Day 60
Today I'm in: Santiago, Chile
After going back and forth about whether I should go to Valparaiso for the day (and getting lots of positive reinforcement from friends who had been) I woke up on Day 60 and decided to go for it. There are buses from Santiago to Valparaiso every ten minutes on weekdays, so getting there was a cinch, and the bus station is conveniently connected to the city's metro (I told you I love this city!)
Santiago was shivering under dense fog and temperatures in the high 30s, so I packed for the worst - I even bought a scarf at the bus station. We rolled out through the misty, gray suburbs of Santiago and climbed into the Cordillera Coastal, the range of mountains separating the capital from the ocean. When we popped out of the tunnel through the cordillera, the fog was gone, the sun was out, and the skies were as blue as they'd been in South Africa. Go figure. On the way into Valparaiso we passed mile after mile of wine estates; Chile's become famous for its wines in the last few decades, and judging from the number of tour buses in the parking lots plenty of people are coming to check things out.
To call Valparaiso a spontaneously-planned city is to put it lightly. Things start out manageable enough on El Plan ("the plain") where a gridded street network faces the city's waterfront and its all-important port. El Plan is appealingly scruffy in a maybe-this-isn't-the-best-place-to-walk-around-at-night kind of way. Rising up behind El Plan, however, are the city's 42 hills, where any trace of cartographic realism goes out the window. The hills are linked to El Plan by a labyrinthine system of cobbled streets, narrow crumbling stairways, and the city's famous acensores - late 19th-century funiculars that crawl up and down the slopes saving residents' knees the trouble of walking.
Or they would if they were working. Riding an acensor is supposed to be a definitive Valparaiso experience - like riding a gondola in Venice or an elephant in India - and I went to four different stations trying to catch a ride on one. Two of them looked like they had been closed a long time (the doors were closed with rusty padlocks) and the other two had signs announcing "temporary" closures for restoration work.
First I headed for Cerro Bellavista, where Pablo Neruda once lived and that's home once again to a growing colony of artists and writers. The houses on the hills are famously ramshackle - many of them are little more than grafted-together assemblages of corrugated steel and tin. The steel is painted in bright colors, though, so looking across Valparaiso's hills is always pleasant, and since the whole city was branded a UNESCO site a few years ago many of the houses have been redeveloped into hotels and restaurants. The views across the hillsides and toward the bay, which is lined with container-lifting cranes and full of enormous tanker ships, come out of nowhere and are pretty spectacular.
From Bellavista I headed for Cerro Alegre, which is right next door, but getting there (thanks to the malfunctioning acensores) required that I negotiate a series of narrow steps and impossibly steep alleyways. Alegre was the first hill to begin drawing tourists, and it felt very fashionable, with lots of classy guesthouses, wine bars and ice cream shops along its streets. I had lunch at a bistro, Cafe Vinilo, where I ordered a carne mechada steak that was served up with a big helping of Chilean vegetables - quinoa, pumpkin, green beans, potatoes and corn - and drowned in spicy gravy. Good stuff.
Finally I made my way to Cerro Carcel, which is topped by the ruins of an 18th-century prison (carcel in Spanish) that's being slowly remodeled into a museum designed by our friend Oscar Niemeyer, who built Brasilia back in the 1950s. It also boasts a great view across the rooftops to the port area - until the opening of the Panama Canal, Valparaiso was one of South America's most important ports, where ships would stop to recover from or stock up for the stormy journey around Tierra del Fuego at the bottom of the continent. Today it serves a more utilitarian role handling Chilean goods, and it's also the home of Chile's navy, but the overwhelming feeling is of being in a city whose glory days are well behind it.
Mostly, though, it's a pretty absurdly cool city, and I'm really glad I went to see it, if only for a few hours. Naturally, as soon as the bus climbed up into the Cordillera Coastal on the way back to Santiago, the mist rolled back in, the windows fogged up and the driver turned the heater up to full blast. I celebrated my return to Santiago with dinner and a few drinks in the Providencia neighborhood, which I hadn't had a chance to see the day before. Not a bad way to spend a day!
Today I'm in: Santiago, Chile
After going back and forth about whether I should go to Valparaiso for the day (and getting lots of positive reinforcement from friends who had been) I woke up on Day 60 and decided to go for it. There are buses from Santiago to Valparaiso every ten minutes on weekdays, so getting there was a cinch, and the bus station is conveniently connected to the city's metro (I told you I love this city!) 
Santiago was shivering under dense fog and temperatures in the high 30s, so I packed for the worst - I even bought a scarf at the bus station. We rolled out through the misty, gray suburbs of Santiago and climbed into the Cordillera Coastal, the range of mountains separating the capital from the ocean. When we popped out of the tunnel through the cordillera, the fog was gone, the sun was out, and the skies were as blue as they'd been in South Africa. Go figure. On the way into Valparaiso we passed mile after mile of wine estates; Chile's become famous for its wines in the last few decades, and judging from the number of tour buses in the parking lots plenty of people are coming to check things out.
To call Valparaiso a spontaneously-planned city is to put it lightly. Things start out manageable enough on El Plan ("the plain") where a gridded street network faces the city's waterfront and its all-important port. El Plan is appealingly scruffy in a maybe-this-isn't-the-best-place-to-walk-around-at-night kind of way. Rising up behind El Plan, however, are the city's 42 hills, where any trace of cartographic realism goes out the window. The hills are linked to El Plan by a labyrinthine system of cobbled streets, narrow crumbling stairways, and the city's famous acensores - late 19th-century funiculars that crawl up and down the slopes saving residents' knees the trouble of walking.
Or they would if they were working. Riding an acensor is supposed to be a definitive Valparaiso experience - like riding a gondola in Venice or an elephant in India - and I went to four different stations trying to catch a ride on one. Two of them looked like they had been closed a long time (the doors were closed with rusty padlocks) and the other two had signs announcing "temporary" closures for restoration work. 
First I headed for Cerro Bellavista, where Pablo Neruda once lived and that's home once again to a growing colony of artists and writers. The houses on the hills are famously ramshackle - many of them are little more than grafted-together assemblages of corrugated steel and tin. The steel is painted in bright colors, though, so looking across Valparaiso's hills is always pleasant, and since the whole city was branded a UNESCO site a few years ago many of the houses have been redeveloped into hotels and restaurants. The views across the hillsides and toward the bay, which is lined with container-lifting cranes and full of enormous tanker ships, come out of nowhere and are pretty spectacular.
From Bellavista I headed for Cerro Alegre, which is right next door, but getting there (thanks to the malfunctioning acensores) required that I negotiate a series of narrow steps and impossibly steep alleyways. Alegre was the first hill to begin drawing tourists, and it felt very fashionable, with lots of classy guesthouses, wine bars and ice cream shops along its streets. I had lunch at a bistro, Cafe Vinilo, where I ordered a carne mechada steak that was served up with a big helping of Chilean vegetables - quinoa, pumpkin, green beans, potatoes and corn - and drowned in spicy gravy. Good stuff. 
Finally I made my way to Cerro Carcel, which is topped by the ruins of an 18th-century prison (carcel in Spanish) that's being slowly remodeled into a museum designed by our friend Oscar Niemeyer, who built Brasilia back in the 1950s. It also boasts a great view across the rooftops to the port area - until the opening of the Panama Canal, Valparaiso was one of South America's most important ports, where ships would stop to recover from or stock up for the stormy journey around Tierra del Fuego at the bottom of the continent. Today it serves a more utilitarian role handling Chilean goods, and it's also the home of Chile's navy, but the overwhelming feeling is of being in a city whose glory days are well behind it. 
Mostly, though, it's a pretty absurdly cool city, and I'm really glad I went to see it, if only for a few hours. Naturally, as soon as the bus climbed up into the Cordillera Coastal on the way back to Santiago, the mist rolled back in, the windows fogged up and the driver turned the heater up to full blast. I celebrated my return to Santiago with dinner and a few drinks in the Providencia neighborhood, which I hadn't had a chance to see the day before. Not a bad way to spend a day!
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