After the mishaps of the past two days, today was … nearly perfect.
We had a leisurely morning. I did some work on my photographs and some final edits to my blog and John managed to get a bit more sleep than I did. I noticed this on the front of the refrigerator. I am not sure how I missed it last night.
We had breakfast on the patio a little before ten. The food was mediocre, but the view from the balcony was perfect. As I ate, I observed the other guests gathered for breakfast, most of them in the twenties or thirties. I remember how when I was their age I sometimes came across people in their sixties who were staying in the same kind of places as I was and how I thought then how interesting it was that those older persons were still trying to to travel and stay active. And I then thought, I am one of those old people now. How did this happen so quickly? Sigh.
Our big event of the day was a walking tour of Valparaiso at three o’clock in the afternoon. We thought about taking an Uber down to the Plaza Sotomayor where the tour was to begin, but we had some time and decided to do some exploring on foot. Valparaiso, as I mentioned yesterday, is built on about 40 hills. I say “about" because Porteños, as the residents of this city style themselves, cannot actually agree on the exact number. What they can agree on, as can all visitors, is that these hills are miserably steep. Before the advent of the car, there were 28 funicular railways that helped carry people and things up the slopes. But not everybody could afford to pay, so there are also a series of stairways up and down each of the hillside neighborhoods. The Winebox Hotel is located in the Teniente Pinto neighborhood and so we walked down the Escalera Teniente Pinto.
Teniente Pinto, by the way, refers to a certain Lieutenant Ignacio Carrera Pinto whose face also graces the 1000 peso note. He showed a great deal of bravery in the war against the Bolivians and the Peruvians in the nineteenth century, but he died in battle. The Chileans seem oddly adverse to honoring heroes who actually survived the Pacific War.
John survived the staircase, but just barely.
Walking down stairs is part of his physical therapy, but neither of us realized we when started down that there were at least 300 steps here. Despite that, there were definitely interesting things to see along the way. When I saw this garden built out of old plastic bottles, I thought, “Hmm. Easy instant science project with the appearance of caring about the environment thrown in for good measure."
There are telephone and electrical wires just everywhere in Valparaiso. I do not much care for them in Los Angeles, but here the profusion here almost becomes art.
There was, of course, a also good deal of street art along the stairs, and some of that was quite good indeed.
By the time we reached the bottom, John’s right foot was throbbing and the first stop we made was at a pharmacy. Traveling in Spanish-speaking countries I have learned that if I usually take the English word for a drug and just switch the vowels to Spanish — make the i into a long e, for example, or the e into an a — I usually have the name of the medicine in Spanish. But my efforts to do that with “acetaminophen” only created confusion. Lots of mime and the use of Google Translate finally resulted in some tablets that had the desired effect, whatever they may have contained.
We were still about a kilometer from the Plaza Sotomayor and John was not up to walking it. So we requested an Uber and were there just in time for the beginning of the tour. Central Valparaiso is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a designation that is all too frequently conferred. The area is somewhat historic, yes, interesting, definitely, but is it really an essential part of the patrimony of the entire human race? it would be a stretch to put it in the same category as Renaissance Florence or the Great Wall of China. But I digress…. The tour was sponsored by an outfit called Tours for Tips. The idea is that you pay the guide what you think it was worth. The guides all wear red-and-white striped shirts with the name “Wally” written on them. We were greeted by one Wally who signed us up and seemed very excited to meet people from Los Angeles. He had once spent two weeks living in Lomita and getting around the city on Metro buses and somehow seemed to have a genuinely warm memory of that experience.
Our actual tour was led by another Wally whose real name was Sergio. He was evidently a teacher of some kind, but here in the Southern Hemisphere summer vacation is just beginning. His English was not bad at all, though he occasionally struggled for a more technical term. We started off right on the quay with a view of the port.
He gave us a quick history of Valparaiso. The area was home to a small group of native people until the Spanish arrived in the middle of the sixteenth century. During the colonial period there was a small port here, but given the Crown’s prohibition on trade with other nations, it was hardly an important place. After independence, and particularly once Santiago was named the capital of the new country, Valparaiso began to grow more prominent. But it was really the California Gold Rush that propelled Valparaiso into one of the nineteenth century’s most important cities. In 1849, thousands and thousands of Argonauts headed to or from the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas stopped here to pick up provisions. And even after the Gold Rush, trade among the United States, Europe, and the different countries of Asia all still seemed to require a ship to stop at Valparaiso before or after making the dangerous journey around Cape Horn. Valparaiso was also an entrepôt or free port, that is, goods could be traded here without the imposition of tariffs or duties. All of this made Valparaiso one of the most prosperous cities in South America.
But disaster struck in 1906. Only a few short months after an earthquake destroyed San Francisco, another temblor leveled Valparaiso. As it had in San Francisco, fire almost immediately broke out and destroyed much of the wooden city. But Valparaiso had an even fate than San Francisco as the earthquake here was also accompanied by a tsunami. The triple disasters of earthquake, fire, and flood left little standing in the great port city. Porteños vowed, as San Franciscans also had, to rebuilt their city bigger and better than before. But the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 completely eliminated the need to take ships all the way around South America, and almost overnight ships stopped appearing in its harbor. So Valparaiso did rebuild, but a smaller and far poorer town replaced the once great port city.
Oddly enough, the the military coup of 1973 gave a boost to the city’s fortunes. Valparaiso was dominated by its labor unions and was a center of support for the communist Allende government. But as a port city it was also the home of the Chilean navy and naval officers were central to the plot to take overthrow the government. The navy moved into the old blue municipal palace that dominates Plaza Sotomayor, and today it still remains the headquarters of the Chilean Navy.
Determined to weaken opposition, the military regime also moved the national legislature and some of the key departments of government from Santiago to Valparaiso, in effect making the old port a second capital city. So much of Valparaiso’s renewed prosperity is due to the man whom Porteños then and now utterly loathed. History is nothing if not ironic.
Sergio walked us all around the historic neighborhood of Cerro Concepcion with its colorful houses.
He explained that houses in Valparaiso have been covered in metal shingles and siding for years because the weather is so miserable most of the time and it causes concrete to deteriorate quickly. Plus, ships from the nineteenth century to today left huge amounts of scrap metal behind. So Porteños started cutting this into strips and squares and putting it on the sides of the houses. Paint, of course, was required to keep the metal from rusting. Sergio did not offer any explanation for while so many different colors are used on the same street. I suspect that in minimally literate cultures color is any easy marker to help people locate places. But that is just my guess.
We went up one of the eight remaining funiculars, the "ascensor reina victoria,” named in honor of the British Queen who had just recently died when this funicular was constructed. It starts its ascent in the area right by the brewery where we had dinner last night.
It works exactly like Angels’ Flight does in Los Angeles. There are two cars and the weight of the one going down pulls the other going up.
The process still requires the operation of a conductor and an operator.
At the top we waited until all the members of the group had arrived — the funicular only carried 8 people at a time — and Sergio told us a little more about the history of the area.
You can see him there in his “Where’s Wally?” shirt. Sergio explained that this area had originally been settled by the English and the Germans and it became home to a large Protestant community. The Lutheran parish, perhaps Valparaiso’s loveliest church, is visible from all around.
But it was not the first Protestant church here. That distinction belonged to the Anglicans. When members of the Church of England first wanted to establish a parish in Valparaiso, only Roman Catholic worship was legally permitted in the country. But the local authorities gave the English permission to build a church as long as it had no steeple or cross on it. And Saint Paul’s Church, now raised to cathedral status, still does not have either.
Of course, in time the Anglicans and Lutherans departed this life for the next, and the Protestants next petitioned the government for a cemetery as they could not be buried in consecrated Catholic soil. The government agreed to this request and the "Cementerio Disidentes," the "Cemetery of the Dissidents," was established. But the Protestants took death as just another way to demonstrate their preeminence in the community: they picked one of the most visible sites in Valparaiso.
As interesting as all this was, John was starting to get seriously tired and his foot was throbbing.
So we had to slip away from the tour before it was over. I still feel bad about this because I never had the chance to give Sergio the tip he so richly deserved. So, Sergio, in the unlikely event you read this, email me and I will send you 20,000 pesos! You were a great Wally.
We took Uber back to the Winebox. Usually I have had great experiences with these local drivers, but Rafael did not seem to know the city that well and GPS was sending him the wrong way on one way streets. Thankfully, we made it.
Back at the hotel John took a long nap and he felt much better. In the evening. we went up to the rooftop of the hotel where there was a bar. Grant was leading a wine tasting with a couple from Argentina.
We had a great dinner at Verso, the restaurant which could not accommodate us last night. They recognized us, and gave us a couple free drinks. John’s, of course, was a mocktail. Returning for our last night at the Winebox we admired our room reflected city lights.
Tomorrow we are off to San Antonio where we start our cruise.
