Chile, Day 14

After yesterday’s long trip, and getting too much sun without quite knowing how, I woke up in the morning feeling more tired than I had felt before going to bed. After breakfast and a shower, neither of which woke me up, I decided to lay low for the day and focus on securing accommodations for the rest of my trip. Or as much as I possibly could in only a day. (Planning takes a lot of time, especially when you’re waiting for responses.)

After breakfast, I only emerged from my lair to get lunch at the nearby seafood market. It was a good choice, as it wasn’t terribly far – and walking downhill is a nicer prospect than walking back up – and I took the recommendation of two Irish women on yesterday’s tour who said that if I went to the market I had to eat at Marisqueria Anita’s.

The seafood market, which I commented on in an earlier post, has no seafood vendors per se indoors. At least not on a Sunday. I passed a few vegetable vendors on the way to the second floor, which is the real draw once you enter the building. On the second floor one only finds seafood restaurants. There is a third floor, but it looks closed off, quite likely because it appears ready to collapse.

Anita’s was definitely the right choice. It was by far the busiest of the many small restaurants, which is usually a sign of a place with a good reputation, and the woman corralling customers had a quick smile that won me over right away.


I sat at a table in the corridor just beyond the entrance to Anita’s and ordered something I’ve long wanted to try here in Chile: machas parmesana, or pink clams in their shells with melted Parmesan cheese.


At only 4000 pesos, or about $8, the price for this dish was very reasonable. And though this dish might seem a bit plain for lunch, I have to say that the clams and cheese, which I wouldn’t think would go well together, really hit the spot. The clams were obviously fresh, and the melted cheese was still warm when I was served. Again, the people who run Anita’s were some of the smiliest of anyone I’ve met in Chile thus far, and the food won me over as well.

Anita’s can be found at Mercado Puerto 2, Piso Local 81, in the Barrio Puerto. Tel: 223-8052.

From the seafood market I was going to proceed to the bus terminal on the other side of town, but I realized that I’d stupidly forgotten to bring enough money. So I tromped back up the endless hill to my hostel in Playa Ancha, grabbed my wallet, and headed back down again and across Valparaiso. I bought my bus ticket to Santiago for tomorrow morning, with the hope that I’ll be able to go directly from the bus station there to the airport, where I’ll fly in to Puerto Montt and then figure out some way to travel another 20 miles to the city of Castro in Chiloe. I’m pretty excited about the trip, as the national park there is supposed to be spectacular.

Once I’d gotten back home, with a blister on my heel from so much walking, I hung out to do more accommodations research. However, I got sidetracked when a Belgian-Danish couple approached the table on the terrace where I was sitting and we began talking. I think we talked for around two hours about all kinds of different things. They were very nice, but at a little after six I was feeling hungry again – the machas parmesana wasn't exactly filling – and so it was time to go have dinner. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think I’ve eaten at the same place twice in my six weeks of travel. But I wasn’t going to walk with this blister any farther than I had to, so I returned to Café Arte Mirador for a quick bite.

Tonight I went with the pollo espiada, which I think means chicken cooked on a spit – then again it could mean “chicken spit,” in which case I’ve obviously gotten the name wrong.


It was nicely cooked, with a crisp, salty skin, and the French fries, though spilling over my plate, were seasoned with what almost tasted like cinnamon. I chased this down with a Valparaiso ale, and then decided to be bad yet again and ordered what I was told was a fruit tart as well as a cappuccino con leche pero sin crema (as in whipped cream).


The meal was good if not great, and the waiters were excellent as before.

Now I’m back home again and looking into accommodations in Uruguay. I think in a week from now I may just be on my way to an estación…

Chile, Day 13

The colorful, charming beach at Quintay.

Today I headed out on a half-day tour that felt more like a full-day tour to me. But no complaints here. It was nice to drive through the Valparaiso region to see more of what it offers. A tour guide was supposed to pick me up at my hostel at around 10:30; luckily I was ready to go much earlier, as they arrived to collect me at 9:50. From there we picked up five other people: two from Ireland, one from France, one from Germany, and one from New Zealand. The guide was German but lived in Chile and spoke English fluently. We were quite the international van-load.

Before leaving, the hostel owner’s dog, Poopy, who had visited my room the night before to have her tummy scratched for ten minutes, left me a going-away present outside my door that seemed to explain her name. I sidestepped it, then continued on my merry way.

Does this look like the face of a dog that would poop outside my door?

The first place we visited was the William Coles winery, located in a town called Casablanca. Twenty years ago Casablanca was nothing more than dusty midpoint between Santiago and Valparaiso, and if it was known for anything more than that it was probably for having cattle farms. Now, however, every inch of cultivable land is devoted to vineyards, the vast majority of which are owned by foreign wine growers.

Near the entrance to William Cole Vineyards.

William Coles is originally from Denver, where I understand that he made quite a bundle as a dot-commer in the early 90s. He has vineyards in California and Chile, and in 2009 his Chilean-produced Sauvignon Blanc was voted the best in South America.

We started off our tour by stepping into the vineyard and learning about the grapes that are cultivated there. For me, the most interesting thing I learned was how two different types of grape vines can be grafted together to grow not hybrids but rather separate types of grapes. Apparently this protects the grapes from certain types of disease and also promotes vigor in growth if done properly.

Part of the vineyard itself.

Sauvignon Blanc grapes.

From the vineyard we proceeded into the “laboratory,” which is where the steel-vat science is carried out.

Modern and traditional: French oak barrels lined up in front of giant, steel wine vats.

After learning about how the grape stems are removed, the grapes are crushed and juiced, the 18- to 25-day wine-making process occurs, and then seeing the wooden casks in which the product is aged, followed by a glance at where the bottling is carried out, we went on to taste three bottles of wine.

A little wine at the end of our tour.

Call me unsophisticated if you like, but William Cole’s award-winning Sauvignon Blanc didn’t exactly move me. I found its aromas far more interesting than its taste, which was crisp and fruity but otherwise not that distinctive to my palate. The red wines, which included a chardonnay and a carmenere – which can be grown nowhere else but in Chile – were nice, but to be honest I preferred other South American wines that I’ve had on my trip thus far. Don’t get wrong: they were quite nice, but nothing I’d go out of my way for when so many other wineries offer such excellent products.

The tour was quite informative, and I enjoyed visiting the winery a lot. I was amazed at how cheap the wine could be purchased at the winery’s gift shop: prices ranged from 1200 pesos (~$2.40) to 2500 pesos (~$5).

William Cole Vineyards is located at Camino Tapihue, Km 4.5 in Casablanca, Chile. Reservations are highly recommended. Tel: 56-32-215-7777. Email: saladeventas@williamcolevineyards.cl. Web: www.williamcolevineyards.cl. Hours: Monday – Friday, 9:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

From the winery we continued on to El Quisco, which is the location of Isla Negra, Pabla Neruda’s third house, and the one in which he lived until four days before his death in 1973 – shortly after the dictator Pinochet came into power.

The back of Isla Negra.

The side of Isla Negra, from the bottom of a hill.

Our guide here, who was not very good, told us that Isla Negra was his favorite house – something I heard from my guides at Neruda’s other two houses – and she herded us through the place in all of ten minutes. The tour, and the house itself, was disappointing. The entire place has been commercialized, and the feeling one gets passing through it is that Neruda’s foundation has made it all very tacky. Many people don’t wish to pay the 3500 peso (~$7) entrance fee and instead press up against the windows of the house to look inside, which is an odd thing to observe during a tour. Our tour guide said that every room except one, which contained Neruda’s seashell collection, looked exactly as it did when Neruda lived there. But I don’t believe this for a minute. I don’t believe he lived in a place set up to look like such a tacky museum, for example with a fake, gaudily painted train sitting in front of the entrance. Neruda and his third wife, Matilde, are buried in back of the house.

View of the ocean from the back of Isla Negra.

The grave of Pablo and Matilde.

Isla Negra is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day and costs 3500 pesos (~$7) for a guided tour in English. (Guides are mandatory if you wish to enter the house.) Reservations are required and can be made by calling 35-461-2844.

By this time it was nearly 3 p.m. and we hadn’t had lunch. All of us were famished and were hoping to grab a bite to eat at one of the restaurants in El Quisco. But the tour guide had other plans, and over the next 90 minutes, after seeing probably 100 restaurants along the side of the road, we arrived in the small fishing village of Quintay.

Quintay as seen from the restaurant where we had lunch.

Quintay from higher up a hill.

I recognized it immediately from Andrew Zimmern’s visit in an episode of Bizarre Foods, but rather than go out on a fishing boat for conger eel, as he did, we plopped ourselves down at Restaurant El Gato, which gave us a nice view of Quintay’s rocky, aquamarine cove. I ordered a plate of locos (“false abalones”) with assorted sides (7000 pesos, or ~$14), a dish I’d never heard of before.

Locos aren't the most appetizing-looking seafood in the world.

The locos were gray and almost intestinal-looking, and I was a little scared of them at first. They were topped with a kind of hollandaise-mayonnaise, and surrounded by cooked potatoes, a creamy yellow rice that somewhat resembled paella, and fresh salad. The locos turned out to be very dense, and one of the Irish women who ordered the same didn’t like the texture at all, but I had no problem with. In fact, I thought they were very good. The flavor was mild, and they reminded me of calamari, only less chewy. Because I was full after my meal I didn’t go for dessert, though two other people ordered mote con huesillo, which is a sweet drink made from boiled wheat, apricot juice, and two or three sun-dried apricots. I took a little taste and liked it. It was quite sweet, but also light.

A glass of mote con huesillo.

After lunch we had an hour to walk around the fishing village. There wasn’t a great deal to see other than a lighthouse and a small museum with black and white photos of whales that had been caught back when Quintay was a whaling port (whaling was banned here in 1967).

I got back to my hostel at a little past 8 p.m. I was so full I didn’t need dinner…

Chile, Day 12

For some reason I like this piece of graffiti-art.

I got a late start today, mostly because I was dreading the hills that awaited me. Also, my feet were sore and tired and I didn’t have a lot on my travel agenda today. When I did leave – after another nice breakfast and conversation with the hostel owner – I decided to walk across town and up Cerro Concepcion and Cerro Allegre. There wasn’t anything in particular there that I wanted to visit, but I knew I’d have enough to keep me busy for much of the day, even if it simply meant wandering around the steep, windy, colorful streets of both hills.

I had a hard time reading my map – I always have a hard time reading maps, actually – and walked up the wrong set of stairs twice. The first time was fine, as I was still quite fresh and the staircase happened to be the oldest in Valparaiso, but the second time it wasn’t as fun.

Want to get in shape? Try running this a few times a day.

Looking down the stairs is like peering over a cliff.

The third time it worked out for me, which is good because I'd gotten tired by the time I reached the top. Actually, there’s really no “top” to these hills – they seem never-ending. But I did get to the top of the area I wanted to visit, and that was an accomplishment in itself. Once there, I wandered around looking at the various churches, brightly colored houses, museums, galleries, cafés, and vista points. And trying to play with the many stray cats in the neighborhood that were sleeping in the sun.

There was puppet theater in this tiny park. But the puppets and equipment were sitting there unattended. Maybe it was an installation...

At one point I stopped in a café called Café Con Letras (Almirante Montt 316; Tel: 223-5480) to get water and coffee, and while there I observed an older Japanese couple having difficulty setting up their camera to take a picture of themselves.

This is a terrible photo of the café. And I forgot to take a photo of its exterior as well as of my drink (big loss, I know).

So in Japanese I asked if they would like me to take their photo, which startled them. They invited me to sit at their table, and then we spoke together for about half an hour. It was nice talking to them. They were from Chiba prefecture but were living in Honduras, where they volunteer as education specialists with a focus on physical rehabilitation for handicapped children. They said that Honduras was very unsafe and they couldn’t stay out at night, so they were pleased to be in Chile where safety isn’t such a worry. They were heading to Argentina tomorrow and would try to go to Mexico after that. It seemed that our Spanish was equally bad, and for our simple topics of conversation my Japanese sufficed. We wished each other well on our respective trips, and then I bid them adios and continued with my walk.

At around 2 p.m. I realized that I was going to need some lunch, so I decided to head back toward Playa Ancha and grab a sandwich somewhere. I ended up going to El Sandwich Cubano and having the restaurant’s namesake sandwich (2100 pesos, or ~$4.25).



There wasn’t much to it, but the Cuban owner was nice to me and spoke perfect English, plus the Cuban tunes she was playing were nice to get lost in while I ate.

It looks grosser than it tasted. It was good, but there was way too much bread in this sandwich.

After finishing my lunch I continued on my way, and by a little after 3:00 I was back in the hostel, where I changed out of my sweaty clothes.

As usual, during my walk I came upon a good deal of “urban art” – I’m not sure what else to call the colorful pictures one finds on the sides of buildings and houses and walls all over – and am including a sample of what I found today. Much of it was located in Cerro Concepcion and Cerro Allegre.





When dinnertime rolled around, I didn’t feel like going terribly far, so I walked to the stairs at the edge of Playa Ancha and descended them partway to eat at one of the closest places available: Calfulafquen.

There's a very nice restaurant in that old, beaten-down blue house.

The waiter was quite nice and spoke English very well, and he helped me choose a dish of merluza, with a white sauce containing mushrooms and spinach, and a side of pureed potatoes.

The presentation was a bit lacking. There's a sea of pureed potatoes there. Or more like a flood.

I’ve definitely had better meals in Chile, but the ambience of the restaurant – you can see the entire bay from your table, not to mention the old yellow ascensions (hill elevators, basically) – combined with the hospitality of the waiter – he gave me a free pisco sour before my meal and then a free iced manzanilla afterward – was worth it.

That yellow box at the top of the hill is one of the "hill elevators," as I call them (wrongly, I'm sure).

My meal came to 12,500 pesos (~$25) with tip included. Calfulafquen is at Sub. Artilleria # 166, Paseo 21 de Mayo. Tel: 321-4130. Web: www.calfulafquen.cl.

Chile, Day 11

It was nice waking up today under a cool, cloudy sky. All the more so after getting a night’s sleep that wasn’t interrupted by guests, receptionists, traffic, or loud sea birds. I grabbed a quick breakfast, which the hostel owner provided, and she joined me for the latter half of it and talked to me about her life here.


She told me an interesting story about her mother, who lived in Los Angeles for 35 years and worked for some insanely rich family the entire time, and recently came back to Chile due to health problems she was having. I guess it’s been a hard adjustment for her, even though she’s 80 and has her children nearby for the first time in several decades. The hostel owner, too, worked for a family in Los Angeles, but only for six months. She’s owned and operated the hostel where I’m staying for fifteen years. It’s a beautiful home. Maybe I’ll upload photos of it one of these days…

After breakfast I decided to walk down the steep hills of the Playa Ancha neighborhood and make my way to La Sebastiana, one of Pablo Neruda’s three houses. It was one hell of a walk, but an interesting one for sure. Once I got down to the bottom of Playa Ancha, I found myself in Barrio Puerto, a rather poor and dirty area of town – it looked worse because it was cloudy – but in a way I found it more interesting because of this. I didn’t expect to see so much fresh seafood being sold on the sidewalk, right on the edge of what appeared to be the business district, and I slowed down a bit to see what was on offer.




As I continued toward Cerro Bellavista I began to notice how much colorful artwork decorated the walls of buildings, fences, small alleys, even light posts. I’ve included a few snapshots of some of what I came across during the day.







About thirty minutes after having set out from my hostel, I found myself at the base of an intimidating hill, and I knew I had quite the climb if I wanted to make it to Neruda’s house. But the climb was fascinating and picturesque, and after stopping a number of times to enjoy the location, I finally took a rest at Plaza Mena, which is only one hundred meters or so from La Sebastiana. But I was pretty sweaty at this point, and I didn’t want to enter the house looking like I’d just completed a swimming competition.






La Sebastiana was the house Neruda gave up first when his legs could no longer handle the hills of Cerro Bellavista and the steep, windy staircases of his home. It was an information tour – it’s all done by little audio phone devices – but it was a little strange standing in rooms with ten other people with their audio devices pressed against their ears. If you took yours away from your ear, the room was utterly silent – it was just people standing their, looking around, with these weird plastic devices pressed against their heads. But this is unimportant.



The house has an outstanding view of Valparaiso, and Neruda used to remain here on New Year’s Eve so he could watch the city’s famous fireworks show from pretty much anywhere in his house.

La Sebastiana is at the top of Cerro Bellavista, at Ferrari 692. One adult ticket costs 3000 pesos (~$6). Tel: 225-6066. Web: www.fundacionneruda.org. Hours: Tuesday - Sunday from 10:30 a.m. - 6:50 p.m. in January and February. Tuesday - Sunday from 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. the rest of the year.

By this time it was already noon, but since I wasn’t particularly hungry – my motivation for doing everything – I decided to give the Mercado Cardonal a try. It wasn’t exactly close, but if I map was accurate, it seemed that once I got back to the bottom of Cerro Bellavista I only had a fifteen to twenty minute walk to get there. So off I went.


And I’m glad I did, because it was a very lively place, as colorful as many neighborhoods in Valparaiso but with the added attraction of being redolent with fruit.





I’ve had some incredibly flavorful fruit since arriving in Chile – the tomatoes are maybe the best I’ve ever had, and this morning’s honeydew and cantaloupe were no less amazing – but I’ve also had some unfriendly encounters with people here. Wanting so badly to get some local fruit to take back to the hostel, I managed to explain to a young woman at a stall that I was interested in buying a quarter kilo of black cherries and a quarter kilo of apricots. A scale was right there, there were plenty of bags for customer purchases…and then there was the woman’s mother, who hurried over once she saw what was going on and refused to let me buy less than a kilo’s worth of fruit. Her daughter protested, but her mother cut her off and repeated her words to me. I tried to explain that I couldn’t possibly eat a kilo of apricots and a kilo of black cherries by myself, but she’d heard enough and shooed me away.

As if that weren’t enough, I decided to leave the market and find someplace to have lunch. I walked about fifteen minutes and then came across a restaurant mentioned in Lonely Planet called La Moneda de Oro – remember that name, please, and don’t ever go there. As soon as I saw a waiter come out to the entrance of the restaurant I said, “Una persona, por favor.” He scowled at me, looked me up and down (really, I looked fine), and with an index finger wagging in front of his face he said no. No? A person can’t eat alone at this restaurant? I asked him this, and he repeated himself. I stared at him in disbelief, then kind of laughed and went off. I quickly found another place – Lord Byron was the name – that was happy to have me, and though they didn’t have a sterling lunch menu, the ham and egg sandwich I ordered was enough.



Lord Byron, too, had a much nicer atmosphere, as their outdoor seating gave views of Valparaiso’s Hero Memorial and Armas de Chile.



By the time I’d finished eating and paying for my bill – and wandering around a little more – I returned to my hostel, which meant climbing up the hills of Playa Ancha. I stopped at one point to pet a cat in a window, but he stuck his tongue out at me so I just continued with my climb.


One nice thing I found right around the corner of where I’m staying was a charming little mom-and-pop store. I bought five apricots – no problem! – and since they were eating lunch when I came in I pulled their ladder to their tall shelves, climbed up, and bought a liter and a half of agua sin gas. I was good for the rest of the afternoon.


I stayed at home for a while and read on the back patio of the hostel, then after doing a few other small things it was time to go have dinner. I didn’t want to go too far, but since my neighborhood really doesn’t have any restaurants I had little choice but to head back down the hill and into the city. I went to a place I’d passed earlier in the day called Restaurant Los Porteños I.



All the staff was eating when I entered at 6:30, and I was afraid they wouldn’t be open until 8 or something. Luckily they were open, so I ordered fried merluza (hake, and it was a huge portion), a side salad (another huge portion), and a glass of red wine – all for a mere 3400 pesos ($6.90).



The people here weren’t the slightest bit mean to me, and my waiter even spoke a little English – anyway, he knew that arroz means rice. I definitely recommend this place to visitors staying in the vicinity or who find themselves in the Barrio Puerto. You can find Los Porteños I at Valdivia 169 in the Barrio Puerto. Tel: 225-2511. Web: www.marisquerialosportenos.cl.

On my way home I entered a busy little pastry shop and ordered a croissant for 200 pesos (~$0.40).



It was all I could do to finish it off at home, after which I started to write this entry.