Valparaiso

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Got to Valparaiso on Friday. It´s a port city about 60 miles from Santiago.
Totally different place from Santiago, much poorer. There are loads of stray dogs and cats, the streets are dirty and there seems to be an unusual amount of funeral parlours knocking about.
Apart from that, it is definitely one of the most uniqué cities we´ve ever been to. It has a really good feel to the place despite it being a bit rough.
The city is perched on some really steep hills that look out over the port and bay. God knows how most of the houses have survived the regular earthquakes that strike Chile. The streets are so steep that people use funiculars to get up and down in places. There are about 15 of them and they are all around 100 years old but still work perfectly despite sounding a bit dodgy.
Almost all the houses on the hills are painted different colours.
The city is best at night, where almost every plaza seems to have some sort of singing, dancing, miming, clowning, kiddy shows, and mad drummers who spin around very fast and have a little kid who does a funky dance. There are markets with loads of cheap fruit and veg and hundreds of people who sell things from sheets laid out on the floor all day.
There are some good bars with live music and we´ve spent a few hours in them drinking the litre bottles of Escudo for about 1 pound 40.

There has been loads to tell about Valparaiso but we don´t really have time at the minute because we need to find a hotel back in Santiago with rooms free tomorrow.
This is definitely one of the best cities we´ve ever been to and it will be hard to match but we´re heading back to Santiago tomorrow and then down south to the Lake District area where we´ll hopefully be climbing a volcano amongst other stuff. Should be good. We´ll upload more photos when we get a faster connection.
Cheers

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Photos

Fruit Market
We fed ourselves for 2 days by spending a couple of quid in this market. Dave cooked of course.

Comments

[mum, pam and sian]

Hiya dave and sarah thank you for your email and pics we have enjoyed reading them and are very jealous, its been snowing here and very cold so we are coming over to see you. My mum has seen the size of the bottles of beer and the lovely fruit so she is definately coming (for the sun). The cat is fine, you will not get any abuse as holly is a sleep oh what a shame. The funicular sounds fun ( but i think i would rather walk) looking forward to more emails and pictures. p.s see you Saturday lol