Chile once more!

I've learned the secret to a smooth, wait-free trip across the Chile-Argentina border. Go in the middle of the night. Not only are there very few cars and busses crossing over, but the customs agents just want to go home, so they wave you through no matter how sketchy you look. My trip over the border in September took 3 hours; the way back was no more than 45 minutes.

My stint in Santiago was meant as a little downtime, chilling with my good friends Claudia and Jessica, before heading back to Canada. We stayed at Claudia's boyfriend Sebastian's house in the middle-class residential neighbourhood of La Florida. Such a change from the traffic-noisy corner of Montevideo and Marcelo T. in Buenos Aires; la Florida was rows of colourful little houses, lush plants and greenery in every tiny shoebox yard, and relative quiet, ( well, except for the barking dog I would say 85% of the homes had lurking in the yard or back alleyway...)

Wednesday I took a day trip to the port city of Valaparaiso, Chile's second-largest city, about an hour and a half from Santiago, on the coast. I'd spent New Year's 2004 there, but it was a quick rush-in, rush-out job, as we were staying down the coast at the beach and only came into the city for the New Year's festivities. I'd wanted to go back and explore it at my own pace ever since.

Valparaiso's the seedy port cousin to Santiago as capital city. It's noisy, dirty, chaotic, dangerous, working class to the core - and utterly charming. The city consists of a series of hills, or cerros, that encircle a harbour. Twisting, narrow streets amongst rows of colourful, ramshackle houses seemingly piled on top of each other spread back from the shore and work their way up the hills. Several hills have funicular-style cable car elevators or asensores that facilitate pedestrian access between the lower town and the hillside neighbourhoods. On any given hillside you find a labyrinthine network of winding streets, deadend alleyways, and small stairways and passageways. It's urban planning at its worst ( or at its most absent) and that's exactly why the city is so amazing.

As soon as you leave the bus terminal in Valpo ( as the city's affectionately known), it gets in your face. People hawking everything from used clothes to meat to jewellery on the sidewalk. I took an old-fashioned streetcar from the bus terminal to the city's main plaza, and from there spent the whole day wandering. Up and down different asensores, from this cerro to that, getting lost in a maze of colorful houses and winding lanes and then figuring out where I was. Spending as much time as I could at every lookout I came across, absorbing the breathtaking views of the Pacific Ocean, and the sprawling, hilly rainbow that is the cityscape.