The drive from Santiago to Valparaiso (or Valpo, in local
parlance), was when I first got a sense of how empty Chile is. Santiago is a big and dense city of some 4-5
million people. I knew that Valpo, the
historic port city, was only an hour’s drive away, so I was expecting a pretty
dense suburban buildup between the two. Sort
of like the drive between, say, DC and Baltimore. Wrong…it’s completely empty. As soon as we left Santiago, we drove through
arid wine country straight for about an hour, before entering the outskirts of
Valpo, which is a pretty big city in its own right. But the lack of building between the two came
as a bit of a surprise, and a harbinger of what we were to see on the road in
the coming days.
Valparaiso is beautiful.
A maze of windy streets built impossibly on a set of steep hills overlooking
a forlorn port, and also the source of the country’s alternative culture,
comparisons to San Francisco are completely impossible to avoid. The wet, constantly changing weather, the
seedy pockets, the graffiti, the inexplicable stairs, and the super fresh
seafood all reinforce the analogy. But
in keeping with the comparison of Chile to “California 30 years ago”, Valpo is
like an ungentrified, pre-tech boom version of SF. No billionaires or tech buses here.
The best thing about Valpo was simply the time we spent
winding through the old city streets, checking out the graffiti and the
views. We did this as part of a walking
tour and on our own. I was particularly
impressed with how our multi-generational group hung together through the
endless stairs and the heat. We had a
couple of incredible seafood meals, our first exposure to things like “machas”
the uniquely Chilean mollusk sort of like a razor clam.
We could have easily spent more time in Valpo; the truth is
that we saw very little of the city beyond the most touristed central areas,
Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepción. We
were able to check out Pablo Neruda’s house here, La Sebastiana, which was as
interesting as his Santiago house and particularly fun because Yo and I recently
read a Chilean detective novel set partially in the house, so it was a bit like
checking out a movie set for a book you’ve just read.
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| View from our Hosteria |
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| Loading up the 12 person van |
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| Old funicular repurposed as art |
The one thing I really regret missing in Valpo, was the
“Cerro Abajo”, a crazy downhill bike race sponsored by Red Bull that is held
there every year. I’ve been following it
on YouTube for a few years, and it was one of the things that first got me
interested in visiting to Valparaiso. I
can’t really describe it (best to check out the video), but it involves
professional racers plummeting down the city streets for about three minutes,
riding down stairs, through alleys, jumping embankments and other dangerous
stuff. It was to go right through the
neighborhood where we were staying, and we saw the crews setting up some of the
ramps and jumps. We had no idea, but it
was to take place the day after we left.
Had it just been the four of us, I would have re-jiggered our plans to
stay a bit longer. But since my parents
were on a limited timeline, we had already made other plans. I’ll just have to get back some time. (Although next time, I’ll be sure not to try
and navigate the maze of steep, narrow, one-way streets with a 12-passenger
van!)
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