I only had about 2.5 hours to spend in Valparaíso, Chile so I am wildly unqualified to describe it. But lack of qualifications has never stopped me before so here we go. Besides, this seems like the kind of enigmatic place you could unravel for a lifetime, so I'd probably never be fully qualified anyway.
There's always a desire to describe a place in relation to other places people are familiar. Such as "Seattle reminds me of Boston, but more rainy and with a different type of people." It always reminds of the scene from Altman's The Player. "It's like The Gods Must Be Crazy except the coke bottle is an actress. Right. It's Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman". Valparaíso may be too unique a place to describe in those terms, but again, that won't stop me so here we go. This city is like if you took the narrow, twisty alleyways and bright colors of Venice, and mashed them with the wild, dangerous, artistic, eclectic culture of New Orleans, then draped it over the hills of San Francisco, only steeper.
My gracious hosts Thomas and Sophia had taken a big chunk out of their precious weekend to take me up here. Thomas had a marathon training run in the morning, I had a flight home in the evening. That didn't leave a whole lot of time. Sophia made some calls and found THE restaurant to check out. After a wild (unplanned) driving tour of the various neighborhoods we finally ended up right at Espiritu Santo . We were warmly welcomed by the owner Laura Moreno who quickly and easily identified the gringo. When I told her I was from MA she laughed and revealed that she had lived in Cambridge for 11 years. T&S, of course, had just returned home to Chile after 3.5 years of living in Cambridge so we all had a lot to talk about. She walked us through the menu with specific recommendations to our taste. It was ceviche for me and it was by far the best I had ever had. More importantly, after 2.5 weeks in Chile I finally got a exceptional pisco sour.
There is a definite edge to Valparaíso. Like New Orleans there are sights and smells that aren't welcoming and it's clear that not everything is safe. But like NO that edge also comes with a huge freedom of artistic expression and deviation for the norm. Virtually every vertical surface is covered in color. Whether it's a brightly painted hotel, a commissioned mural, or fantastic graffiti, personal expression is literally splattered all over the city. That edge also brings other wild activities. One of the first times I had heard of 'ValPo' was in this insane video of mountain bike downhill race through the streets http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIe6hYAdw_I. If I hadn't already been blown away by that video, walking the streets and imagining riding them just made my jaw drop. While we were there the Dakar Rally was coming to finish line in downtown. The 5,824-mile route leads from Rosario, Argentina across the Andes and the Atacama desert to Valparaíso on motorcycles, buggies, cars, and ridiculously huge trucks.
That's about 2.5 hours worth of my understanding of Valparaíso. But I can pretty much guarantee that I'll be back. So more next time.
