The trip from Santiago to Valparaíso was splendid. The seats in the bus were massively comfortable and being, as I was, on the top deck, I should have been able to see the countryside very well. As it was, the pelting rain outside and the condensation inside made the scenery seem somewhat impressionistic.

Here’s Eduardo, the Airbnb guy…

who met me at the bus station, and together we got a ‘colectivo’ up the hills to where he lives. A colectivo is a shared taxi which plies a particular route (artfully named on the windscreen) and costs around 60 cents each for the trip. It was much quicker and easier than walking…but more of that later.

The area is pretty downtrodden and random…

And there are lots of dogs, some enclosed, others not, so the chance of being barked at is rather great, and the chance of walking in droppings is even greater. The paths and steps are pretty uneven, so keeping your eyes on the ground is doubly important.

Eduardo’s apartment has splendid views over the harbour…

…over the container terminal. At night it is excellent.

His place is modern and new, created inside a shell designed to fit in with the prevailing look of desuetude. It’s quite a contrast to the Star Waredness of Nestor’s.

He works in hospital administration, and is very attentive. We have had a lot of good conversations in English and Spanish.

I went the the Maritime Museum, which is housed in a stately building which used to be the naval training place. The exhibits were interesting, some in translation, but the highlight was a non-naval performance put on by a dance school, I suspect. I had had a long chat with one of the blokes of the museum, and he alerted me to the impending show. I had met up with this guy when he was acting as a greeter at the front door, and after a few minutes of chat, he suggested that even though foreigners (he could have said ‘gringos’, but was too polite) normally paid twice as much as locals, I could go in as a local; which I did.

The performance was based around the national Chilean dance, the cueca, pronounced like quaker, which imitates the courting behaviour of a rooster and a hen. I suppose you could call it the South American equivalent of the Chicken Dance! The most skilled performers may have been the teachers…

The students did a dazzle and splash number as a finale.

Hmm…they seemed to be having fun.

The walk down into the city doesn’t take all that long, maybe 20 minutes…in contrast to the way back. The roads are very steep getting down to the coastal plain where the centre of town and the port are. The roads are also quite narrow, a car-and-a-bit wide in places, so when the taxis come hurtling down it’s advisable to flatten against the wall and hold your gut in.

There’s a quaint juxtaposition in one section…where

meaning ‘suggested speed’, cheerfully ignored it seems, followed 5m later by…

No wonder they are confused. Maybe they are doing 30kph…it just seems faster when you are pinned onto the wall, facing death by taxi.

On the first day, walking back from downtown, and so pleased that I had done so much training on the seven flights of stairs at Nestor’s, I found myself lost in the labyrinth of little streets and stairs around the apartment. I circled around (and it didn’t help that the official address of the block of units isn’t the street where Eduardo’s front door is, and I had forgotten his real street, and Google maps was a bit equivocal about the whole area), but couldn’t find the door.

While I was standing on a street corner, orienting the phone, looking desperate, a buxom woman of a certain age stopped and asked, in Spanish, if I was ok. She helped away, suggesting possibilities, rang an English speaking friend, to whom I spoke, and he suggested…and then, seemingly by accident, there was the door! (shades of the Magic Faraway Tree). So there was much laughing and congratulating, and then hugs and kisses! In some restaurants there are similar women waitressing, who are brimming with confidence and personality, and where the paucity of a common language is no barrier to communication. Not a lot of kissing in the restaurants, but some affectionate shoulder stroking is common.

On Saturday I went by metro to the nearby resort town of Viña del Mar. It is on the coast, there is a beach of sorts…

and they have a whopper music festival in the summer.

The highlight of my time on he beach was a group of dancers doing some typical north Chilean dances. There was so much energy and in-your-facedness, and the costumes…well, what can I say?

The band playing in the next clip is a bit approximate in the brass section, but the young guy playing the side drum is excellent.

There are frequent earthquakes here, and Eduardo’s apartment has heavy steel beams and posts to deal with them. Much of the city was flattened in the quakes of 1986 and 2010 and regularly before that, which were over 9 on the Richter scale, and generated huge tsunamis that went right across the pacific. There are many big buildings in the city that had their innards destroyed, but the facades remain. I guess there were plans to create new innards, but they haven’t gone anywhere, so all that survives is are sad, graffiti ridden blots…

Much of the town looks sad like this. The Plaza Sotomayor, in the centre could be a splendid square with fountains and trees and lawns, but instead is a cobbled car park, with a nice view to the sea and the container terminal.

A couple more days here, today is Sunday, then back to Santiago on Wednesday.

That’s it for now,

Hasta pronto,

T