Today Santiago screwed us over, twice. I took this photo of one of the subway stations on the way back to the bus station because Similarly to Stockholm’s famous subway system, Santiago has also turned their subway system into a giant art gallery by using the entire subway stations as a canvas (as you can see here) and/or putting up paintings all through others. I went back to the bus station because I accidentally left my sleeping bag on the bus the day before however the sleeping bag was no where to be found 🙁
Anyway, apart from losing my new sleeping bag to the staff at Tur-Bus we were also forced out of our hostel because they had double booked us because of a music festival happening. We only discovered a day or two before we arrived into Santiago lollapalooza was happening this weekend with a pretty awesome lineup, however with prices similar to a major Australian Music festival there was no way we were going to be able to afford it. So we figured we would just have to explore Santiago without seeing the Chilli Peppers, Nine Inch Nails, The Wailers, Cage The Elephant, Soundgarden and the Pixies. Because of the festival all of the arsehole hostels in Santiago simultaneously screwed us over by capitalising on the music festival by double booking us and by jacking up the accommodation prices. This essentially left us wandering from hostel to hostel for most of today attempting to find a hostel with accommodation and who wasn’t going to overcharge us for a simple dorm room.
Eventually we struck it lucky and found a place which was only charging about $18 AUD for dorms (still expensive), but after lugging our bags across the city and checking in they informed us that the quoted price was actually a miscalculation and after the first night they were going to charge us almost double the price! Cockdonkeys! Even after trying to negotiate none of the hostels would budge on their price hikes even though we weren’t going to the festival and leaving the day before it started. Apparently the owners had instructed the staff to leave the rooms empty and wait for last minute festival goers to pay the hiked prices rather than have a guaranteed booking.
Thanks to the greedy hostels hiking up their prices and my budget constraints we are now being forced to leave days before we had planned and head to the nearby city of Valparaíso, which is a cheaper city by the coast, but apparently one of the most dangerous in Chile. If we get mugged i’m coming back to rob this hostel.
Screw you Santiago, I heard you were cool man.
