Valparaiso

Today we took a day trip out of Santiago as a bus trip to Valparaiso and Vina del Mar both on the Pacific coast. We chose to go on a guided tour as we had heard that Valparaiso was a little sketchy with some recent violent thefts against tourists. The guide Pablo on our trip yesterday was excellent but today our guide Chevaz was somewhat lacking in his guiding skills. His English was poor as was his knowledge and enthusiasm. I suspected from the reviews that the company didn't have the best guides but the price was good and it allowed us to get to the coast and see the two cities.

As it was a guided tour we were taken to a wine shop on the way where we stopped for a wine tasting hoping we would buy some wine. The wine shop was known for its blue wine which when we googled we realized it was white wine with some blue dye from blueberries added. It was a little cheezy and I don't even drink wine.

Val is Chile's largest port and has a large naval base.It saw its heyday in the 19 century but fell on hard times when the Panama channel was finished in 1914. The city is on very steep hills which descend to the ocean. The whole harbor is rimmed by houses and buildings many of which appear to be poorly built. It is a wonder that they all haven't collapsed into the Ocean with an earthquake. Val has more recently been taken over by artists and bohemians who have painted murals on many of the houses and buildings. Val and Vino also appear to be popular places for Santiagians to go in the summer to avoid the heat We were dropped off with our guide at the top of one of the hills and we walked down one of the very steep streets admiring the street art and the view of the harbor. The one crazy thing that happened on the walk was that there was a slide like structure which had historically been used to clean laundry but which tourists had started using as a slide. A local who lived nearby and had seen many tourists injured going down. We only knew this as a local who was sitting at the bottom of the slide told this to Cheryl. He should have been our guide. Our guide however encouraged people to give it a try and one guy gave it a try but went into a death spiral and hit the pavement at the bottom very hard. He said he wasn't hurt but I think he was too embarrassed to admit otherwise.

After our walk we headed off to Vina del Mar home of a beautiful beach and the famous Vina del Mar floral clock. The clock was spectacular. We were given 2 hours to explore by ourselves but encouraged to eat at a very high end restaurant. We had brought our lunch so we headed down to the beach. The beach was closed for swimming but for us landlocked Albertans it was fun to enjoy the serenity of the waves washing against the shore. It was very calming much more than the west Edmonton mall water park.

Heading out of Vina del Mar we stopped at an archeological museum where there was a Moia taken from Easter island. Some of the Canadians on the bus trip today are flying 5 hours to Easter Island tomorrow to see the Moia. I teased them that they didn't have to go now.

A one day bus trip was fine and allowed us to see a lot of interesting things that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to see but I don't think I could handle travelling for much longer with such a slow moving group. It is very slow moving with 20 people. The bus trip was also only to have taken 8 hours but took 11 1/2 hours which was long. I think it took longer as they combined 2 tours and we were at least an hour getting going in the morning. We were happy to get back to our Air BnB.Baca lagi