Valparaiso

Trip Start Sep 25, 2007
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18
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Trip End May 29, 2008


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Flag of Chile  ,
Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Valparaiso is an amazing, beautiful, slummy, impractical city. Every morning it is covered in fog brought in on the Humboldt current, making it much cooler here than Buenos Aires at a similar latitude. There have been 2 earthquakes since we arrived, one which we failed to notice in the queues at the supermarket checkout (everyone in the wooden, multi-storied hostel on the hill asked us if we felt it when we got back). The second woke Nick at 6 yesterday morning, while I slept through it but dreamt I was experiencing a mild earthquake. There are murals everywhere, as well as a surprising number of burnt out buildings in the downtown area. We think this is because the fireworks display out over the harbour here every new year cause fires which are acceptable collatoral, given the thousands of tourists which the fireworks attract. It´s very steep, with 45 hills within the city, and in the central part there are 15 ´funicular elevators´- counterbalanced cable cars on rails, which creak and rattle and haul people up and down the city - they were all built around a hundred years ago One of the plazas
One of the plazas
 . One night we stumbled across a puppet show on the way back from dinner, which ended in a hilarious rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody. Yesterday we wandered through the natural history museum, which included 4 shrunken heads, and the following things pickled in jars - an 8 legged dog, a giant squid, a baby dolphin, and a two headed baby (yes, human). It doesn´t get much more tasteful than that. There´s an open air museum of murals, consisting of winding narrow streets around the top of one of the hills, where 20 murals were painted in the early 1990s.
Restaurant staff are particularly driven in getting bums on seats. One lunchtime we stopped across the road from 2 restaurants side by side, looking at their specials boards. Waiters from both came across the road to try and pull us in, one talking to us very quickly and energetically at length. Not to be ushered before we´d figured out the menu (often there are no menus inside), we resisted and eventually made our decision, with both of them still trying to entice us from across the road. When we made to come closer one of them stept out into the middle of the narrow road, into the path of a rapidly approaching bus, and actually stopped the bus and ushered us across the road into his establishment. We´d already chosen that place, but it was really the pinnacle of an excellent performance. I suspect he annoys the bus drivers quite a lot.
Valparaiso has a strong British influence, stemming from the British desire to have a friendly port (free of Spanish influence), and the Chilean desire to develop the port and nearby tin mines with non Spanish foreign investment after they declared independence from Spain in about 1815. Everyone benefited until the early 1900s, when the tin market crashed and the Panama Canal was opened, reducing the port´s importance.
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