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Published: December 3rd 2011
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I discovered that it wasn´t wasn´t much of a detour to head to Santiago (capital of Chile), and decided take the chance to see another country for a couple of days, before getting a long bus north to Bolivia. The overnight bus from Mendoza was stunning, driving through the Andes under a very clear starry sky. After a delay at the border, where I thought I might be arrested over a ham and cheese sandwich, we arrived in Santiago. I got in a taxi to a hostel with a German girl, a German guy and a Dutch girl. Santiago is beautiful; nestling in the middle of the Andes, you can see mountains in the distance from pretty much anywhere.
I spent the day exploring, managing to walk into the Peruvian quarter with more of an old-school-market style. Starving and needing a wee, I ended up sat in a "restaurant", picking at some soggy chips while sat on a chair with two legs balancing against a wall, in a stinking meat market. I rejoined the others later on, and along with a Brazillian guy and two guys from Guernsey, we headed out to the cinema, booking seats for the only film
in English. With an hour and a half to wait, we ended up in a kareoke bar to endure two terrible versions of Shakira followed by a very grand attempt at opera. The film was possibly the most excrutiatingly bad rom-com I´ve ever seen (and I bloody love excrutiatingly bad rom-coms), that strangely never made it to a cinema near you.
The following night I went out with the Guernsey lads to a "Chilean girl´s Halloween party". She´d invited them after meeting them in Buenos Aires. It turned out that she was a promoter (and a very good flirt), which was the only reason we eventually got let in to the club by the
gringo adverse bouncer. Chilean girating was subtlely different to the Argentinian version. The girls seemed a lot more proactive, dancing into the Guernsey guys and grabbing them occasionally, but I was assured that this wasn´t a patch on Cordoba in Argentina (the student town with a huge shortage of men); male backpacker heaven.
To nurse my hangover, I laboriously uploaded photos to email for the people I´ve promised and failed to do this for on every other trip; prompting a Guernsey guy to suggest
that Travel Blog was a better idea... Later on I got a bus to Valparaiso, a beach town only two hours away. I´d been told by so many people that it can´t be missed, and decided to add another couple of days to my quick Chilean detour. Thinking I´d not be back in Santiago again, I said my goodbyes and jumped in a taxi.
Halloween and All Saints Day is a holiday in Chile, and all of the usual places to stay were booked out. I ended up in a dark, old B&B run by a lovely old couple. The husband showed me to my (own) room free from snorers, and demonstrated how to create hot water by lighting a fire under the boiler, looking at me like I couldn´t be trusted with matches:
"Caliente" (hot)
"Si...."
Valparaiso is simply amazing. If
Secret Garden Party could be a town, this is it. The hills above the beach are covered in houses painted every colour under the sun, and the entire place is graffitied to within an inch of it´s life, but really really well. The steps up to my hostel had been painted like a piano, and the
steps back down had bottle tops glued all over them in patterns. There are too many other detailed examples to recount, but let´s just say it´s brilliant. I bumped into a student protest, university fees being the issue of the moment. They´ve been used to entirely free education, but the new, more right-wing government have introduced fees, which youngsters are very unhappy about. Sounds familiar, if a bit further to the left...
Without company again, I spent a lot of time taking photos and getting heavily absorbed by my book, and decided to leave after a couple of days, taking a chance by grabbing my bag and getting a taxi to the bus station without having booked anything. There was space on the bus, but I had to wait for two hours, so I headed for the nearby park with both of my bags. I usually keep a little bag hidden away in my big backpack, as inside it is a spare credit card, some cash, my passport and documents. As I was about to stow my big backpack out of sight at the bottom of the bus, I moved the little bag to my day-bag (containing my Ipod,
camera, copies of photos on CDs, Lonely Planet, book I´m really into, phrasebook... basically everything useful).
It was a lovely sunny day, everyone was happy to be on holiday, and men played chess and draughts on the concrete boards that are found in many public spaces in Chile. I sat on a park bench, getting out my notebook to scribble down what had happened so far for blogging purposes. After about half an hour, a guy came up to me and started speaking to me in English. I was too occupied to chat, but tried not to be too rude. His tone turned sharp and body language aggresive, as he lurched to my right making me turn around, but not far enough to stop me from noticing a hand coming over my left shoulder into my small bag. An unfamiliar noise reminiscent of a wild animal defending her young came out of me, as he easily grabbed the bag from my flimsy, unprepared left hand and pegged it across the park. By the time I turned back round to see where the other guy was, he´d disappeared. The whole park started screaming, four men chased after the guy, and someone set a dog on him. As the dog succesfully snapped at his legs but failed to stop him, and women came up to comfort me, I realised that I was already crying and wondering what the hell I was going to do minus my passport, money, credit cards, Spanish phrasebook or a person who knew my name.
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