CHILE : From Santiago to La Serena via Valparaiso
Flying back to Santiago from Punta Arenas after a night at the Hostel del Rey and an interesting conversation with a Chilean writer, we stayed another night with Ines (the lady friend of our spanish teacher in Sydney), spent the following morning visiting the commercial art galleries of a very swish suburb nearby, returned for another supermarket lunch, then caught the bus to Valparaiso.
Valparaiso is a hotch-potch of buildings and shacks climbing the hills behind a working harbour, every wall covered in the ubiquitous graffiti of Chile, the hillsides of the central cerros (hills) with very cute cafes and bars, hostels and little handicrafts shops. Apart from avoiding the market area which several people have warned us is dangerous, we walked around, caught an ascensor up one hill, drank coffee in a little cafe where the waiter told us about his trip to the Amazon with Greenpeace and bemoaned the Chilean character that wouldn't allow change in a country with a huge gap between rich and poor, caught a bus to the southern end of the town and ate seafood, drank pisco sours and red wine, and walked around the coast to beaches with run-down empty pools and change-rooms. This summary of our last week has just been written from our window-less bedroom where we've returned for a siesta (to digest the lunch time pisco sour and red wine) before going out tonite in search of some kind of vibrant nightlife which in Chile does not seem to start until quite late...
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