Valparaiso or short (Valpo) is just a short 2h bus drive from Santiago and Busses go every 15 min. So we left our hiking stuff behind and traveled lightweight to this colored city by the sea side. The city is quite exceptional distributed over 45 hills that are connected by ancient elevators and rainbow colored stairs.

Going up the stairs never gets boring here.

We were adviced that there are some hills that we certainly don’t want to go to, but actual we didn’t felt threatened at any point. It’s nearly impossible to walk around between the painted houses and not just be amazed by the beautiful pictures that decorate most of the walls. Street art is actual illegal in whole chile, but if the owner of the wall (and even the city itself) gives the permission it is okay to paint in them. So many street artist come here to life and paint. Unfortunately also many other people own spray cans and leave their tags (signs) on our next to the paintings. You can probably walk around in ages and discover new paintings every time (since many artist are still very young they will hopefully continue painting for many years).

You find surely thounds of simple graffities decorating the walls (legal or illegal).

The couple „color distinto“ and their elaborated paintings changed the view on graffities and the face of Valparaiso substantially.

But also many other artist leave their traces over the city, working together they create pieces like this one.

Aside from that Valpo is absolutely a place to enjoy life. On our first night we attended a wine tasting organized by a guy from our hostel were we came to try many different Chilean wines and cheese and chatted with other guest from our hostel, so even the tasting was over we kept on drinking beers on the plaza in front if our hostel listening to the street music until 3 am. This also led to a very late breakfast the next day so all we managed to do was to attend the free walking tour before we ended up on the plaza again eating the Chilean version of a hotdog and drinking beer again.

Trying chliean „Riesling“ …

… chilean simply but very tasty cow cheese …

… and enjoying very nice company.

When we arrived at the Plaza Descanso in front of our hostel it just started to get to life with artisits and musicians, so we got more beer and settled for a few more hours.

Drinking beer in chilean. You get a glass filled with some lemon juice and its rim covered in salt. Then you add the beer and spices as you like. The first sip is weird but it get continously better.

The chilean version of Hotdog comes with huge amounts of fresh tomatos and avocado topped with ketchup and mayonese.

The sandboards are hardly more than a painted wooden board with straps. To wax it (which you have to do every 30 m) you get an old piece of candle.

So we had two choices stop drinking beer or extend our stay. We extended the stay to five nights so we had the time to go sand boarding, taking a boat tour, learn even more about graffiti, and dance to the drum music on our favorite plaza (we stopped dancing at 2 am, unfortunately they kept playing until 8:30 am so there wasn’t much sleeping that night).

We didn’t got a word of what the guide was telling us, but he made sure we were all well prepared for the 30 min ride.

We also met some of the marine locals of Valpo. They didm’t even bothered to turn there heads to us.

Overall Valpo is a really fun but very exhausting place. Absolutly recommendable.

Landing in Santiago promised quite a change from NewZealand. The view from the plan revealed a yellow-brown dry landscape. And yes temperatures finally allowed to retrieve the short thoursers from the bottom of the backpacks again.

Anyway, in a very nice way many things reminded us of Warzaw. The heat, the parks, people on city bikes, the straight forward working underground train, and the funny and informative free walking tours around the city.

Carlos alias Wally guided us around the corners of Santiago, that you probably will miss on your own.

Tio Willy (located in the fish market) made Tom trying his first real Mate, not this sweet Club Mate stuff he is drinking back in Germany.

The tour led through Santiagos cemetry, which is as big as 117 soocer fields so you can easily get lost here.

Finishing the tour with a drink is quite a nice style and after all the talk about earthquakes in Santiago a „Terremoto“ is the obvious choice. Made of Vino pipeño with pineapple ice cream the second glass makes the earth shake in deed.

And then we headed back to Tio Willy to try some of the famous fish. I head soup made from conger eel.

A substantial difference in Santiago from Warzaw however were the huge number of stray dogs. They are just everywhere and some even adopt a lordling, as the one following our guide around the city. Though we never met one being aggressive towards us.

Red following the tour until we reached the Undergound train. He knows he is not allowed there.

Christoball (the mountain with the virgin on top) was quite close to our hostel so we made it up there almost twice. On our second time the top was closed due to the fact that it was close to sunset and people get robbed there when it’s dark. But aside from all the stories you hear we felt pretty save in Santiago. When I lost a 5000 CLP note in the underground train a girl even came after me handing it back.

The virgin on christobal can looking over Santiago.

The view from christobal during sunset unfortunately reminds a little of china. The smog hanging over the city is reaching as high as the surronding mountains.