Chilean Travel Blog - Valparaiso (5 Jan 2018)

I have been to Chile 7 times over the last three years, always with Piotr J. working on behalf of WOM, but to my shame had never set foot outside the capital’s hotel rooms, conference rooms, and restaurants.  Not a way to get to know a country.

Thanks to Beata’s initiative, we are belatedly correcting that a little bit, and are embarked on a 2 ½ week trip to see some parts of this longest country on earth, including the driest desert in the world (Atacama) as well as the famous Patagonian glaciers and mountains, trekking the Torres del Paine national park.

But we started off by visiting what one guide labelled a ‘Kreuzberg/Berlin’ lookalike.  They must have been there in the 1960s, because -- although we are old Kreuzberg hands -- we were not prepared for what Valparaiso threw at us … first covered in fog and horrible early morning traffic jams in its tightly packed narrow coastal strip, encircled by 45 hilltops (cerros) dotted with thousands of colourful houses that often look more like rickety shanties or sheds that somehow survived a range of earthquakes and the Pinochet dictatorship by some miracle ...  But when the fog started to rise, and we finally made it up the Cerro Bellavista to reach Pablo Neruda’s 2nd house in Chile (‘La Sebastiana’), with its magic and its vistas over the Bay, we caught onto the spirit of this former bustling harbour beauty turned social hotspot and challenged municipality.

Valparaiso can probably claim to be one of the first places to vastly benefit from globalization, only to see its’ business model’ horribly disrupted and fall into decay -- from which it evidently has not yet recovered, despite its many appealing and quaint charms. Having been founded in 1543 by Pedro de Valdivia, the founder of Santiago, as its port, it soon became the stocking-up harbor of choice for all ships sailing home to Europe from the Pacific past the dangerous Cape Horn, and thus benefited hugely from the first wave of global trade in the 18th and 19th century; each country’s population is said to have populated one of the many cerros, a first true melting pot.  Until, that is, the Panama Canal was opened in 1914, and the dangerous and long shipping route circling South America was replaced with a shorter and faster one.  ‘One hundred years of solitude’ followed, and it is still looking for its bearing.

UNESCO declared its old town a world heritage site, and that it is.  Colourful, odourful, idionsyncratic, full of stray dogs and sounds from the ports and from its creaking funiculars (the only way to reach some hills), and its lively but evidently quite impoverished inhabitants.  Beauty and colours mix with decay and nostalgia.  Its graffiti is as excellent as it is powerful. 

Her policewomen, driving BMW motorcycles, are dressed in 1950s police garb that appeared designed by Colombian painter and sculptor Botero, like out of time machine (see pix).

(The city’s major since 2016 is the local head of Frente Amplio, a new leftwing coalition recently formed in Chile, and who took over 56% of the votes in that 2016 municipal election – reflective of its social challenges.  The Frente Amplio took over 20% in the Chilean presidential elections several weeks ago with its candidate coming third, but did not formally endorse a centrist candidate in the ensuing run-off, allowing a conservative candidate to win.  But the local experiment of renewing Valparaiso, bit by bit, is continuing.)

I had bought Pablo Neruda’s books, including his biography “Confieso Que He Vivido” (1974) and some of his love poems when travelling in Nicaragua in 1987, but they have been sitting on our shelves, mostly, for the last 30 years, awaiting to be kissed awake.  Well, a walk around his Valparaiso home (he has two more, also both museums, in Santiago and Isla Negra), brought the man, his country, his struggles and passions back to us.   He published his first 20 love poems at the age of 20, against the wishes of his father.  Having been posted as Consul to Buenos Aires in 1933, he met and befriended Spanish poet Federico Garcia Llorca, the son of Granada, and followed him to Spain in 1934.  His friend perished in the Civil War at the hand of the Franco’s henchmen, but Neruda got 2,000 Spanish out in 1939 by putting them on a ship to Chile. 

Having become a Senator in his native Chile in 1945, he was persecuted from 1948 and went into foreign hiding for some time.  Shortly after socialist politician Salvador Allende was elected Chilean President in 1970, Neruda got the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971.  On 11.9.1973 (another 9/11), Pinochet led the coup against Allende, who committed suicide under attack from the military.  Neruda was interned in a hospital and died only a few weeks later, the causal link between the coup and his death still a matter for discussion and investigation in Chile today.  Not many men of the pen have personally experienced two of the most brutal military dictatorships of the 20th century – and yet he writes mostly of love.  Biography and poems have been rebought and shall serve as a map to this country in the weeks to come.

What are the odds that the Italian voice on the audioguide in La Sebastiana comes from a school friend of ours, from the UWC of the Adriatic in Italy in 1984/85?  Well, Alessandra G. has been a Chilean resident for over 20 years, enlivening its theatre scene, and it was a joy to hear her voice retell the story of the house and its importance for the writings of that great man.

On our way back, already exhausted from so many impressions, colours, sounds, and stimuli, we could not resist but pay a visit to one of the many vineyards in the beautiful Casablanca valley half-way between Santiago and Valparaiso (Chile looks a bit like Israel on the map, just pulled at both extreme edges way too long – it is never wider than 180km but some 4,000km long, squeezed between the Pacific and the 5,000 – 6,000m high Cordillera mountains separating it from Argentina.)  We drove through eucalyptus groves, the trees smelling deliciously and its trunks measuring some 1m in diameter, signs of the fertility of these lands.  Palm trees growing next to pines, as if photo shopped there.  Ending up the day sipping fresh Sauvignon Blanc, Rose Shiraz, and Pinot Noir, testimony to the richness of Chile and its creative entrepreneurial class.

At the end of the day, I could not help thinking that in the next life, I want to be a koala bear in Chile, devouring eucalyptus leafs during the day and sipping its fruity wines in the evening as the sun sets over its rolling hills and mountains.