Valparaíso

Valparaíso's hills slope down to the sea, a bit reminiscent of Rio de Janeiro. So funiculars (ascensores to the locals) were built to provide transport. M had arranged to meet a Chilean acquaintance at the bus station. We missed it by one stop so she had to walk back. D and I went up the El Peral ascensor. The neighbourhood was poor, there was garbage in the streets and dogs wandering around. It seems strange that the poor in Rio and Valparaíso should have such scenic views. I think it was simply that in the past the poor built the shanty towns where nobody else wanted to live, out of easy reach of jobs, transport and shopping.

Our destination was the Fine Arts Museum (Palacio Barburizza). You could have a private tour, but a group of 4 was required. I didn't really want to see any of the exhibits but admire the art nouveau style building.

There was a stocky tree in the grounds. I wrote in my diary that it was a 300 year-old pepper tree (probably this), but I cannot find anything about its history on the Internet. I must have copied the information off a plaque.

We walked downhill to the Muelle (Pier) Prat. There were tourist souvenir shops there. We were offered boat rides.

We had a drink while waiting for M to turn up. She arrived with a Chilean youth, J, in tow. It was obvious that he was smitten with her, but the full story was to emerge later. We took lunch at one of the restaurants on Plaza Sotomayor. M was vegetarian so she had rice with a fried egg.

Pablo Neruda is Chile's 1971 Nobel prize winning poet. Isla Negra, one of his houses, was not convenient for us to visit, either not open to the public at the time or because it was 70km down south, I don't remember. However we could visit La Sebastiana, his residence in Valparaíso. This time we took a colectivo up the hill.

It was an elegant house with beautiful keepsakes; Neruda was quite a collector. I think photography was not allowed inside so that's why I have no pictures of the interior. However the hillside had great vistas of the harbour and beyond on a sunny spring day.

Neruda was ill with cancer and died days after the coup. Perhaps it was just as well, with his left-leaning sympathies, the times would have broken his heart.

A telephoto shot of the harbour.

We walked down one of the roads to the sea level and had beer in a cafe. We enthusiastically adopted a suggestion to have dinner in one of the hillside restaurants. We took the Concepcíon ascensor to Café Turri.

There were lovely views of the harbour at dusk.

We couldn't get a window table so we settled for one outside. The seafood was expensive but excellent, worth the splurge. M and J conversed in Spanish. I sensed that D was annoyed by this as he didn't understand Spanish.

The evening ended with a bus back to Viña, with J in tow right up to the hotel. He told M he would call in the morning with news about Tierra del Fuego.