Today brought unexpected adventures. Sometimes those are the best part of traveling. And sometimes they are not.
The day began well enough. Our bed in the Castillo Rojo was comfortable, and when we woke up it was nearly nine o’clock. Those of you who know me well know that I am usually up before five, so this was a late morning indeed. We had a pleasant breakfast on the hotel patio. It is summer here in Chile, and the temperatures in Santiago at this time of year are usually in the eighties. One of the things I liked about the patio were the figures hung from the wires. They danced about merrily in the mistral wind.
We had a better view of the hotel by day.
We walked up towards the San Cristobal Park and the Santiago Zoo, only a few blocks away, as that appeared to be the nearest bank machine. Alas, when we arrived the screen informed us that the machine could not dispense any cash and we like several other visitors to the ATM, wanted it only for that purpose. John’s foot was starting to hurt — after his accident he still cannot walk any significant distance most days — and so we decided to take an Uber to the nearest branch of Banco Santander. Santiago traffic is miserably congested, and I am sure we could have walked those two kilometers much faster. The stop-and-go, really more stop-and-stop, traffic gave me an opportunity to look at the neighborhood from the car window. As we went down Pio Nono Street, I saw the Gym Pio Nono. Catholic humor, I suppose, but the idea of the Pope Pius IX fitness center made me laugh.
We finally figured out the cash machine, but by that time we needed to start packing and check out of the hotel. We decided walking back would be faster. The Mapocho River, a shallow, fast-moving brown stream, runs through the center of Santiago and divides it in two. Like the Los Angeles River, it has been seriously canalized to prevent flooding in the city. But at least the city leaders here had the sense to place parkland on either side of the stream to make it somewhat more appealing.
Back in the room I packed up quickly and John did the same a bit more slowly. I began moving some bags to the car and checked out. But when John came down from the room he was seriously agitated. He said he could not find his phone. I knew that the phone had been in the room since we returned from our walk because his medication alarm had sounded at noon. I called him, but there was no answer. We tried the “Find my iPhone” app and the phone appeared briefly on the map about three blocks away — and then went right offline.
We began to piece together what had happened. John told me that the maid had entered the room when he was on the toilet. Surprised, she quickly retreated but apparently must have left the door open. In the few minutes when he was in the bathroom but the door was slightly ajar, someone must have entered the room and taken the phone. I spent some time on the phone with ATT to make sure that somehow nobody could make calls on it, and we pondered what to do. John needs a phone for many reasons other than the one Alexander Graham Bell envisioned, and he felt that he could not wait until we returned to California in January. The staff at the Castillo Rojo was seriously upset by a theft from their property, perhaps by a member of the staff, and they offered to do anything they could to help us. We asked if there was an Apple store in Santiago, and we were told that there was one in the Costanera Center, the six-story shopping mall attached to the Gran Torre Santiago, Latin America’s tallest building. Eduardo, one of the English-speaking staff members, offered to take us there and be our interpreter.
The prices of new iPhones in Santiago were pretty much the same as the those in California, at least when you adjust for the fact that the VAT tax is already included in the price here and the rapacious California sales tax comes as an unpleasant surprise at the cash register. I decided that John could make do with the XR rather than the higher-end models. At our age, we are fortunate if we can still see the screen much less appreciate the differences between displays that offer resolutions higher than our eyes can possibly distinguish. It was not possible, of course, for him to get his old number attached to his new phone in Chile. So we figured out that we could get him a SIM card here as a temporary measure and reactivate him on ATT when he returned in January.
Eduardo snapped a picture of the two of us, though not in the best light, at the mall.
John was not feeling much happier than he looked at this point. We also stopped by the North Face store. Just about every shop you could think of at the Westfield Century City or South Coast Plaza is in the Costanera Center. Yesterday I made a concerted effort to not mention that in the Bogotá airport I took off my jacket to find my passport and boarding pass and accidentally set it down. Of course, when I remembered what I had done a couple hours later and went to find it, my coat was gone. So skinny John, who is always cold, insisted on buying me a new coat for our days penguin watching in Punta Arenas and Ushuaia next week.
Eduardo drove us back to the hotel. He had thought that he had an extra SIM card in his backpack he could give us, but when we returned he could not find it. He assured us that we could get one nearby for about 2000 pesos. That is about three dollars in case you do not have a currency converter handy. Finding a shop was not quite as easy as he made it sound. We asked a couple people and a charming young woman hawking bicycle tours to English-speaking tourists, pointed us to the Centro de Llamadas. Despite its somewhat grand name, the “Calls Center” looked like a particularly dingy English newsagent’s shop. The proprietor, a fat man in his sixties, seemed to spend most of his time selling candy and loosies, but he did have a few SIM cards behind the counter. He offered us one, and the price was indeed 2000 pesos. He seemed both stunned and annoyed that I had no idea how to insert a SIM card into a phone. I wanted to explain to him that the nation that had actually invented the phone had been held captive by the dark forces of Verizon and ATT for decades and that we had been led to believe that evils far greater than those of Mordor would fall upon us should we ever attempt to change our own SIM cards. But my Spanish was not up to telling him this, so I just appeared stupid. He helped me.
Before we had left on this shopping excursion, Eduardo and Nicolas at the desk of Castillo Rojo had warned us about continuing on to Valparaiso our destination for the evening. Valpo, as Chilenas often call it for short, was in the midst of a bitter strike by port workers who had rioted days before. We were warned of molotov cocktails and burning automobiles. John was set to just forget about going, but I suggested that we call the hotel and ask them about it. We ended up speaking with the hotel’s owner, a New Zealander named Grant. He assured us it was all overblown and the hotel was four kilometers from the port. We decided to go. After all, if you can’t trust a Kiwi, who can you trust? (Or should that be “Whom can you trust?” I can’t quite remember….)
Getting out of Santiago proved to be pretty easy and as we drove along the Costanera Norte we encountered little traffic. In a little over an hour we were coming into the outskirts of Valparaiso. We did spot two vehicles, including one that looked a bit like a tank, sporting the insignia of the Carabineros de Chile, two crossed rifles with the somewhat ominous motto of “Orden y Patria.” But that proved to be the only suggestion of rioting we saw here. I was relieved. John might have been disappointed.
There are many hotels, guest houses, and pensions in Valparaiso, but none are quite like the Winebox. The moment I saw this place on Booking I knew this was where I wanted to stay in Valpo.
The story behind the hotel is pretty simple. Grant Phelps, the New Zealand winemaker who had moved to Chile, saw how shipping crates had been used as emergency housing in Christchurch following the massive earthquake there. He thought, “This could work really well in Valparaiso. It would be a fun and relatively cheap way to build a hotel.” You can check out this video, en español but with English titles, to find out more about the history of the hotel and container architecture.
While building this structure on a hilltop corner affords many stunning views, parking is relegated to a small area in the cellar of the building with the entrance awkwardly located right at the corner. We followed directions and pulled up on the curb while a young woman donned a yellow vest and directed us inside. We carried all of our luggage — John and I both seriously overpacked for this trip — upstairs. The room I picked for us was the most expensive of this otherwise fairly cheap hotel, but the view was worth every bit of the price. Not only was our room made of not one container but two, but it has a deck almost the size of the room itself. And from that deck you can see almost the entire city of Valparaiso spread out over its hills and the Pacific Ocean beyond. And all this for less than the price of a basic room at the Sacramento Hilton!
While I took in the view, John was enchanted by the work of the street artists that Grant hired to decorate the rooms. This picture of Pam Grier dominates our room.
Grant stopped by not long after we had settled in to talk with us for a bit about the hotel, the city, the strike, and life itself. And as we had come into Valparaiso around eight in the evening, by the time we had finished our chat it was after ten. We were both hungry having eaten little since breakfast, and he recommended a nearby restaurant. He called them and they promised to to keep the kitchen open if we arrived by ten thirty. Grant assured us that it was just a short walk.
It was really close to a kilometer, but we had a pleasant stroll. Valparaiso is a much poorer city than Santiago, and yet a far more interesting one artistically. The city covers some forty different hills, and for that reason it reminds many people of San Francisco. But while American builders insisted on imposing a grid upon the hills of San Francisco, the Chileans were content to allow roads to follow the natural contours of the land. For this reason, there is scarcely a single straight road anywhere outside of the downtown and the port areas. Until the Panama Canal opened in 1914, Valparaiso had been one of the most important ports in the world and most of the people who lived here were stevedores. The homes they erected for themselves in the hills were small wooden structures built higgledy-piggledy against each other on small lots. That tradition still lives today. Here homes are constructed out of corrugated iron because it is cheap, not because it is the whim of a prominent Canadian architect.
The residents of this city have a rich tradition of street art and many otherwise utilitarian spots are painted.
This was the entrance to the garage of an otherwise quite uninteresting little house.
Even thought it is summer here, it is still Christmas and the residents love to put up lights.
We were not surprised, when we arrived at the restaurant, a charming place called Verso, to learn that the kitchen had closed. After all, it had almost been ten thirty when Grant was giving us directions! But the staff could not have been more friendly. They were friends of Grant’s and felt bad about turning his guests away. So, while we waited they called just about every restaurant in Valparaiso to see if they could get us in.
But they not only found us a space at a downtown brewpub called the Casa Cervecera Altamira, they even paid for the taxi there! We had two enormous burgers and I had a fine amber ale. Tomorrow, we see more of Valparaiso!
