High temp: 55, sunny/foggy; low: 39
We woke to thick fog, with the white opaque disc of the sun visible through it. But the weather forecast called for clear skies, and sure enough, by the time we were finished with breakfast, the day was sunny and warm.
We decided to take a local bus up the coast to Concon, a fishing village about 16 km north of Valpo. This was easy enough to do: Millions of them leave from Avenida Errazuiz, a quasi-freeway that runs along the waterfront, parallel to some train tracks. (Sounds familiar, right Clevelanders?) In fact, waterfront access is almost as limited here as in Cleveland. There’s a square to goes up to the water, but otherwise the shore is given over mostly to transportation.
It cost us about $1.50 total for the half-hour trip to Concon. What we discovered, when we got there, was a fairly seedy strip of seafood restaurants along a narrow beach. There was also some kind of mass happening, with people dressed in what looked like native costume and singing with really interesting instrumentation. Here’s a stand with some fresh-caught fish.
Unfortunately, we weren’t hungry yet, and we decided to head back south. This time we rode right along the coast, the waves crashing violently. We passed what looked like a small park on a rocky promontory and asked the bus driver to let us out. It turned out to be a park memorializing the 100th anniversary of the birth of (who else?) Pablo Neruda. We watched the churning of the ocean in a kind of trance for 20 minutes or so, my glasses becoming speckled with salt.
Watching the pounding these rocks took, I was amazed that erosion doesn’t work more quickly than it does.
There were some black-as-night outcrops of rock (you can see them to the left of Dan in the photo) that looked like hardened lava. Since there aren’t any volcanoes around, we theorized that they were formed during an earthquake, when magma leaked out of the surface.
We kept walking north along the road, until we got hungry enough to stop at an overpriced restaurant built right on the rocks. As is the case with many restaurants here, there was a lady out front trying to persuade us to come in (quiere comer? Adelante!). We called them lunch ladies. Honestly, the promise of views was pretty irresistible, too. The food was good — I had a delicious shrimp-cheese empanada.
Some pelicans were hanging out on the restaurant’s roof.
We walked to Reñaca, which is the next town south of Concon (toward Valparaiso). The beach here is where the fabulous, rich and young hang out in the summer. Luckily, we were here in the winter. There were some nicely designed, slanted-box shelters all along the beach.
It is a stunning — and very long — beach.
We walked a bit further, enjoying views of gulls and cormorants on the rocks. In the middle photo below, you can see a cormorant drying his wings by holding them out from his body. I loved watching these birds diving in the water. They’d swim for a while, only their heads visible, and then wiggle underneath the waves, staying below-surface for a scary length of time before reemerging.
Eventually, we got tired and hopped on a bus back to Valpo. The sun was out again when we returned, and when we took Ascensor Concepcion back up the hill, we were greeted with a fairly delightful scene of full-on hippy tourism, including a guy in a hippie hat playing a Hang, a steel-drum-like instrument invented by a Swiss couple about 15 years ago. It made a bewitching sound.
Our last stop was the candy store run by Paulina’s friends, where we bought some treats for souvenirs.
Then we went to our roof to watch the sunset and to ogle the utterly foreign stars in the night sky: The first night it’s been clear enough to see them. Neither one of us has ever been to the Southern Hemisphere before, and to see entirely new constellations, and the Milky Way in a place we’re not used to seeing it, felt like being on another planet. In the background, los perros de las calles howled and barked. We wanted to take them all home.
We wrapped up the night — Dan’s last full night in Chile — with a quick dinner and an abortive trip to La Piedra Feliz, Valpo’s most famous music club. By the time the clock approached midnight, my eyelids were sinking shut and there was no sign the band was starting anytime soon. That’s one thing I couldn’t handle living down here — the lateness of the nightlife. Bars stay open until 5 (!) on the weekends, so things don’t really get going until 1 or 2. We got one more workout as we hoofed uphill to our place, and then back to the roof to do a final check-in on the foreign stars.
