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Published: January 15th 2015
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Ever since we arrived in South America, from Ecuador to Chile, we have been constantly aware of the fame of Bernardo O’Higgins. This son of an Irish father (who happened to be the Governor of Chile) and a Chilean mother, was born in Chile on 20
th August 1778. He was sent to England for his education, returned to Chile to become a sailor and ended up an Admiral and then, upon independence, the Supreme Director of the country. He is recognised as Chile´s liberator, as well as Peru´s, in the fight for independence from Spain. The name O´Higgins is everywhere, and every city has an Avenida O´Higgins. In our ignorance we knew little of this famous man, so, on Wednesday we spent the morning in the maritime museum in Valparaiso, where a whole salon is dedicated to him. Another focusses on the life of Admiral Cochrane (Scottish) and a whole host of other adventurers from the British Isles, who adopted Chile as their country, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, becoming leaders in the wars of independence. We planned to spend an hour in the museum, however, it was so interesting that we were there for four hours. One salon is
called “Rounding the Horn”. Since we shall be doing just that next week, we are rather glad that we are not in a sailing ship! Cape Horn is often called the “biggest graveyard in the world”. Another salon amused us greatly, it featured famous British pirates, namely, Captain Kidd (Scottish), Mary Read and Anne Bonney (English), Edward Teach a.k.a. “Blackbeard” (English), Henry Morgan (Welsh) and the most notorious of all, Francis Drake (English). The Spanish always refer to Sir Francis Drake as “The Pirate Drake”!
On Tuesday we went to Viña del Mar, which is a pretty ordinary seaside resort that could be almost anywhere. Today we walked to the two Valparaiso town beaches (about five kilometres) and they were pretty disappointing; they look great from a distance, but are filthy dirty and permanent red flags warn people not to swim in the ocean off either of these beaches, due to currents and dangerous obstructions in the water, like rusty metal debris. We saw some sea lions, however, sunbathing on a disused part of a concrete pier, so that made the walk worthwhile. We were surprised to see them, since nowhere in the tourist literature have we
seen their presence mentioned, and they obviously live here permanently. The promenade is a sad affair, just grimy concrete, graffiti and rubbish.
Apart from this, we have done little this week, and enjoyed just chilling out a bit. Tomorrow we shall Hasta chill a bit more and do the packing, ready to leave on Saturday morning. Our ship is due to dock in the early hours, so we are going to set the alarm clock to go down to see it come in. Then we shall be off, heading south towards the Horn and the midnight sun. On cruise ships they always charge a ridiculous amount for Wi-Fi, so folks, if you don´t hear from us for a while, don´t worry, we shall still write the blogs, but we might have to wait a while to publish them. ¡Hasta
!
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