This Woman Was Here

We arrived in Santiago in the morning and took a taxi to our hotel, the Marriott, in a wealthy area of town. We had planned to do a walking tour of downtown, but the hotel recommended we not do it and not take the subway because so many stations were shut down due to the protests. The protests have been going on foe 50 days and center on demands for health care, better pensions, and lower costs of education. They began when the government announced plans to raise metro fares. Taxes are 18% and people feel the government is corrupt are not providing them with services. We opted to have a seafood lunch ( a bucket of mussels I couldn’t finish and hake, the most popular fish in Chile) and recover from the plane flight. I’m glad we decided against either the hop on bus or a taxi tour because much of the downtown was shut down due to the protests. It was in the 90’s and the smog made visibility poor.  After a nap and a swim, we wandered out to an upscale shopping area and had a wonderful seafood dinner at La Perla del Pacifico ( calamari, crab bake, and more wonderful hake).

We booked a tour that would take us to the cruise ship in San Antonio via Valparaiso and neighboring Vina Del Mar (for about the same price as a transfer to the boat). In picking up the other passengers for the excursion, we got a tour of the downtown area, where most of the stores are closed and boarded up, graffiti covers everything, and even traffic lights have been destroyed, making navigating intersections without traffic cops challenging. The entire downtown area is lined with barricades and we saw lines of paint splattered armored vehicles.

Outside of Santiago, we drove through the Casablanca Valley. The countryside is very dry, river beds are dry, and we saw evidence of recent fires that are whipped up by high winds. We stopped at a winery that had been covered in corrugated steel to protect it from protesters who were traveling by bus to protest in Valparaiso.

We saw lots of people walking along the highway with backpacks. It turns out they are pilgrims heading to celebrate the feast of the Immaculate Conception on 12/8, the largest religious festival in Chile. The day before the festival, the highway will be shut down to accommodate over a million pilgrims making their way to the monastery perhaps 40 miles outside of Santiago.

Valparaiso was once the busiest port in Chile before the Panama Canal opened ( when ships had to go around Cape Horn to transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic).  It’s a beautifully old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, but unfortunately marred by graffiti and protests ( since the Congress is in Valparaiso).

The steep roads up the hills of Valparaiso are full of colorful street art.

We visited Pablo Neruda’s house overlooking the port.

Many of the lovely old homes have been turned into hotels or museums.

We also rode the Cerro Alegre Valparaiso funicular.

Next we visited Plaza S0t0mayor with its Wedgwood naval building and its new building built inside of the old.

Right next door to Valparaiso is Vina Del Mar, the newer, wealthier city.

Vina del Mar Flower Clock with workers trying to remove graffiti from a recent demonstration.

In Vina Del Mar, we saw one of the Easter Island moats donated by the Rapanui people to the city.

On the way to the boat in the port of San Antonio ( cruise ships moved to the new port after union protests shut the Valparaiso port several years ago), we stopped at The Indomita winery in the Casablanca Valley, the Chilean capital for cold climate white wines.

Puerto Montt was settled by German settlers in 1852. The Chilean government gave land to German settlers, who must have felt quite at home since the area looks like Bavaria, with a temperate climate, a huge lake with views of two snow-capped active volcanoes, Osorno and Puntiagudo. We visited the first  Chilean national park, established in 1913, the Vincente Rosales park, where we saw the Saltos del Petrohue waterfall that is spectacular because of the aqua  blue glacial waters that cascade through black  volcanic  rock.

Next, we visited Puerto Vargas, established in 1853, where the founder of both Patagonia and North Face lived and died here in 2015 (and donated thousands of acres in Patagonia)

It is truly a gorgeous area, think Lake Como in Bavaria with snow-capped volcanoes. We also stopped briefly at the German Museum.

Next, we visited Frutillar, another German town.  It is also on the lake with views of the volcanoes.
When we were boarding the ship in Puerto Montt, we saw lots of people at the beach.. it is their summer here and temperatures were in high 70s and low 80s.