The Trip: Valparaíso [Gaganymede]

The Trip: Valparaíso

12 April 2010 at 16:55
Traveling

My experience of Chile in San Pedro de Atacama wasn't enough, so I improvised a day at Valparaíso... and I haven't been disappointed! The guy who was in charge of organising the city did a real mess... and it's a good thing!

I travelled all night long from Mendoza where I had left my big packpack, and I arrived at 5am. I hung around, looking for a coffee and toilets, between drunk guys and very sociable prostitutes. I wasn't very happily stunned at that moment.

When the sun rose, I walked along the coast. The city is made of diverse buildings, stuck around some big half-circle-shaped port. And you can find anything! Spanish era monuments

council estates,

churches,

colourful houses,

tags of all kind and all size,

ascensores (hundred-year-old booths used to climb the steep hills)

but also the National Parliament. It's a nice mess (in a good way).

There is a very boho atmosphere, very Montmartre-like. I entered randomly a shop where they sold postcards of the town. The landlady told me the artist drawing them was french. Then she told me that she herself lived in France because she had to exile from the Pinochet dictatorship. I had read Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits, and it talked about how the dictatorship settled and how the opponents were treated, but meeting someone who actually went through it was a shocker. Even though we didn't speak much (it felt like she didn't want to say more, which I understand), I was impressed.

The most important museums were all closed for a reason or another, one because of the recent earthquake that shook Chile, some retired people told me: "The earthquake? Oh, we're used to it here!"