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Published: March 21st 2013
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After a lengthy delay during which Emma and Bob spent all of our free food vouchers on wine and Chris went into student mode, managing to blag a free pizza and plate of nachos, we finally got out of Auckland airport and left New Zealand behind us flying to Chile, our first stop on the final part of our journey around South America.
It turns out that staying in dorms in a rowdy hostel in the centre of Santiago perhaps wasn't the best way to beat jetlag. Aside from the loud music and televisions through most of the evening and night, we were also positioned directly above one of the main plazas and subsequently had to contend with street performers and preachers below our window, all of whom had brought megaphones with them, making for quite a cacophony. Slightly dazed and confused by lack of sleep, we amused ourselves by going on a few wanders around the streets and plazas, eating, drinking and visiting parks, and taking in views of the city at various points along the way.
After a couple of days in Santiago and having established something approximating normal sleep-wake cycles, we caught a bus out to
Valparaiso, a colourful port town on the coast, where we had a lovely few days staying in a hospedaje, a kind of cheap bed and breakfast type lodging within a family home. This one was very cute with a plentiful supply of blankets and fluffy covers on the various bathroom appliances. Valparaiso was great, a rough and ready city with brightly painted houses, lively markets and some atmospheric drinking holes scattered on the steep hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. You can just wander the streets for hours, taking in the beautifully decorated tumbledown houses, or better still, you can intersperse wanderings with use of some of the city's ancient funicular railways which negate you having to climb up huge staircases. The only real disadvantage of this is that given the huge network of stairs and lifts everywhere, maps seem to struggle to represent the whole network and so it does seem to be pot luck where you end up. Valparaiso certainly puts the 'fun' into funicular!
Embracing our inner poets, we ascended one of the hills to visit one of Neruda's houses, now preserved as a museum but containing a lot of Neruda's posessions and some of his poetry.
'Ode to Valparaiso' describes the city beautifully (we've put the first few lines of it at the end of this blog entry).
We had a fun night out stopping for drinks at various bars around the city centre. Most of the bars we ended up in seemed to be caught in some kind of timewarp with ancient cash registers, creaky furniture and antiquated pictures from around the city. In keeping with the theme, they also seemed to be staffed almost exlusively by male octogenarians who, shall we say, maintained a consistently relaxed pace to bar service. The vast majority of the clientele also seemed to be at least twice our age and we wondered if we might have missed the younger, trendier part of town, but possibly had a much more interesting night as a result.
From Valparaiso, we continued our travels on a nightbus heading down south to Chile's Lake District and the city of Valdivia. Staying at another cheap hospedaje, we had a relaxing few days exploring the city and surrounding area. During colonial times, this was one of the southernmost cities that the Spanish had to defend, sited near the coast and at the confluence
of two rivers, there are numerous remains of towers around the city and forts at nearby coastal towns downstream. We subsequently had a fun day trying to understand the local dialect, which seems quite different from Spanish as we remember it, as we travelled around the towns on cramped local buses and in small ferries, visiting the town of Niebla and the fort and tiny chapel on the island of Mancera. Unfortunately the forts were quite badly damaged by an earthquake in 1960, but the remains are still impressive and give a good impression of their size and grandeur.
As well as spanish occupation, Valdivia was also a centre of German colonisation in the 19th century. Alongside various technological expertise, the arriving germans also brought with them a love of beer and chocolate, which remain in the numerous breweries around the town and various cafes serving various types of 'kuchen'. Suffice to say, Emma didn't go hungry; and neither for that matter, did the town's populations of sealions. As marine mammals, they seem to be less fond of cake, but instead, hover around the river next to the local fish market where they get thrown free handouts. While we
were there, one of them managed to break through the market defences and almost raided some of the stalls, having to be herded off by a man with a big broom.
We decided to continue our travels across the border in Argentina and so we caught an early bus from Valdivia and headed towards San Martin de Los Andes for more adventures in South America´s Lake District.
Finishing with a poem... We thought we'd do something different and finish with a poem this blog entry. Here's the first few lines of Neruda's 'Ode to Valparaiso'. For linguists, the original Spanish version is at the end.
VALPARAÍSO,
what an absurdity
you are,
how crazy:
a crazy port.
What a head
of disheveled
hills,
that you never finish
combing.
Never
did you have
time to dress yourself,
and always
you were surprised
by life....
VALPARAÍSO,
qué disparate
eres,
qué loco,
puerto loco,
qué cabeza
con cerros,
desgreñada,
no acabas
de peinarte,
nunca
tuviste
tiempo de vestirte,
siempre
te sorprendió
la vida.....
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