Wanderings: A Travel Journal

I’m not quite sure how to begin an entry on the quirks and unorthodox beauty of Valparaíso, but here goes anyway: it’s somehow fitting that such an unusually shaped country like Chile should contain within it an equally unusually shaped city, and it is the geography of the city more than anything else that defines most of its significant charm and character. Valpo, as it’s known locally, is a coastal port city on the Pacific, but the land at sea level is only a few blocks wide, with forty-two different hills, or cerros, rising steeply from it.

Thus you have the geographic uniqueness of Valparaíso: a flat, narrow commercial centre at the city’s heart, with hilly residential districts climbing up from it in three directions, offering sweeping views of the port and the ocean beyond. And the character and economic division of the city is also thus formed: in the working-class lower city (called ‘Plan’), there’s a rough, gritty charm similar to that of Naples or Palermo, where you don’t have to search too far to find trash strewn everywhere on street corners, homeless people sleeping in the bus station etc, and when we wandered around the port area one morning three different local people came up to us within five minutes to tell us how dangerous it was and that we should be extremely careful. But there’s something about the realness of the city – in the street markets, in the graffiti, in the way you see the locals interacting with each other – that is inherently attractive despite the dirtiness and the stray dogs and everything else.

And then, when you’re on the cerros, the atmosphere is completely different. Here the pace of life is slow and peaceful compared with the bustle of the lower city, the old houses are virtually falling down but still beautiful in their bright colours, a ‘museum’ consists of a series of murals on adjacent streets, and a cemetery of ‘dissidents’ in fact houses tombs of Protestants. If ‘Plan’ is not to everybody’s liking, then the cerros should be. There are endless hours – no, days, or even weeks? – of exploration to do on the cerros, and we must admit that we only scratched the surface, focusing mainly on a handful of them. But every street is a delight to walk on and around every corner, you don’t know if you’ll find a gorgeous purple house, or a street-long mural, or a lookout to the other cerros and below to the city and the bay, or art students with pen and sketchbook in hand drawing their city, or who knows what else – and that’s one of the most exciting things about the city. But even though the cerros are Valpo at its prettiest, they don’t in any way project a Singapore-style artificial version of the city. There are abandoned buildings everywhere, crazy amounts of haphazardly installed power lines on every street, and teenagers drinking on steps and street corners. And, around the same time we were heeding the advice of locals and getting out of the port area, two French tourists we met at our hotel the night before had their camera stolen from out of their very hands while on the Cerro Alegre in a popular tourist area. So while the cerros might represent an idealistic Valparaíso, it’s still Valparaíso, after all.

Between these two cities within a city are the 15 ascensores (usually translated as elevators, but that’s misleading in this case; they’re more like funicular railways), built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to ferry the porteños (citizens of Valparaíso) from port and city centre to their houses on the hills. These creaking ascensores still run today (or at least they do when the operators are not on strike) and form one of the most unusual modes of public transportation within a major city I can ever recall taking; for about US$0.50 you hop onto a small wooden carriage with about 10 others and, after a few groans and rumbles you slowly climb above the city on tracks which can be as steep as 70 degrees. The trip is over as quickly as it began: a minute later, you’re off the carriage and it’s as though you have been transported to another world.

The common thread in both parts of Valpo is the street art and graffiti, which tells you more about Valparaíso’s character and story than any written description could. A couple of my favourite pieces were:

> Two 1970s television sets placed on top of each other on somebody’s front porch, with these words painted on the two screens: Apaga la tele and Vives tu vida (“Turn off the tele, live your life”). Later, in Santiago I saw someone wearing a T-shirt which had on its front a drawing of this exact scene.

> One mural on the side of a house which merely depicted a bunch of pieces of old furniture and other junk piled on top of each other as though it had been left for a council collection – such an uninspiring theme that yet manages to somehow so perfectly describe the character of Valparaíso.

I knew before I arrived that I would like Valparaíso but I didn’t imagine I would like it that much. Among large cities in Latin America (with Rio de Janeiro being the only obvious one I haven’t been to yet), the only one that rivals Valpo for me is Havana, which also offers its fair share of ‘rustic’ charm. Valparaíso doesn’t show itself off, or clean itself up, or promise you anything, but if you have the right mindset it’s really fabulous. Having glorious weather every day we were there helped, and staying one night in the lower city and two nights on Cerro Concepcíon gave us some insight into both sides of the city.

So with some regret, we took a bus yesterday to the Chilean capital Santiago, knowing that it could not come close to matching Valparaíso. Santiago doesn’t have much to offer the tourist – I was pretty convinced during our walk around the main sights this morning that you can experience more in five minutes in Valparaíso than in a whole day in the capital – but it’s certainly a well-developed city with solid infrastructure and a pleasant atmosphere. This normally wouldn’t count for much, but since it’s one of the five cities that Wendy can be posted to for her UN position in the coming months (years?), we have been examining Santiago a little differently than we usually would. The best part so far? It’s only 101km from Valparaíso! (And since my project of taking sepia photos of all the ascensores is only 2/15 complete, I need to return.)

With that, the first part of our Chilean journey comes to an end, and tomorrow we cross back to Argentina.

South America - what a continent! (Please excuse me while I gush like a child for a paragraph.) In many debates over the years with Wendy or other travellers, I have tended to choose Asia as my preferred continent for overland travel (especially if I get to include so-called ‘West Asia’- the Middle East – as part of Asia), given the extraordinary diversity of people, cultures and religions, unmatched by any other continent and, indeed, it would still be unmatched even if you could combine all the other continents together. But what South America lacks in diversity of peoples it more than makes up for in diversity of landscape. And it’s not just that it ticks all the landscape variety boxes – jungles, deserts, beaches, mountains etc – but it seems that everywhere you look on this continent there are natural phenomena that you just don’t see anywhere else: here, pink-purple-and-orange rock hills; there, geysers rising to the surface from rivers running underneath the world’s driest desert; over there, miles and miles of crystal salt flats; now look, dinosaur fossils, etc etc.

And so it has been for us over the past few days. Travelling over the Andes from the magical Quebrada de Humahuaca in Argentina on Thursday, we saw llamas, vicuñas and flamingos from the bus windows and drove past active volcanoes, through blinding white salt plains and alongside bright yellow mountains. We crossed the Chilean border in the afternoon and promptly arrived in hot, dusty and infrastructure-lacking San Pedro de Atacama, a small oasis town in the Atacama desert and an unusual introduction to the most politically stable and economically prosperous country in the Western Hemisphere south of the United States. I didn’t think much of San Pedro, which virtually only exists for tourists, and was a bit cynical at first of joining the hordes in taking minivan tours throughout the surrounding countryside, the type of travel that we normally eschew if possible. But I need not have worried at all – the desertscape was spectacular and the three tours we did (even the one that departed at 4am) were all very worthwhile.

Our first trip was the sunset tour to the Valle de la Luna, which I feared might be like sunrise at Poon Hill in Nepal or Mt. Bromo on Java – nice, but with too many other tourists around to really allow you to enjoy the nature. But fortunately it wasn’t like this at all; the view from the sunset lookout of jagged hills, deep grey sand, and little canyons was truly spectacular, and there weren’t nearly as many people as I thought there would be, and since those who were there were spread out along a ridge, I barely even noticed anyone else. Considering only the views, this was the highlight of the region.

The next morning, we rose at 3:45am for our trip to see a field of geysers two hours drive from San Pedro; the geysers are only active in the early morning when it is still cold. It was, as I hinted at above, pretty extraordinary to see these bubbling geysers and the mist that rose from them in this otherwise completely barren desert. The geysers reach about 85 degrees Celsius, and as such our guide boiled eggs in one of them and heated up chocolate milk to make hot chocolate while we walked around the place. One geyser in particular violently erupts every 10 minutes or so, then completely calms down and stops bubbling entirely – then repeats the process over and over again.

On our final afternoon in San Pedro, we went to the Salar de Atacama, the world’s third-largest salt flats and home to flamingos and other bird life. The salt flats were rockier than both the ones we passed on the bus a few days before and the more famous Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia, but it was still pretty extraordinary to see them stretch out before us at sunset to the foot of the nearby Andes, with a full moon rising behind the mountains. I was a bit disappointed that we weren’t allowed near the biggest concentration of flamingos, but I still managed to get a few good shots anyway.

After three days of happy touring in the northern desert, we hopped on a 24-hour bus and headed south to the centre of the country, where we’ll spend the next few days in the cities of Valparaíso and the capital Santiago.