Viña del Mar / Valparaiso, Chile

We arrived in Viña del Mar at 5am after a 7-hour bus ride from Mendoza, and took a cab to our airbnb hosts apartment. Luckily, she was kind enough to accomodate our early arrival, and even came outside and walked down the block looking for us. As we were fairly unrested, we decided to sleep immediately after entering the apartment.

After waking up past noon walked to the beach, only 4 blocks away. We had sandwiches leftover from our bus ride, and had a little picnic with a stray dog on the boardwalk while reading our books. Now we have both finished A Thousand Splendid Suns, and recommend it highly. We then walked back toward the apartment and around the enormous mall next door, finishing our rounds with a bottle of wine and some chocolate in hand.

The following day we took a cab to the downtown area of Viña del Mar, walked around for a bit, and then hopped on the metro towards Valparaiso which has a small downtown with beautiful historic buildings surrounded by dozens of steep hills. We took a lift to the top of a Cerro Alegre (cerro = hill) and went into the Museo de Bellas Artes which is housed inside El Palacio Baburizza. After exploring the museum, we took the lift back down and decided to eat at a nearby cafe that had a delicious seafood soup. We then opted to head back to Viña on the metro, avoiding the areas our airbnb host told us were a little sketchy.

Once back in Viña, we walked to the tourist hotspots along the coast, which consist of a functional Flower Clock, a sweet Castle, a Casino, and of course stopping to get a beer by the beach. It was a great day to be walking around, and once the daylight started to fade we had an urge to see a movie. We walked over to the mall, ate a quick dinner, and went to watch Captain America 2. In all it was a successful day full of activities.

The next morning we woke up, packed and headed to Reñaca for one last siteseeing in Viña. We took a bus right outside the apartment that took us a couple blocks from the Reñaca beach, where we drank a bit of wine while watching pelicans dive for fish.

We hurried back to get our packs from the apartment, said our goodbyes to our sweet hosts and jumped into a cab to the bus terminal. The night before we had planned to go 10 hours north to venture around Caldera and Copiapo despite the earthquake and tsnuami warnings. We had the camping and hostel locations as well as buses figured out for our stay in the north, but when we arrived at the bus station, something overcame us and we spontaneously ended up with two tickets to Puerto Montt, 14 hours south of Viña. We planned our next move before falling asleep on the bus.