A Close Shave

 The epic 24 hour bus trip from San Pedro down to Santiago turned out to be not epic at all. It went by easily and when we got off the bus I couldn't believe I had been sat in it for a whole day. There was plenty to look at out of the window as the expanse of the Atacama desert went by. By turns ugly and lovely, it was a scene that was continuously both changing and interesting. A shame then that the same could not be said of my book, of which I managed to read a good 200 pages despite its wooden style and two dimensional characters. Astoundingly for me, I even managed to get a fair night's sleep on the bus. We arrived at Santiago at 8.15am and left an hour and a half later for Valparaiso. Valparaiso, or Valpo as us seasoned veterans call it, was much bigger than I expected but still quite an impressive place. Most South American cities, like most North American ones in fact, are built on the eternally dull grid system with a never-ending repetition of identically sized blocks separated by streets with evocative and historical names like 1st avenue, 2nd Avenue....Valparaiso is built on the plate of spaghetti system, with a maze of tiny wiggly streets interconnecting randomly with other larger wiggly streets. Its built on quite a steep hillside too so and many of the houses ore coloured so it looks like these colourful places are haphazardly piled on one another. Our hotel was not too bad, though the advertised kitchen turned out to be badly equipped and impossibly small. The main problem was that there were four young girls (late teens, early twenties) next door who thought nothing of coming back at 3am talking, shouting and laughing at the top of their voices. On their last night they were a lot quieter, having had the Leader of the Opposition yelling at them through the walls to pack it in. In such emotional moments Helene's voice takes on the aspect and timbre of a Bengal tiger about to fall on its prey. Suavity, gentleness and courtesy are among many of the qualities it lacks and the girls wisely decided to tiptoe and whisper.
We visited Pablo Neruda's house. Pablo who? Well, quite. I'd never heard of him either but he was a Nobel prize winning diplomat, politician, writer and poet. There were a couple of his poems on the walls and pretty rotten they were (but then I think that most poetry is rotten so what do I know), but the house itself was great. There is one main road, Calle Alamania, which weaves and winds its way through the maze of streets. As it winds and curves so much the views over the town are always changing and it makes for a nice walk for a couple of hours, after which you can drop down into the town centre for a beer. Well, thats what we did anyway. We didn't do much specific in Valpo, just wandered these streets. I managed to finally finish my book, the turgid War and Peace and was pleased to find an English bookshop and get a couple of easy junky novels to relieve the brain after 1475 pages of Tolstoy's flat prose. In much the same way that after a few weeks dining on heavy meals you crave a baked spud and beans.
The main event of Valparaiso we saved for our last day. The plan was to go up to a viewpoint for some evening photography. We decided to take the roundabout way instead of taking the funicular. We found a road on the map that looked to be about the same as Calle Alemania that we had taken the day before. It wound and looped its way through upper Valparaiso before dropping down to the place that we wanted to take pictures from. We set off and after a few minutes a garage mechanic appeared from nowhere and asked where we were going. We replied and he said, 'No, danger danger'. We said it would be fine, but he said it was not safe. We asked, what about Calle Alemania and he said it was bad and not safe. This decided us as we had walked Alemania and it was touristy and fine. Also we had walked some back streets at night looking for a show and had met with no-one. We continued. A couple of minutes later another man stopped and said that we should be careful as my tripod (which is always on the outside of my bag) could attract attention. We promised him we'd watch out and went on. We stopped for a brief conference and decided to carry on, based on the fact that we had walked at night with no problem, that we had walked the so-called unsafe Alemania with no problem and that the street was busy with pedestrians, buses, trucks, etc. We walked on and all went well. We stuck to the main drag and took no back alley short cuts. About halfway round we met a couple of tourists coming towards us. They were French and said it was not safe where they had come from. We were a bit concerned as this was now the third time we had heard this. On their next statement however concern was no longer enough and we had to fall back to amazement. They told us that a few minutes before, a few hundred metres from where we were, they had been held up at pistol point and relieved of their bags. Cameras, cash, passports, the lot. Had we not run into them then we would have been the next victims, between us carrying almost $5000 worth of camera stuff as well as cash and passports. We turned around and walked, quite rapidly, back down the main road to town where we breathed a sigh of relief at being back in the tourist area. Owing to our ignoring two warnings from locals we had been within a few minutes of being robbed at gunpoint. It was a sobering moment as we realised that we had invited it on ourselves in ignoring the locals. After two and a half months of safe and pleasant travel in South America we had dropped our guard. Had the same happened in Cusco or Arequipa we would have turned round straight away. After this we were happy to stay in the touristy areas and not too sad to get on the bus out of Valparaiso and back to Santiago.