Walking around Valparaiso

I enjoyed an excellent walking tour (called Tours for Tips, a free tour for which people pay a tip of their choice) around Valparaiso – or rather up and down Valparaiso, lead by an enthusiastic local, and then did some more walking myself around this lovely city.

The tour guides were dressed as Wally (as in Where’s Wally?) and our English-speaking Wally was a very enthusiastic local resident. We had a delightful time for a few hours. The snaps below show the first flat street in Valparaiso (once the richest street in Latin America), a park that used to be a prison used by the military dictatorship in the 1970’s and Valparaiso’s oldest church in the original town square. Valparaiso used to be the stopping-off point for ships from Europe, after passing the bottom of South America, en route to the California goldrushes. The line just behind Wally in the photo shows what used to be the edge of the ocean in the city, now a few hundred metres inland. She was an excellent and knowledgable guide to our multinational group and the idea of giving a tip instead of paying a fee is a good one.

The church shown here has been rebuilt no less than five times since the middle of the nineteenth century, such are the problems of earthquakes and fires in this part of the world. I heard some interesting stories too about the dictatorship (as it is called here by most people), which used the old jail as a detention and torture centre. I also heard of the activities of the CIA that had originally supported the coup, mostly because it was replacing Latin America’s first freely elected Marxist government. Of course this reminded me of the earlier US support of El Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden … as well as the invasion of Iraq, which created ISIS as a by-product; international politics is often messier, the closer one looks …

Among our adventures was a bus ride up the hills to a good lookout, followed by a walk downhill. She had warned us that the bus ride was like a roller coaster ride, which turned out to be a remarkably accurate description; everybody was advised to hold on tight at all times, as the bus drivers whizzed up and down hills at breakneck speed, and round corners in a display of driving that would be good training for Formula 1. Miraculously, we all survived.

The pictures show that buses make the fares clear in an assortment of attached stickers. The bus shown above is not the one we took, but is a similar (newer) one whizzing past the corner (cutting the corner – they drive on the right here, at least in theory) near my lodgings and about to tear off down the hill. I took a bus home, and found that the driver went to the same training school, whizzing around corners and lurching from stop to stop. Like everyone else on the bus, I learned to hang on tight. If ever there is a Valparaiso Grand Prix, which would make Monte Carlo look tame, I’d back these guys!

But most of our time we walked, or even strolled, and learned about this lovely city, its history and its present, seeing lots of murals and lots of mosaics as well. It is delightful to be amongst enthusiastic people, and our tour guide did a terrific job of helping us to see and understand the city that she obviously loves. One of (many) murals associated with local nightlife is shown at the top of this blog. Here are a few other murals and mosaics, which can be seen better if you click on them:

Some of the mosaics are large works of art (one I saw took up the wall of a five-story building) and are in fact signed; many are commissioned by owners of the respective walls, and there is a difference between graffiti, murals and tags, as well as considerable respect amongst the artists. The above samples are just that – samples. Here are a couple more samples:

Our guide told us of an extraordinary annual bike ride, which starts very high up on a hill, and goes down steps, alleys, streets, all at a death-defying breakneck speed, ending up down on the flat. It’s a huge day, apparently and unsurprisingly. The first picture below shows the start (at the top of the steps next to the green belt in the middle of the picture) while the second shows the end: the riders come through the right-hand window (which has been removed for the purpose!) and their time stops when they hit the street below! The best time is around two and half minutes!

That would be worth seeing, but it is not happening whilst I am here, unfortunately.

After my tour, I had lunch in a lovely café, dedicated to poets. There’s something wonderful about such an idea, and especially in Chile where two of its poets (Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral) have won Nobel Prizes for literature.

Inside the café, one table was taken up by models of two of the poets (Neruda and Vicente Huidobro) apparently having a literary lunch together; I did not realise until I had been there a while that they were in fact models, and not people. I had already decided that I would visit Neruda’s Valparaiso house while I was here, and so set off after lunch to do so, hoping to use an ascensor to get started on the trip up the hill.

Alas! The ascensor was being repaired (like several others around town), so I decided to walk up instead. While this was certainly more strenuous than the ascension would have been, it allowed me to see a few more murals on the way, including the lovely corner mural of Gabriela Mistral, and a very clever set of painted steps – among many others.

Here are a few of the others, including one in which the mural had spilled over onto the pavement, as you can see.

The (long!) trip uphill was worth the effort, as I enjoyed exploring Neruda’s house very much. he was very fond of Valparaiso, it seemed, and loved the views from his five-story house (with just one room on each level) over the city below:

As you can see, the view from the lounge room and from the bedroom sweep over the city below, so I am not surprised that he enjoyed it so much. In fact, although La Sebastiana (the name of the house) has views from high over the city, the city of Valparaiso goes a long way further up the hills behind the house as well. There are apparently 47 hills in Valparaiso, so I have only just scratched the surface so far.

It was a lot easier coming down the hill, and I noticed that people generally walk down and don’t generally walk up – funny, that! I also saw some interesting sights coming down as well, including the house of someone who seems to collect hub caps with obvious enthusiasm. Try as I might, I could not reconcile the angles of the white house, as something seemed to be vertically challenged, maybe a result of the most recent earthquake? And everywhere, there are lots of vibrant colours, almost as if it is illegal to paint your house in some bland pastel. I was impressed also with the garage door mural I passed on my way down the hill.

We also rode on a trolley bus during our tour; this was a great deal less exciting than the bus trip – a lot slower, smoother and more horizontal! Apparently, the trolley buses here are amongst the oldest in the world, although this one was relatively new, probably no more than fifty years old. The church shown here is, unusually, not a Catholic church, but I think was Presbyterian. There were lots of colourful fruit and vegetable stalls around on the flat part of town.

It was a lovely day out, and I was pleased to get back alive to my abode in the hills. These couple of snaps give an idea of those hills, both taken within a block or two of where I am staying. Good training ground for bus drivers …