Viva Valparaiso

Made it up in time for breakfast and ate it all. My appetite is still great (cereal, fruit salad, scrambled egg, bread buns, cake, cheese, coffee and fruit juice). Isi shows me how to make cheesy egg sandwiches - she's the idea person. There I meet Gale & David, an Australian couple from the truck. They've done the whole of South America on a Dragoman truck in 7 months and are now going home.

Isi and I decide to take a day trip to Valparaiso, a coastal town whose port had massive importance before the construction of the Panama canal. It's supposed to look cool too! We took the Santiago Metro (underground) to the bus station (which always excites Isi, they don't have an underground in Canada)! A 2 hour ride and we're there. Valparasio bus station is in an industrial looking part of town. We wander around, blindly trying to find our position on the map (you have to walk west to get to the town centre) and blunder into a couple of markets where I discover Isi's true life love and Isi discovers "Peas"!!! So Isi buys a couple of kilos of peas in the pod to quaff and I some red grapes. The gluttony stops after ½ hour when she discovers worms in a few pods and I creepy crawlies in the grapes. So we wander into town and fill our bellies at a Chinese restaurant instead.

Valparaiso is on a hillside and has a collection of mutant tram lifts to drag people to the top. We try a small steep one (Ascensor Concepcion) for a quite a pricey 500 pesos (50p). The top is a quaint residential area full of twisting passageways with cafes and Bed'n'Breakfasts. It seems we weren't the only people to think the Ascensor to be expensive as most houses had posters calling for a boycott due to the recent 150% price hike from 200 pesos to 500 pesos. Oops! Walking around I was struck by the vast amounts of colourful graffiti that littered all the walls and passageways. We even passed a work of art in the making with the graffiti artist busy beavering away. We had coffee at a cafe at the top of Ascensor Artilleria with spectacular views of the Technicolour port harbour below. (Isi had dared me not to order a beer!) We then sauntered back to the bus station and onto Santiago.

Due to the inefficiency of email we had missed Sean and Monika in Valparaiso, a couple I'd met in Canaima (Angel Falls), Venezuela. They too were still travelling around South America and happened to be in Valparaiso that very day.

In Santiago we went back to the local bar for more excellent Pisco Sours and got chatting to a very drunk rock couple who'd just come back from a concert. Well, Isi chatted Spanish, I just sat there grinning inanely. I do that best! That was followed by some snack food (beer and Espanola Tortilla) at a cafe next to the hotel where the entertainment was watching a very old, very drunk gentleman fall over. Isi rushed to his aid the first time fearing he was disabled. She didn't bother again!

Posted by Steve Eynon