Valpariso, ChileFebruary 11, 2007
We decided to take a day trip to Valpariso instead of hauling our luggage on the bus and through Valpariso for only one night. We didn’t want to miss is the city all together after reading good things about it in our guide book and feedback from other travelers. Plus, we hadn’t been on a bus for a few days and thought we needed some “bus” time.
We booked our tickets in advance. Good thing since the return trip home was completely sold out even though they had a bus leaving every 10 minutes. We opted for the 8am bus leaving Santiago, and the 6pm bus home. Each way was approximately 2 hours, so we thought this was perfect.
First, I should explain the bus system in Chile is very nice; there are even different classes of service mostly depending on the distance being traveled. Since our trip was short, we were on the Clasico, but the seats were comfy and with plenty of leg room. This felt like pure luxury after the infamous trip to Montenita.
We don’t want bore you with the details on Valpariso. We walked around the entire city by 12:30pm after arriving at 10a, and didn’t see anything too exciting (except for some of the graffiti art). The city is a big port town which also comes with the highest HIV rate in all of Chile. We saw a lot more homeless people here than in Santiago (or San Francisco for that matter). We don’t know if the people were homeless due to HIV, or drugs (the homeless did look “cracked” out), or both—most likely a combination.
The main attraction in the city is the 15 ascensors spread throughout the city. The ascensors, which translates into elevators, were used to bring goods and services from the port up to the people living in the hills surrounding the port. They are now simply a tourist attraction; similar to San Francisco’s cable car. They were built on railroad tracks, a big cable wheel, and a long cable with a car at each end. The big cable wheel rotates so one can go up and the other can go down. The cars are very rickety and, as Marc stated, makes the cable car look like an engineering marvel.
The ascensors might be the highlight for Valpariso, but the highlight for us was seeing our first
familiar face from home. We met up with Kelsey Smith, Elise Tuttle’s roommate at UNR, who is currently studying abroad in Santiago. She happened to be in Valpariso for the day and was able to meet up with us. We were only able to spend a few hours with Kelsey and her friend Gabriel to share a few beers before heading back to Santiago, but it was nice to see she is doing well in her program.The best way to compare Valpariso to something familiar is to compare it to Oakland, CA and the fact that it is always lost in the shadow of the larger city looming near by. In summary, Valpariso is to Santiago what Oakland is to San Francisco without the daily gang shootings (at least we think) and the street art in Valpo is awesome (see above).
