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Other entries in Valparaíso

Valparaiso

We have been reprimanded for our previous writing style in which it seems we have a third person traveling around with us whose sole purpose is to record our blog. This was done kind of by accident in an attempt to show that the record was not one of a single person, but rather both of us recording the events. I can see that this isn't exactly the best way of doing things, so we will change it from hereon in. This is Victoria writing...

Flying out of Cusco felt really great (instead of getting on a manky bus and worrying about crashing down the side of a mountain).Our flight arrived in Santiago at around 1am, so instead of trying to find accommodation we had decided to wait out the night in the airport and catch the first bus we could out to Valparaiso. Unfortunately the trip instigated a bout of severe vomiting in me and I spent the entire time in the airport getting very familiar with a toilet bowl. The nausea refused to abate but I managed to make it onto the bus and into Valparaiso with only a little dry heaving. Joy. Finding a hostel in Cerro Allegro with a bad tummy had its own set of challenges and poor old Ant was tasked with lugging both backpacks up about 300 very steep steps. We were pointed in the direction of a most fantastic hostal called Luna Sonrisa and I was very pleased to be installed in a room with wooden floors and a bright pink ceiling. By the evening I was certainly feeling worlds better and by the next day I was able to get out and about.

So we were finally out of cold wet Peru and were desperate for some well earned sunshine. Alas this was not to be. The coastal fog clung stubbornly to us almost the entire 5 days. Sigh.

The hostal was a fabulously social place, where a small group congregated every morning (for a yummy breakfast) and evening to cook dinner. We got to know a few people and spent the first day wandering around the Open Air museum (where a number of students had painted a series of colourful murals in one of the historic neighbourhoods). Valparaiso is an amazing place. The people there are not afraid of colour. Every house is painted a more outlandish shade of pink/green/purple than the next- sometimes all at once. The atmosphere of the cerro's (hills) is also very special. One minute you are walking on a narrow stair with crumbling buildings crowding in around you, and the next you are standing at the edge of a precipice looking out over the bay feeling like you are king of the world. We also paid a visit to Pablo Neruda's quirky house 'La Sebastiana'. From this vantage we were able to watch a naval parade with our new binocs in the bay. The house itself was a labour of love for Neruda and the subject for some of his poetry (have done a brief search for some of them but had no luck... will look it up when we are back). Every window was placed so carefully to allow small glimpses of the surrounding hills or grand vistas of the bay. I particularly loved the ship portal windows on the stair landings, reinforcing your position in the city and reminding you of all its steep stairways and hidden nooks and crannies. The house reminded me in many ways of Pancho and Dori's apartment in Alfama with similar tiny doorways and lack of head height, as well as the collections of quirky artefacts including a stuffed penguin over the bar and a beautiful carved horse from a fairground carousel.

 Day two was spent catching a bus northwards up the coast past Viña del Mar to Ritoque to visit the 'Ciudad Abierto' (Open city)- a collection of crazy houses built as part of an urban planning proposal by a number of Architects and prfessors in the 70's (I think). I need to do some serious research about this place as my memory of ot from 2nd year design is a bit sketchy. We discovered afterwards that we should have contacted the university to be given a proper tour. Instead we scaled the fence and snooped around trying desparately to translate the mission statement with the help of our very limited phrase book dictionary. We felt very much like intruders as everybody seemed to be home and washing their cars or watching us accusingly from their windows (it being a Saturday). As luck would have it the sun was nowhere to be found so the pics are not that great.

Our dreams of a stroll along the beach were also dashed when we climbed over the rise to find the dirtiest beach I have ever seen. The sand was oily and black and their was rotting seaweed and horse dung all along it. So we retreated to Viña for lunch and then heading back to Valparaiso where we had dinner in a great little French restaurant near the hostal.

 Day three we spent taking a bus South to the seaside town of Isla Negra home to another of Neruda's homes. The town was very sweet, somewhat reminiscent of the nicer parts of Port Alfred. Neruda's house was very special. It houses some of his larger collections. Of what you ask? Pretty much anything he could lay his hands on from African masks to large irridescant bugs to figureheads scrounged from decaying ships before they were popular or sought after. These are arranged around the living room- hanging from the rafters and clinging to the walls forming an eerie kind of gathering in the absence of their collector. I especially loved the engravings in the beams over the bar of the names of friends of his that had died. He and his 3rd wife are buried next to each other in the garden loooking out over the rocky sea. While I got all mushy at the house, Anthony sat drinking a cerveza at the adjoining restaurant. He felt it was somewhat hypocritical to spend money snooping around the house of a poet he had never heard of until we arrived in Chile. I argued that at least we would be learning something new, but he decided chilling watching the view was more to his liking.

After reuniting, Ant and I went and sat on the rocks on the beach (stony) under a heavy layer of clouds and watched the goings on of the locals in all their sunburnt, bulging glory. I felt like an intruder on someone elses family holiday when I sneakily took some pictures of them. Then it was back on the bus to Valparaiso for another 2 hours (getting really tired of all this bussing). We went out that night with a Norwegian (biking around Chile for a few months) and a Brit and got a bit toasted on Pisco sours in a bar that had run out of beer (Shock horror!) and then in a pizza restaurant with painted mannequins sitting on the bar. This meant we got to a rather late start the next morning and had little time to do anything other than get back on a bus to Santiago for our return flight to Mendoza. Aside from being a bit on the expensive side (with money so big I just will never figure it out), Chile seems like a really amazing place... glad we will spend some more time there when we head down to patagonia for Torres del Paine.

 xxV&A

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