Eastern Valparaíso

After loving Valparaíso on Day 4, I was ready for more on Day 5.  More color.  More vibrancy.  More sea.  More sun.  And that’s what I got.  Plus a visit to a really cool house with views over the city.

On Day 4, I got around the city on food and by ascensor.  On Day 5, I got around a lot by local bus.  They really made me laugh.  I mentioned previously that I arrived in Valparaíso via Viña del Mar because I had heard that the main bus station in Valparaíso was dangerous.  It turns out that arriving in Viña del Mar and then taking the metro to my hotel was the right thing to do.  Not because the Valparaíso bus station was dangerous, but because the Valparaíso buses are so hilariously cramped.  They look like converted school buses.  There’s very little room between you and the seat in front of you.  There’s no way I would have had room for myself and my bags on the bus.  I traveled smart without even knowing why ahead of time!

More of Scenic Valparaíso

It should be easy by now to see why I loved walking around Valparaíso.

La Sebastiana

La Sebastiana is a house museum in what was 1 of the 3 homes of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.  (The other 2 houses are also museums.)  Pablo was a Nobel laureate.  He was also a senator and an ambassador.  Quite the Renacimiento man.

La Sebastiana was originally begun by builder Sebastián Collado Mauri.  He died before it was finished.  It was sold to Pablo Neruda in 1959 and completed in 1961.  Pablo named the house after the original owner.

To get to La Sebastiana, I took a bus to the hilltop neighborhood where the museum (as well as the colorful houses in the picture above) is located.

Pablo died shortly after Pinochet’s coup in 1973.  His widow then abandoned the house for the rest of her life.  The house remained empty until 1991, after the end of Pinochet’s regime.  It was then restored and made into a museum.

Museo a Cielo Abierto

After touring La Sebastiana, I walked partway downhill to Valparaíso’s Museo a Cielo Abierto (“Museum of the Open Sky”).  The Museo is a concentration of street art created in 1992.  It had its conception before Pinochet’s coup, but didn’t come into fruition until after his reign was over.

City Center Plazas

I eventually walked all the way downhill to the busy city center that Pablo Neruda preferred to avoid.

Although Santiago is the capital of Chile, Chile’s congress is located in Valparaíso.  It is the oldest congress in Latin America.

Valparaíso’s main bus station is across from the congress building.  This is the station I intentionally didn’t arrive at because I had heard how dangerous it was.  I decided to stop by and sit down for a while.  I kept my wits about me and didn’t feel in danger.  Someone on Facebook commented that she met a woman whose cell phone was snatched out of her hand at the station.  She subsequently commented that the woman admitted she let her guard down when she pulled out her phone to get an Uber.  Lesson learned:  don’t let your guard down.

Iglesia de San Francisco

To get to the church, I took a bus up a steep hill.  The bus was jampacked.  When the bus got to my stop, it took me a long time to make my way from my seat to the door.  The driver was already starting to pull away.  I let him know I needed to get off.  I was holding on to a rail while he stopped and open the door.  People tried to warn me, but it was too late.  The door hit my hand when it opened.  I could see by bright yellow warning tape that you weren’t supposed to hold on there, but there was nowhere else for me to hold on.  I went flying backwards on the bus.  Silly American tourist.  It was the 1st, but not the last time I wiped out on a bus on this trip.

Playa Caleta Portales

My last sightseeing stop in Valparaíso was Playa Caleta Portales, a lovely beach on the eastern edge of the city, just west of the border with Viña del Mar.  It was here that I stepped in the Pacific Ocean, to officially begin my coast-to-coast trek across South America.

I also got a somewhat disappointing lunch at a restaurant at the beach.  It wasn’t the last disappointing meal I had that day.

Not a Great Journey Back to Santiago

And then the worst part of my entire trip began.  (Well, good to get it over with 5 days into an 18-day journey, I guess.)

In the morning, while I was packing my bags, I couldn’t find my return bus ticket to Santiago.  I figured it would turn up.  But it didn’t.  So, after my sightseeing for the day was over, I took the metro back from the beach to my hotel, picked up my bags, then got back on the metro to head to Viña de Mar.  From the metro stop there, I walked to the bus station.  I needed to buy a new bus ticket back to Santiago.  As it turned out, the next bus I could get a ticket for wasn’t leaving for several hours.  So I had to wait around till then.  (I thought about it afterwards that I could have tried to convince the ticket seller that there would be an empty seat on my original bus, and I’d just pay for that again.  But with the language difficulties, that never would have worked.)  There was a mall across from the bus station that had spotty WiFi, so I loitered there for a while.  On Google Maps, I saw that most of the nearby restaurants were closed because it was Sunday.  I did find 1 restaurant within walking distance that was open.  I had the worst meal of my trip there.

Well, it was finally time for my late bus back to Santiago.  I started to panic because I realized the Santiago metro might be closed by the time I arrived.  What would I do?  (In the meantime, a safety video was playing nonstop on the bus featuring a guy who was clearly supposed to be a spoof of Bruce Willis.)  When the bus got back to Santiago, I got off the bus at my stop–the same stop where I had gotten off when I had arrived from the airport and the same stop I had boarded the bus to Valparaíso a couple days earlier.  But that didn’t work out so well.  I went to retrieve my bag.  But the driver said bags were only unloaded at the next stop.  So, I had no choice but to get back on the bus.

Well, thank God I got back on the bus.  When I returned to my seat, I saw that I had left my baseball cap tucked into the pocket on the seatback in front of me.  I had brought it on the trip to try keep a low profile.  (The whole fear-of-crime thing.)  And of course it kept the sun off my bald held.  But it was also my favorite hat.  I was relieved I hadn’t lost it.  But I was also totally mad at myself for leaving it on the bus at all.

So, arriving at the main station.  Sure enough, the metro had stopped running for the night.  I saw a sign for taxis.  I followed in the direction that the sign was pointed.  The passageway turned at a corner.  Then it came to a barricade.  Some people were jumping over the barricade.  I wasn’t going to do that, especially with my bags.

I figured there had to be a main entrance to the bus station.  I found that quickly enough.  Then it appeared I may have to fight the crowd standing there for the rare cab that went by.  1 guy darted out into the street to catch a cab that was going by.  I was starting to wonder if there were any hotels nearby where I could stay if it looked like I was never going to get to the hotel where I had a reservation.  Suddenly I saw a taxi down the block.  Before long, he approached the entrance.  I waved him down frantically.  To my complete amazement, I was able to get into the cab.  I felt like the driver was an angel sent from heaven!  He drove me across Santiago to my hotel.  I did have to help him find the hotel a bit when we got to the street.  But the night was saved.  I’ll be forever grateful for that taxi driver.

[Factual information is primarily gathered from Wikipedia, so you know it must be true.]