Santiago and Valparaiso

Hi everybody,

After being in Santiago and Mendoza, i felt it was time to do some weblogging again. From here i'm going back to landscapes again, so this will be a nice (?) intermezzo.

I left Mendoza by bus, and took the same road I already described in the previous post (Puenta de Inca). This time it had been snowing so the whole area around the Aconcagua was white.


The first snow



Aconcagua white now (with reflection in mirror)


At the chilian border things are somewhat different compared to somewhere else. The chilians don't want to have food from other countries, so they scan every piece of bagage that's entering the country as if they were looking for drugs. They also use dogs to look for yummy yummy. To me it looks a little bit silly, but who am I?

So the mess is incredible. Cars, autobuses, trucks. Everybody has to wait there quite a while, and if you see how many people are involved in this important operation, I saw porters, policemen, soldiers, heaps of border officials (someone to direct the way, someone to put a stamp, someone to look you in the eyes) etc.etc. Also the argentians were doing their best to enhance the mess, because it was national truck control day. Combined with the snow, and the closing of the pass, you could see during more then 100 km traffic jams (consisting of trucks) that were standing beside the road, waiting to get further. Consider the money it costs!

Then down to Santiago. The road here is quite spectaculair. When you look into the valley you can see most of the hairpins that you're going to do. It's a steep road and it's some kind of version of going down the Mont Fort. Very spectaculair.



hairpins in chili


Santiago de Chili
I stayed a week in Santiago in a hostel named the Casa Roja. It is a big hostel (more then 80 people can stay there, formerly it was owned by a trader, and he probably had a lot to trade), but i didn't like the place. Too many young people ( i am getting old), and not that that's the problem, but i think it is a little strange that many people at night were only watching helevision (and don't communicate), so you go to a strange country, far far away, and all you can think of is bbc news etc. Sometimes i even think i saw people hiding in cupboards when you were looking into their direction. My god that grey old man wants to say something to me, eaaaccchhhh. They even weren't drinking most of the time!!!!!!!!


In Santiago i decide to take a holiday. I'm tired after three months travelling, and it's time to charge up the batteries. Not doing too much, although I think I have been walking there at least an average of 10 km a day.

Santiago is a city that looks a lot like Buenos Aires. Broad avenues, the Almameda for instance is 100 meter wide and its lanes are divided by green strokes they call a park. Also in the north and around the Plaza Italia they have the parks in between the lanes. There are many palaces and colonial mansions, and in the center modern buildings are mixed with older stuff.



Palacio de la Moneda (the palace where Salvador Allende was bombed out)

Furthermore there are many houses that have nice colors, not the boring colours we use normally in our country.



Nice coloured houses in Santiago



Just another nice plaza in Santiago

The main plaza in the center is the Plaza de Armas (in Chili and Argentinia, they are very fond of plaza de armas). It is a very cosy place. You can see street theater, people praising the lord, people playing chess, painters and beggars. I have been watching several times when they were playing "vluggertjes"! I think the "Verhofstad group" could learn a lot from them.



Plaza de Armas

You can see a lot of beggars in the streets, and sometimes you really feel sad when you watch in what conditon people live. One beggar however didn't follow the rules for begging. Allthough he was quite handicapped (he lost both of his leggs), he didn't look very sad, and what was even WORSE, he was eating ice cream while begging.
A few days later i saw the man again inside the mercado (where they sell delicious gambas) eating some tasty fish, but when i met him 5 minutes later just outside the mercado (probably he was speeding to the Plaza de Armas to get some ice cream) and HE SAW ME- a wealthy tourist- he suddenly looked very sad and asked me for money holding out his hands. I can 't help that my first thought that moment was not very nice, wishing he even had lost THAT hands.



This beggar is cheating!!


Time to do some cultural things too, so to the museum. Unfortunately the musea I saw where not that well, and sometimes my travelguide gives not the wright information. For instance the museum Bellas Artes was very small, some wings were closed, and i wasn't very enthousiastic of the work of Frank Stella. Furthermore they had some lousy paintings by Chilian artists dating back from 1850. (One of the things i don't like and you can say that too of the sculptures in the city, is that Chilians love their heroes, and make the most awful cliché like images of them, it's almost communistic art).

But i saw some nice sculptures. One of it struck me in particular because of the very fine way it was carved. (Or did it remind me of Cristiana and me!?)



Museum de Bellas Artes


One beautiful museum however is the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, this museum is absolutely superb. They have a large collection of objects that were used by the native people in the period before the spanjards & portugese entered South America (and by the way destroyed most of these cultures). It covers Mexico and Chili, and all the countries in between. For everybody who is interested go to their website, that gives a good impression what can be seen there.

I especially found the typical conservation of mummies interesting, although i didn't understand the artefacts (mummies?) that were laying in the vitrines. If they were real, how come they were so small??
Also the pottery (jan-Gert!) is amazing. And i saw many beautiful sculptures. In this link you see a sculpture of a man that wears a skin of a monkey (also the skin is made of stone).

Two other muses I saw were the museo Salvador Allende, and the museo Arlequin. This museum is for children (Oops my guide forget to mention that). Is has reproductions and on a very basic scale it tells something about the way to make a painting. The building itself is very nice. It was built for the world expo of 1898 (?).



Museo Arlequin



Inside Museo Arlequin


One of the funniest things I encountered in Santiago was while crossing a park, that used to be a botanical garden. I saw a somewhat strange church, and when i got there (it was something called with Lourdes in the name), and i turned my back, I saw a replica of the grotto of Lourdes with a maria statue high up in a cave. They even made a wall with taps with running water (i can remember that also from Lourdes, when i was there 35 years ago), which probably also is sacred. The pope has visited this holy place in 1991.



Lourdes in Santiago


Furthermore there are some Cerro's in Santiago. A cerro is a hill, i climbed two of them. They were not very high, but it is strange to see two tiny hills in the middle of a very busy city. The Cerro San Cristobal is the highest. Unfortunately my batteries were low that day so no pictures, but this link gives you an impression of the view you have from here.



View on Cerro San Christobal

The other Cerro the cerro santa Lucia, is very small (only 70 meters high), but it has a nice park and plaza. It has a famous sponsr. Unfortunately the weather that day was not to good, so the famous fog of Santiago was my partner here.



Philips sponsoring the Cerro St Lucia




Cerro St Lucia



Fountain in front of Cerro St Lucia

The first of may (labour day) was probably celebrated with a parade, but i didn't see that one. Only heaps of policemen that were around. Furthermore there was street music and dance and furthermore lots of shops that sold 'antics' and other rubbish.



Labour Day


Santiago was while i was there not a very quiet city. The students were protesting every day, because prices had been raised, and also the goverment was cutting on the budgets for universities (i think i have seen this somewhere else also). So everyday it was fun to see the students running like hell persecuted by excited carabinieri who were glad to use their water canons now and then. It looked impressive and stupid.

In Santiago i met Gerardo Puelles again. I met him earlier in Buenos Aires. Gerardo is also student (Economy) and told me that his parents pay 5000 (!) dollars per year for that (he's brother is studying too). In a country like Chili THAT IS A LOT OF MONEY. Gerardo showed me some of the night life in Chili, en brought me to a new part of town, that has very pleasant bars and restaurants. (In argentina on the other hand universities are free!) Thanks Gerardo!


After one week I went to Valparaiso, where I stay two days in Casa Aventura (guess what people are talking again!). Valparaiso is a beautiful place at the Pacific Ocean. Part of the city is on the world heritage list of Unesco. Although lying next to the sea, only a small strip of land is flat. The rest of Valparaiso is built on (a lot of) hills, and the houses are stuffed in order to let all the people live there. Many houses are lively coloured ( I wished the people in my plaza were seeing this), and in order to go from the lower part of town to the upper part of town, you can take elevators that were built between 1880 and 1910. There are not many very old buidlings in Valparaiso -the city originates from 1540- because fires pirates, storms and earthquakes destroyed most of the old city.



Valparaiso

The Plaza Sotomayor is the most beautiful in Vp, there is a monument conmemorating an heroic epic in Chili's history (the heroes of Iquique, 1879 civil war), and two sailers are standing gard here 24 hours a day, year in year out.



Plaza Sotomayor


On on side of the place there is a nice mixture of old and new architecture. They built the new part on top of the old, and it looks like someone has been playing with his 'blokkendoos' (don't now the english word for this). Very original!



Plaza Sotomayor, modern architecture



In Valparaiso I travel with Lenny Thom, who i have met in the Casa Roja. She is from Australia, but there is more then that. Originally she lived in East Timor, but here parents (and later her whole family) fled to Australia (Darwin), because of the oppression by the Indonesians. She has an autralian and portugese passport, she speaks also three chinese languages, because she was third generation chinese in east timor. And if you hear what her parents had to do to give their children a decent future (three studying in universities), you only can have the deepest respect for them.

We visit the house of Pablo Neruda (one of the two Chilenian poets that recieved the Nobel Price). In the link you can find more about this house and about him. The house gives a splendid view on Vp, the hills and the see. The house also showes what a colourful person Pablo Neruda was, although i didn't like his taste for paintings. Furthermore there is an open air museum with 20 murals (made around 1990).

At the end of the day, we make a little boat trip in the harbour of Valparaiso, and we have a good view over the whole city.



Valparaiso, view from the harbour


Later (jenny left for Buenos Aires) i make a hike to one of the highest Cerro's to have a good view from there too.



Valparaiso view from the cerro.


Next day I go to La Serena. See you there!

Other links
http://www.educarchile.cl/eduteca/todounmundo/13/metro/guia.htm
http://www.mav.cl/foto/patrimonio-foto2/001.htm
http://www.3dphoto.net/stereo/world/latin_america/chile/santiago/cerro_santa_lucia1.html