So today is our free day, and I was able to get out of bed before 11, quite a feat for not hitting the sack till 5am.  Sam wanted to buy some Cuban cigars, so he Chris and I went to check out La Casa del Habano.  I picked up a Cohiba, Montecristo and a H. Upman – the Kennedy cigar.  JFK loved them, and put in an order for 1,000 boxes of them shortly before he signed the trade embargo with Cuba.  Then we rode the metro to Palacio Cousino, the mansion of Luis Cousino, whose winery we’d visited yesterday.  We got there just in time to catch the last tour of the day.  To say the house is opulent is an incredible understatement.  This was a guy who had more money than the Chilean government, and his ships would deliver coal to countries around the world, then return home loaded with goodies: gigantic French paintings, Italian marble, Ming vases, and a half ton crystal chandelier.  We had to wear fleece booties over our shoes to protect the parquet floors.  After the tour, Chris decided he needed a nap, but Sam and I pushed on. I really wanted to get to the Museum of Pre-Colombian Art. The one must-see museum in Santiago. 

El Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino features 4500 years of artifacts, ranging from the Olmecs and Aztecs in northern Mexico to the Mapuche in southern Chile.  It had tons of ceramic bottles in the shape of nearly every animal native to the Americas, along with stone work and textiles.  There were also small mummies from the Chinchorro culture of northern Chile, which predate Egyptian mummies by thousands of years.   These mummies aren’t wrapped in cloth like the Egyptians.  The organs were removed, then the bodies were stuffed with dry organic material, like reeds, leaves, and ash.  The region they are from, near the Atacama desert (the driest in the world, with some areas having never recorded rainfall), is incredibly arid and lots of salts in the ground preserved them.  There was also quite a bit of ancient drug paraphernalia: a whole case of pipes for smoking unknown substances, and long spatulas, some plated in gold, that shamans would use to purge themselves.  Once the shamans were purged, they would snort some hallucinogenic powders from intricately carved drug trays, which the museum had several of. Sam fell asleep on a bench in the museum, so we decided to head back for a nap.