Valpo

Yesterday I arrived in Valparaiso on a fun overnight bus during which I actually managed to sleep 7 hours with frequent wake ups to un-deaden a limb.

Valparaiso is actually apparently the third most populated city in Chile. It has been billed to me as:

-Dirty
-Gritty
-Arty
-Bohemian
-Supercool
-Boring
-Horrible
-Beautiful

So I wasn't really sure what to expect! But so far I love it.

The town centre is by a port on the flat and then the rest of the housing and shops/bars rise up on .... Hills, with various staircases and elevators and funiculars, plus buses and teams, to try and ease the pain of getting back up to your house once you are down. Apparently the Valparaisians only go down into town once a day and if they forget something they just put it off until tomorrow because it's such a painful task. There is a lot of street art absolutely everywhere and the houses are really colourful. Some are UNESCO protected. Apparently locals used to take half empty discarded tins of paint from the docks to paint their houses and they were always bright colours so that the boats could be seen, which means the houses can be seen as well.

My first task was shopping and I found out the joy of matching up hundreds of steps in the blazing heat with a backpack full of food trying to stop people from being able to see up my skirt.

I then saw Andy from BA who is in my hostel here which is nice (fwend) and went off to a free walking tour that afternoon with a girl from the hostel. The tour was good and involved free wine, explanations of the graffiti and a bit about the area, and a free Alfajor following us awkwardly having to crowd around a door like school kids and shout 'buenos tardes senior' at a man who sells them. Gimmicky!

Afterwards a different girl from the tour and I bought some earrings and went on a fishing boat which loads up with tourists and takes you on a jaunt around the port for 3000 pesos. We went past sealions and between the orange lifejackets of all the people on our clearly overloaded boat you could also see warships and cargo boats being loaded up as we passed. It was ace. You also got an idea of the size of Valparaiso. One of the boat guys stood at the front chattering away in Spanish and hugely entertaining the other tourists as everyone kept bursting into random laughter.

Valp used to be a massive major port but then the Panama canal opened and this stopped that.

That evening the girls I had met on the tour were off to have a BBQ then a night out. I felt a sense of duty towards the other people at my own hostel so headed back for dinner. Afterwards Andy, a really lovely girl from the US who had been at the hostel for something like 10 days already, a funny Irish couple and I all sat on the terrace drinking wine. The Irish couple were absolutely storming through their box and Andy had to go and buy us another couple of bottles so the three of us could​ try to match them. We decided to go out but the Irish couple decided to stay behind which was definitely for the best as the girl almost fell over saying goodbye to us. They were comedy gold. Off we marched with a couple of the people from the hostel to a club by the cargo ship loading dock. The club had an open area at the top and you could look across to them loading up the cargo ships. It was hard to get an idea of the scale of this until we saw a lorry pootling alongside it all, a full sized lorry that looked minute in comparison to the ship and its enormous containers. The night was an electronic night and was average save for the fact that i met someone who went to Challoners and lived in Amersham, which is strange considering we are in Chile.

The next day was a hangover day but I managed to get myself out of the hostel by 2 to have an amble about. The good thing about cities is that you can still have good lazy days! There is so much wall art here. Every turn I take I come across more and more painted on the walls, steps, coloured glass and tiles embedded into the pavement, a park covered in mosaic patterns. I walked up to the cultural centre at the top of one of the many hills. The cultural centre used to be a political prison where Pinochet's government tortured many people deemed to be against Pinochet. It is now a cultural centre with spaces for meetings and theatre, surrounding a park where people meet for various activities or to chill in the day. When i was there it looked like some kind of new baby club was going on, lots of parents with small.babies gathered around stands of bananas and a woman with a microphone saying things i didn't understand.

In the evening I watched about 100 episodes of TV in bed and it was excellent.

The next day I felt like I was settling into the hostel more (it usually takes a couple of nights and as my last hostel was so good it was a bit harder to settle here than usual). Having said that the hostel is only £9 a night with an enormous rooftop terrace with a 270 degree view, a free to use washing machine and a 'buy 3 nights get one free' policy, so it's hard not to like.

I went for a walk with a mission to see sea lions. It was super sunny and quite a long walk but worth it to see the blobby roar slugs that were the sea lions. They were all hanging out on a kind of concrete pontoon and you could clamber across the rocks to see them from not too far off. There were loads all crammed on, occasionally one would fall off and another would leap on quite impressively up a slanted concrete side. There were frequent roar fights between the huge males who would wave their heads at each other as the ladies lazed about. I then continued along the coastline to a super full beach with a stinky fish market and crashing waves. On the way back to the hostel i stopped to queue for what i had been told was one of the best ice creams ever. My tiramisu ice cream was worth the queue and frantic translating via phone app of the various flavours. It was totally delish.

That evening the guy from Amersham (Jack) who I had met on the night out moved to our hostel at the recommendation of Lisa, who had left.

After a tasty meal of scrambled-egg-with-all-sorts-of-additions, me, Andy, Jack and Jessica headed out a to a bar where we drank wine and watched a man dressed as a clown leaving a car and dancing around and some people longboarding. We then had a really long serious wine induced chat about palliative care, death and the American healthcare system. Cheerful!

The next day Andy and I headed to Concon, a beach town near Valparaiso, known for having some dunes which you can sandboard down. We rattled our way through Vina del Mar, which is like Valpo's shiny cousin (white buildings, very clean, no graffiti) on the little collectivo bus which you flag down anywhere you want and takes you wherever for a fixed price of 1600. The dunes at Concon were cool but super random as they were right next to the main road. Luckily you could sandboard in the opposite direction towards the sea to avoid squishy by cars. The sandboards were ridiculously cheap and marching up to the top of the dunes was seriously hard work, especially in the heat, as the sand completely filled my canvas plimsolls and began to burn my feet. However it was worth it as the sandboarding itself was so fun! I was relatively controlled and if i went too fast would just fall off purposely but Andy had a few face plant wipe outs into the sand, the most spectacular being on the way back down at the end where he was trying to show off and nearly broke himself slamming into the ground. I did a thumbs up from the top of the dune to check he was ok and it took a good few minutes to receive a reply. We were totally covered in sand by the end, including it plastered over our faces and eyebrows, so we handed back our boards and went for a long walk to the sea with crashing waves where we washing machined the sand off, then a cafe for waffles, fruit salad, ice cream and pisco sours.

When we got back we grabbed Jack and headed off down the hills to the supermarket where we productively divided into a serious BBQ food buying team then sweated our way back up the hill. Jess joined and the four of us cooked a great steak meal which was added to by everybody's weird food leftovers: half an onion, a bell pepper, a teeny tiny avocado. I got food preparation love of the gang joy. Andy and I did a good sauce exchange/compromise for our steak sauce. Jack was in charge of the barbecue and had angst over whether the meat would poison us all. I felt super glee. We set out our amazing meal on the terrace with red wine and beer. We had good conversation and the steak was excellent.

The next day I headed off to Santiago.Read more