Eating a poor mans dish

Friday 4th April

Today I was relocating to Valparaiso for the weekend. It sounds like a nice thing, relocate to the seaside for the weekend, but time will tell whether this is a good idea or not.

As it doesn´t take long to get there, I decided to do another Santiago sight before I went. So off I went to Santa Lucia, another park on a hill in the centre of Santiago. Its a bit like having Stephens Green where the centre of the green is 100 metres above the rest of the streets. Its not as high as the other one, and doesn´t have a train to the top, altough there is a lift part way. But I decided to do all the stairs.

Before I got to the park entrance I was approached by some local scam artists. Its the usual patter now, how long are you here (how gullible are you?), where are you from, and then the link is formed. In this case by an amazing coincidence the guys father had been in Ireland for 21 years as an exile from Pinochet. While there were some if I thought I actually met one I´d be buying lotto tickets.

Anyway him, and his mate who turned up, making me a bit nervous, wanted to know about how expensive our education system was, as theirs is very dear they claimed (and in fact their scam was supposedly to raise funds for education), and also what we thought of Pinochet in Ireland. I wasn´t getting into any political discussions about dictators (altough I could have compared Bertie to Pinochet like I did in Thailand) so I moved the conversation onto some tourist advice, and then, and I must be getting weak, gave them a couple of dollars.

After that it was up the hill, once I had signed in. They make everyone sign in, and give their ID or passport numbers. No idea why. The hill itself is a strange place, part fort, part church, and part romantic hangout for all the young folk in Santiago. The Lonely Planet warned you would be stepping around courting couples and they weren´t joking. The views from the top were quite poor, I think the smog was worse today than the other day. Its not too bad at ground level, but it is when you want to look at distant things. The Andes were almost invisible today.

After that it was off to the bus station to get the bus to Valparaiso. They run every 15 minutes so its not difficult to get one. However you do need to get to the right terminal. For some reason I took down the wrong terminal address so went to a different one first. Luckily they aren´t too far apart, so it only cost me about 40 minutes, and a dollar for the extra metro trip.

The trip to Valpo was fairly straight forward, it is only 80k away and connected by motorway so the bus flew along at 100k. We know this because there is an in cabin speedometer, I guess to stop the drivers from going too fast, and the passengers from complaining he isn´t going fast enough. The buses were very modern and comfortable, and unlike in SE Asia, we didn´t wait to fill up, we left on time half empty.

Once in Valpo I got a taxi to the hotel. Which was just as well because it was up a very steep hill. There is no way I´d want to walk it with my pack on my back (it was hard enough later with only my daypack and a bottle of water). Interestingly the 4.2 k taxi journey cost more at $10 than the bus journey, which was only $7. I´m not 100% sure if it was the shortest route the driver could have taken.

That evening I went for a walk around the town. Its more like what I was expecting from a South American city, more life to it, but that may just be an unusual feature of Santiago centre. I found a place for a very goos local sepciality meal, a pobre (poor mans) dish. Which actually sounds a lot more special than it is, all pobre means is that you get a big pile of chips and two fried eggs with your meat. But it was still very nice, and provided the energy required for the big climb back to the hotel.