Leaving Santiago

James >> Our plan for the day was simple. Do some laundry, have breakfast and hit the road. We also had some minor repairs to get sorted. Breakfast and laundry were easily completed so we thought we had time to head back to the market. En route to La Vega Kathryn came across the 'wool stores' district of Santiago. As you can imagine it took as longer to make it to the market than hoped. Today the market was much much busier, but since our spanish has improved we got by a lot better too. We had the worlds best juice, pomegranate.
After this we headed down to the spare parts area of Santiago to buy a new indicator cover and a window winder. For the indicator cover we found two old men who ran a store specialising in old light covers.

They couldn't sell us a complete one but offered to repair it for us and promised it would be done in one hour: even wrote our a contract, which was in spanish and unlegible. The window winder was harder but after a few shop owners scrounging in boxes for us we ended up in just the right place and the guy behind the counter armed with our existing winder, make and year he returned with the perfect part only seconds later. Cost around $4. On my return to the old men they had not even started the indicator repair so I thanked them, took my broken part and left them. We have noticed the Santiaguinos seem to really love their pets. All the dogs have jackets (even some of the

street dogs), however, taking your cat (also wearing a jacket) for a walk down the street does seem a little extreme.
Once we packed up we headed for Valparaíso on the coast. Things were going well, until a plan to get to a particular brand of petrol outlet, to pay our toll road tolls, went terribly wrong and we got quite lost. Once back on the highway things were going well again, until... James noticed the temperature gauge steadily climbing. We pulled over and noted the water was not particularly full, waited for the engine to cool a little and then continued on. We thought we were lucky that all the tunnels were downhill, just in case.
We arrived into Valparaíso after dark and pouring with rain but a market was still running so we stopped and grabbed some more fruit and veg. We spent the night near a headland in a car park. Our first night in the Kombi.