Valparaiso

Next day we hired a car to drive further afield, heading for the cost town of Valparaiso – the third largest city in Chile and the most important port.  It sounded an interesting town for an overnight stay thought we had no great expectations, as so many port towns can be quite seedy.  We left in bright sun, crossed some hilly and barren country, interspersed with agriculture, including some good vineyards. 



As we moved towards the forest area of the drive, we thought we were running into huge forest fire – turned out to be a huge coastal fog and the temperature plummeted!!

 

The geography of Valpo needs to be explained – as it grew up away from the port area, it sprawled over many steep surrounding bumpy hills, many of which are accessed by small funiculars as well as roads.

It is not a good town to get lost in with only a tourist leaflet and a temperamental iPad map to guide you…..but eventually we found a sweet carabaneri who was happy to point us in the right direction again!  So eventually we found Sutherland House; built in the 1850s as a school for the children of the many English seafaring families who lived there at that time, and renovated and extended a few years ago by a lovely family to run as a hotel. I recommend it thoroughly.  Not that it has a lot of competition!
 

The Musea de Bellas Arts and the Chilean Naval History Museum  are two of the finest of their kind we have ever visited, in beautiful buildings, with fascinating content - the British influence in the Chilean Navy was especially interesting including such characters as Bernardo O’Higgins and Lord Cochrane (the inspiration for Master and Commander) – google them!

Apart from those, I felt I had stumbled into the set of some extraordinary Peter Greenwood meets Quentin Tarantino film set, the town is so vivid, grotesque, tatty, fun, frenetic, scary in parts, filled with larger-than-life heavy-featured characters in bizarre dress– I fear I’m exaggerating…but I’m not! But at some point, the fog lifted and the sun shone and I started feeling a tad less fearful, but it really is a quite, quite surreal town.

 

 

 

 

The next day the fog was back, this time with rain, so we high-tailed north to posher Vina del Mar and the beaches; managed to get really lost trying to find the Botanical Gardens (never did) and then to find the highway back to Santiago (eventually by pure serendipity), however, it did show us parts not many tourists get to!!!! And we found a vineyard for a spot of tasting so all was not lost!!

 

And now here we sit at the airport Holiday Inn gearing up for our 5.50 flight to Patagonia tomorrow,lucky that jet lag works to early mornings still!!