Valparaiso and Vina del Mar ..or, the beautiful Chilean coast!

The bus ride to Valparaiso was quite short, under 2 hours and I got there early afternoon. After a little bargaining session in the hostel I got a room, left my things and set off on a discovery walk through the town.

Valparaiso turned out to be a very nice and colorful town with a strong bohemian spirit and made a lot better first impression on me than Santiago, which is a fairly modern town but without much of any character or anything too exciting. I was walking around Valparaiso all afternoon long, starting at the old merchant pier, through one of main streets, and ending in the old part of town, full of old mechanical escalators taking you up the hills and higher sections of Valparaiso. I really enjoyed the views of the port and the bay around which the town was built. It serves as the parking lot for the freighters waiting for their turn to be reloaded in this busy Chilean port. The walls of the old town also displayed interesting colors and murals. It was a pure pleasure walking through Valparaiso.

That night in my hostel, being rescued from between the hostel doors, very smartly locked for the night, I’ve met a couple of travelers from Korea/NYC and Switzerland and decided to join them for a tour of Vina del Mar the next day, since it was really close to Valparaiso, only 8 km.

So, the next morning we started looking for a minibus, which wasn’t so easy since there were hundreds of them going the same way and each one had few different numbers on them along with general destinations marked in abbreviations. I promise you, for a tourist it’s all “quite” confusing. Asking the driver turned out to be the only sure way of verifying where we were headed.

The ride to Vina lasted only 10 min, and here we had another beautiful coastal town, not as much bohemian, but very pleasant visually and seemingly nice to live. We walked around for few hours, checked out the famed flower clock, nearby park and the coastal highway. Finally, we met up with one of couch-surfing hosts of Vina del Mar, which we all met through another friend ..what a networkJ.
I left Vina del Mar the same night, came back to my hotel, and the next morning went back to Santiago to start my first couch-surfing experience and meet up with Michal and Ewa.