Valparaiso and Vina Del Mar
Earlier this week we visited Vina Del Mar and Valparaiso. We stayed in Vina--a small resort city with beautiful beaches, lots of shopping, and so on--but I'm sure I will regret not spending more time in Valparaiso.
Valpo hums. It's hard to explain, but we could feel its energy the moment we stepped off the bus. We walked around Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepcion (taking the ascencores up, of course), strolled through the passageways and down streets too tiny for cars. It's an incredibly beautiful and authentic city.
A freshly painted pink house in Valparaiso.
Lunch was at the Brighton Hotel on a patio overlooking downtown. Like most meals here in Chile it consisted of meat and rice (in my case, chicken) followed by té con leche. Té con leche--tea made with steamed milk instead of water--has been the pleasant surprise of the trip. It's not proper English tea, but it's still very good. (And better than the ubiquitous instant coffee here.)
Vina Del Mar was lovely too, but in a different way. Jorge Barahona, who runs the Chilean IxD company AyerViernes, put us up in his fantastic Hotel Monterilla.
We booked the Monterilla at the last minute (I think Javier and Jorge coordinated things by text message), and it turned out to be a great starting point for exploration. We had easy access to South Vina and the microbuses to Valparaiso, and we were two blocks from the beach and one from the casino. They also serve a good drip coffee with breakfast (and after a few days of Nescafe, that's something I could really appreciate).
