Well. You all know we aren’t really tour bus people, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. A local tour bus company was offering C$27,000 half day tours to the Underagga Winery south of Santiago, so we went ahead and bit.
Big mistake. The bus left 1/2 hour late and first had to take us to a mall in the very tony Las Condes neighborhood on the east side of Santiago – exactly opposite from where the winery is located.
Once at Las Condes, we switched to a larger bus and then headed out for a 90 minute drive to the winery. The first pic is Jeff on the bus.
He was covering his ears because the tour guide was screaming into the microphone in English, Spanish, and Portugese. Yikes.
Anyway, we finally got there about 30 minutes late so had to join a tour in progress. This next pic shows you the beautiful grounds if the winery.
This next pic is their cellar. It’s just for show, but it was nice.
Then the tour was pretty much over. We got about 20 minutes of tour, 20 minutes of wine tasting, then time to shop (of course). Then it was back on the bus to return to Santiago in rush hour.
What a freaking nightmare that was. It had been raining quite hard most of the day, we had even heard that the mountain roads in the Andes were closed due to heavy snow. But when we returned to Las Condes it was flash floods in the streets.
It was taking so long for the bus to move that we actually asked to get off miles from our hotel, and then had to turn around and get back on the bus because the streets were impassable on foot — the water was up to our ankles and looked to be deeper in the streets and it was rushing downhill in a torrent.
We finally got back to our hotel about 9pm – nearly 8 hours after we left for our 20 minute winery tour. Boooo!
