Travel blogs praise Valparaiso as Chile’s most colorful city, with vibrant street art, historical funiculars and colorful hills. Yes, it has all those, but after touring the beautiful Chilean countryside and coastline, it was a bit of a letdown. The traffic was horrible, so we dropped both cars pretty much straight away and ubered (is that now a verb?) and walked. We had an AirBnB high up on a hill in an old but beautifully restored home, and two days to see the sights.
We booked a walking tour and spent about 4 hours seeing the highlights. The street art was fun and interesting.
And we did get to ride a funicular. There were 30 funiculars at one time, and currently 16 remain in operation.
We toured some churches and squares, and had lunch while we waited.
Because literally we were waiting for our ship to come in. I had been tracking it on Marine Traffic for a few days, watching it come down the Chilean coast. It reported the last port as Esquimalt, which is a suburb of Victoria BC. It had just finished its last cruise to Alaska, and we were going to become the transit trip down to Ushuia for a season of cruises to Antarctica.
And right on time there it was pulling into the dock and we were getting the last uber down to check in and get onboard. We’re on day four now, and I’ll say that this is certainly all we had hoped it would be.
Here is a sneak peek of the channels of Chile. It’s 10am and I’m sitting in the lounge watching the world go by without having to worry about where we’re going to anchor tonight. The scenery is strikingly familiar, definitely in a good way.
