Valpariaso is only about an hour away from Santiago by bus, on the coast. This was our first taste of buses in South America and we were amazed at how comfortable it was. When we arrived it was only a short walk to our hostel, where we stayed for the next 3 nights. It was a cool hostel in a quiet residential street, run by a young couple. It had a good atmosphere, I think they must have been art students of something as there was a lot of quirky artwork around. They had obviously put a lot of effort into the place, and we were pleased to get a nice double room for the same price we´d been paying for dorm in Santiago.

he town was really cool. Santiago was a big city, quite like other cities, but Valparaiso is much more like you´d expect a South American town to look. It is very hilly, with lots of colourful houses/shacks piled on top of each other. Loads of political graffiti, stray dogs, street food and unusual smells. We spent two days exploring. The main centre is a world heritage site ( on our travels we have found that an amazing number of places are world heritage sites, they seem to take pretty much anything) and it lots of small streets, colourful houses, mosaics and murals. We stopped to buy what seems to be a local favourite: hotdog. But not just any hotdogs. These come piled with tomato, avocado and mayo. There is a ridiculous amount of sauce which far outweighs the amount of meat. Then they offer you more sauces to go on your sauce filled sandwich. Anyway, it filled us up and it is good to try the local food. They love avocados here apparently.

There are also a lot of steep elevators trains ( I know there is a word for those but it has temporarily escaped me) to take you up and down the more hilly parts of the city. They are extremely cheap and rickety. There´s also a lot of nice parks and plazas. We walked up to a viewpoint that looked out of the city. It is also a port town and you could see all the ships coming and going. We also saw a lot of sailors about, but were warned to stay away from the dock area at night. We had heard that there was an outdoor mural museum so we decided to check that out one day. It was quite good but basically graffiti and not too different from any of the other small windy streets in the poorer areas. Museum was obviously quite a loose term. Our hostel was nice but quite quiet as it is not quiet the peak season yet here. There was one other English couple staying there and they gave us some good advice about where to go next in Chile. On our last day in Valparaiao we went to the bus station and eventually managed to book an onward ticket to Valdivia leaving the next day at 8pm. The system is really annoying because at the bus station each bus company has its own office, so you basically have to go to all of them asking do you go to wherever, how much, what time does it go, what facilities are on the bus etc before you decide which one to get, its a pain. Anyway so far we have used the two bigger companies and they are both excellent so we´ll probobly just stick with them in future. We were will suffering from jetlag in Valaparaiso, going to bed really early and then waking up and 5am. We got out of sync and missed the free breakfast. It was only on the last day that we managed to get back to relatively normal. We had to check out quite early on the last day. Later on we headed down to the bus station at 8pm to catch our first overnight bus, a 12 hour journey to Valdivia further South.