanted, straight off the vines, and they had all types as well, even types of grapes from wines they don’t produce, just so you can try them.

     Then in the tour we got to drink straight out of a stainless steel aging vat containing wine marked for Denmark. Then there was the actual tasting of five bottles, three of which having matching hor d'oeuvres paired with it.

     Some of the winery staff was leaving so our tour guide had them give us a lift to the next vineyard which saved us about 45 minutes of walking. This tour wasn’t quite as good but we still got to eat grapes and tour another beautiful vineyard as well as see the actual bottling machines used which are pretty outrageous. The wine wasn’t as good as the first (neither vineyard's wine compared to Mendoza) but we did buy their ‘gold label bottle’ for our last feast which we were planning for tomorrow night as a going away sort of deal since we were all leaving.

     I took a two nap, which I feel is customary once finishing a day of tastings, but awoke in time for dinner. Kevin had made vegetarian pasta, and check this it literally was vegetarian seeing as the noodles where made out of shredded zucchini and the sauce was made out of fresh tomatoes and garlic and what not.

     And now to tell you about Anton. Anton has been a part of this trip but I have waited to tell you about him until now. Anton is 44 years old, won the bronze medal in the Olympics for the USA for snowboarding, has been living in Chile for 15 years and doesn’t speak a word of Spanish. Multiple people said this independently before they knew the others had also said it independently but it is like meeting Will Ferrel in real life but as ridiculous as any one of his characters and he doesn’t stop. He has a laugh that explodes and is about 10 times to loud and he laughs ALL THE TIME because everything is the funniest thing he has ever heard.  His Spanish comes out as “Yo tango das he yos” for I have two kids. Oh yeah and both of them are illegitimate with random Chileans from sometime while he’s been here. He has never applied to live here but still has a tourist visa so every 90 days he drives the 10 hours to Mendoza, Argentina, turns around and comes back into Chile. Every 90 days for the past 15 YEARS! He goes out to the bars at least 4 nights a week and I think makes a move on literally every single girl in the club. He sort of runs a hostel at Punta Del Lobos but he’s never there so I don’t know who actually runs it, and Ryan said he was over there hanging out with Anton (it’s so much fun to be around him, it’s like watching a train wreck) and Ryan said that Anton would answer the phone (there is only one person currently staying at the hostel) and Anton would either tell them he had space or not depending on how ‘cool’ they sounded on the phone. Then a family of 10 Chileans shows up offering to pay him double his normal rate, and he looks at them and says “No, I don’t think so, you guys will use up all the hot water” and sends them on their way.

     Anyways Anton came over right as we were finishing dinner so Ryan and I went out with him to a club called Wytara, which is on the beach and is the ‘surfers’ club. I won’t go into more details about him at the club since I think that’s sufficient for you to probably imagine his antics at the club but I will say you could hear his laugh across the room over the club speakers.

     Oh I will leave you with a quote though, “Spanish is like AC/DC. I have been listening to them both for 20 years and I still don’t understand a damn thing!”