It has come to my attention that I never did the Valparaiso post to cap off the Argentina trip from December 2011. This needs to be fixed and tonight is the night to do it.
As you saw at the end of the Mendoza post, we took quite some time to take the bus from Mendoza to Valparaiso, Chile. Why Valparaiso, you might ask? Well that's a good question. This trip was a bit more improvised than the normal Tobin trip. Over the years, Paty and I have adopted a much more laissez faire attitude towards traveling. We only had plans for Buenos Aires and Mendoza on this trip with most of the middle week open. We were deciding between Iquazu Falls and Chile. But logistically it is pretty hard to get around Argentina outside of the buses. So from Mendoza, Chile made sense.
Our original thought was to go to Santiago, but while talking to people in Mendoza familiar with Chile the consensus was that Santiago is nice but mostly just a capital city, while Valparaiso has more character and is a great spot to spend four nights. That led us to this view from our bed and breakfast room:
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| The view from our B&B room. |
Valparaiso is an old city, it is currently the third largest metropolitan area in Chile (Valparaiso/Vina del Mar combined). It is also a really old city. Valparaiso is the original maritime capital of Chile. It was the first financial capital of South America with the first stock exchange and a major stopover for ships traveling from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean or the Atlantic to the Pacific. The picture shows a little bit of it, but the photo does not do justice to how much the city is built on a hillside. The city itself is built into 23 different and distinct hills that all origniate from the sea. There is a 3-8 block flat (filled tidelands) area that a major portion of the commercial part of the city is built on. Then all the hotels, many of the bars/restaurants and all the neighborhoods on built up into the hills. And the hills are steep. A major part of the construction of the city is the funnicular system. Here is one of the more famous funniculars, covering 108 vertical meters.
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| Funicular. |
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| One goes up, the other goes down. Always two cars on a funicular line. |
Day one, courtesy of trip advisor research again, we did this:
Cooking in Chile
It was an absolute blast. Paty got a uniform and everything:
As part of the class, we met early and discussed the menu. Then we went down into the city and shopped for the ingredients.
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| Yes, we picked fish. Caught in the morning. Everything was fresh. |
Editor's Note: I just noticed that I never published this. I will at some point get around to finishing this post but for now I'm going to hit Publish with what I have. We REALLY like Valparaiso and the entire Chile experience. Feel free to hit me up with any questions about the area.
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