Advertisement
Published: September 18th 2011
Edit Blog Post
Valparaiso was like they took the good bits of Melbourne, added some excellent street art and stray dogs, took away some hipsters and moody posers in black (leaving enough so there's someone to make the coffee), and stuck it all up and down some steep hills.
From cool cats, camouflaged amongst the graffiti, to trendy students, to randoms carrying an obviously scavenged couch up a steep street, hemmed in by brightly coloured row houses.
Every alley, every stairway offered some more street art, and the art was of consistently high quality. It's the way of street art, graffiti – whatever you want to call it. Places which try to rub it out inevitably end up with shitty tags and ugly scrawls. In places which let it happen, or even encourage it, the art eventually reaches a high standard.
And this is what had happened in Valpo. The town had an appeal which began with its position - stacked up and down hills overlooking what it must be said was rather an unattractive industrial harbour. The eclectic architecture – brightly coloured houses, arresting constructions on hilltops, colonial government buildings painted interesting colours – continued the process. And topping it
all off was the street art.
There were museums and galleries and such, but, really, the city itself was the attraction. The thing to do in Valparaiso was to simply wander the streets, quite literally. It was a place of endless photo opportunities, and at no time did you feel a bit weird taking photos of people's houses and front doors, because everyone else was too.
We arrived in Valparaiso after another overnight bus from San Pedro de Atacama. The less said the better about that, although it didn't suck as much as some. Happily, in a strange way, we hadn't seen Valparaiso before – the last time around we'd been to slack to make the short bus ride from Santiago. I couldn't quite remember why.
Grabbing a cab from the bus station, we headed up into the hills for the first time. We'd once again booked a hostel online – accommodation in Valparaiso was at a premium at that time. To say we'd made the wrong call on the hostel would be a significant understatement. When we could actually find someone, he was stoned out of his scone. After a few minutes of us singing out
a head of tousled black hair poked itself round a corner, the owner of the head peering at us out of deeply bloodshot eyes, all but gone into the back of the skull.
“Pablo, hay alguien.” the head said, there are people.
Yep, and the people were becoming dubious.
Someone else, we assumed Pablo, came out, just as wasted. Apparently he was the actual desk bloke. He directed us to our rooms, which were fairly ordinary. And the water didn't work.
I was prepared to stick it out, being historically loathe to rock the boat, but the others called stumps. Mum and dad went up the street and found us another place. And it was excellent. We said our goodbyes to 'Pablo'. I'm not sure that he had even known we were there.
The place we moved to was streets ahead. A lovely old building, attentive employees, and a truly excellent loungeroom for the sitting in.
We spent the next couple of days pretty much wandering, taking photos, drinking decent coffee, walking up and down calf busting hills. There were certainly some fairly serious hills, and the funiculares saved quite a few stairs for
not a hell of a lot of outlay. Numerous cafes were dotted around the city, high on hilltops, or tucked away down long stairways, and we took advantage of our fair share. For its quirkiness, it was a jeans and t-shirt kind of place, and that suited us just fine. This sort of place would have been hipster heaven, but I think they got stopped at the border.
We hiked our way up to the Dissidents' Cemetery, hoping to find some inspiring left wingers, perhaps an anti-fascist or two. Instead we found it was where the non-Catholics were buried. Disappointed we headed back down the hill to the little
Pasaje Bavestrello – a pedestrian stairwell connecting two hairpin streets. Every surface covered with graffiti, different from every angle. It was a cliché, but truly a photographer's dream.
A brilliant city to visit, where it was the little things rather than museums and cathedrals and stuff (the slippery slide you could take instead of the stairs at certain points; you can guess which one we took). It was a city in Chile we'd not seen before, but would like to see again.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.101s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0722s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb