Valparaiso and Vina del Mar

Valparaiso was formerly Chile’s major port, and the first stop for ships bound for the west coast of the United States – it was the first port you got to after rounding Cape Horn (and, according to the brochures, was also an outlet for the export of Chilean wheat needed during the California gold rush.) When the Panama Canal was finished, business dried up. Recently, it’s become more of a tourist attraction, but is still an active port. It’s known as the “Cultural capital” of Chile, and Pinochet moved the parliament here in 1980, apparently to keep them out of the capital. This move was unpopular, and the locals want the parliament to move back out (they occupy a very interesting building by the bus station.) Vina del Mar is the next town up the coast, and is really just over the hill. It’s more of a resort town, with actual beaches (Valparaiso is a working waterfront, and there are docks, but no beach.)

Valpo is a small plane of flat land right on the water, surrounded by an amphitheater of hills that look down on it. These hills are very steep and are all built up with houses that cling to the hillside. One is reminded of San Francisco, but with hills. The easiest and most fun way to get up and down the hills is to take an “ascensor” – this is a cable car/funicular type thing that will climb two or three streets, and costs about 20 – 40 cents to ride. Many of these are over 100 years old, and the view from the top is amazing. Alternately, you can climb the streets yourself. This is hard work, but amazingly productive. By the time you think you’re getting tired, you turn around, and you’re amazed at home much you can see. The neatest thing is the local tradition of painting your house some bright pastel color. It makes for a very colorful city. Even pretty broken down looking buildings can have a nice green or yellow or red or blue paint job. It's nicest when there's a row of houses that each choose a different color.

We didn’t actually have a lot of luck seeing things we wanted to see – we were there on Monday, the day everything remotely related to the government is closed here. We wanted to see Pablo Neruda’s house in Valpo as well, but it was closed on Monday, since things are closed on Monday, and on our way to see it on Tuesday, we met another tourist who told us she had just been there, and they were closed for some staff training day (it’s about a 2km walk uphill to get there, so I’m glad we met her close to the bottom of the hill.) So, no luck there.

Since nothing was open Monday, we took the metro up to Vina, and wandered around the parts of a big public arboretum you could get to (also home to a museum, closed Monday). Here, there’s a giant amphitheatre where apparently there is a huge music festival every February. The amphitheater was very modern and pretty, and reminded me of an exhibit of modern Spanish architechture we saw at MOMA a few years ago. I suspect that the architect is famous if you’re into that kind of thing. There were also some really neat trees with bright orange flowers and a close relative of the monkey-puzzle tree, with much narrower needles/scales, but still arranged in that distinctive spiral pattern which makes you think they’re from another planet.

On the way back from Vina, we got off at a metro stop that looked like it had access to the beach, and frolicked a bit. The surf was usually fairly calm, but occasionally and suddenly really violent. I rolled up my pantlegs, and was trying to be careful wading, but still got pretty soaked. You can still see the salt dried in (hopefully this will change when they come back from the laundry today.) There were kids running around in the surf like crazy people, getting knocked off their feet by the waves (one of them noticed us cracking up at how it had swept him off his feet, and started laughing himself, and soon a crowd of kids was laughing pretty hard, and trying to recreate the moment for us.)

Finally back to Valpo, we found a working ascensor, then kept climbing for a while. This was in the arty district – reminds you of a poor Capitol Hill. Lots and lots of public art/graffiti. At the top of each long climb, there’s a store selling cold pop and hellados – frozen ice cream treats (I have a theory that the “hel” in hellado (which means “ice”) is etymologically related to our word “gel” – haven’t had a chance to look this up yet, but I bet gel basically means ice.)

Back at the bottom of the hill, we found an Italian bar that was recommended in the guidebook, and ordered a small bottle of wine. Supposedly, there’s live music and singing and tangoing in this place, but bar life doesn’t really start here until about 9 PM, and we were there at 7PM, so it was just us and four or five bored waiters, and one old guy who was nursing glasses of pisco, which watching what I think was a soap opera on the television. He looked like he’d been on that barstool for 60 years. I can see the appeal of living in the same smallish port town like that and having a favorite barstool your entire life, but then we got up and left, and I was glad.

The hostel in Valpo was huge and dark, with 15 foot ceilings, I would guess. We got assigned a room with four beds, and satellite teevee. I worked on a paper that was due for class, while Ev surfed channels. Access to a kitchen is pretty standard here in the hostels, so we started our routine of making pasta sauce out of veggies from the local market combined with a packet of tomato sauce (they sell these here in single serving plastic sachets for about 30 cents.)

The next day, we explored an outdoor museum of murals painted on retaining walls and buildings by the local art school in 1992. You do this by climbing a complicated set of stairways and streets, kind of guessing your way along (we stared at a map posted on a wall, but we couldn’t memorize the whole thing.) We were initially really disappointed, as the lowest ones are covered in graffiti, but as you climb higher, they are cleaner and cleaner. That was fun, and we met the aforementioned other tourist who told us about the closed Neruda house, doing this, and traded info about where to go next to see more murals.

Chile has a serious graffiti problem. The problem is that some of it is quite good. A lot of what we saw in Valpo was really interesting and highly skilled. Some of it was just tagging, and not very interesting. Some of it was political (various regions want independence, or are opposed to salmon farming, or still are mad about Allende), which was interesting to me, but only linguistically, as I tried to puzzle out the meaning of the words. If the difference between graffiti and art is permission, it’s hard to say which was which. A lot of it was very good stencil graffiti – we saw lots of stuff way better than the stenciling you see in Seattle (robots and aliens are a popular theme for stencil graffiti the world over, it seems.) Outside of Valpo, I’ve found that the graffiti is no less frequent, but a lot less interesting.