Alison: We arrived in Valparaiso in the evening and by sheer coincidence we saw our friends Kim and Alisha at the bus station. They had opted to fly and set off a day after us but had arrived in Valparaiso at the same time! That's how long our journey was!!!

Valparaiso is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is located around 2 hours west of Santiago. On our first day we took a stroll into town and went on another free/tip based walking tour. On the tour our guide told us that Chile is the most active place for earthquakes in the world. He said that on average they have a massive quake every 25 years and the last one they had was in 2010 so not to worry...gulp! We visited lots of different things but the best part was just walking around the streets. Valparaiso starts on the flat and sprawls up many hills or cerros as they are called here. As the hills are so steep, there are elevator type things known as funiculars that you can use to take you up to the top. These funiculars look ancient and are often out of order but for many people they are essential for getting to the top without having a major cardiac event!

In the hills the buildings are really colourful as they are covered in graffiti (more on that from Nigel) and there are lots of small winding roads that you could walk around for hours and happily get lost in...well you could if you knew the right neighbourhoods to walk in. Apparently different hills are different neighbourhoods so you could be walking in a perfectly safe tourist area and cross the road and be in a dodgy part of town. There is also a difference between the top and bottom of the hills. We were stood at the base of one and were told that if we walked up the stairs to the top then it is very unsafe, not only for tourists but also for locals that aren't from that hill. Safety advice in Valparaiso was given to us by several people so although the hills seemed fairly safe to us, we had to take it seriously and be very controlled with our exploring!

Nigel: As well as the general free walking tour that Alison mentioned, we also went on a free graffiti walking tour to get a bit of an understanding of how there came to be so much graffiti in Valparaiso and to learn a bit about the artists. Street art is a very important part of the culture of Valparaiso and it is welcomed as long as it is of a creative nature. This wasn't always the case though. The graffiti started back in the 1970s during the dictorial, oppressive regime of Pinochet. Graffiti was a way of protesting and was considered a form of vandalism. When Chile became more democratic however, the street art continued and the city hall decided that it was OK as long as it contributed to the urban area. In the past there has been problems with artists tagging walls (basically just spraying their street 'signature' on the wall) which is a bit unsightly. As lots of the walls are now covered in really high quality art, this is less of a problem as, out of respect, people won't tag on top of another artists work. As we walked around the hills learning about the art, it was a little difficult to concentrate because we were being followed by a female dog and a pack of male dogs who were taking it in turns to.....try to give her a cuddle. At the start of the tour she only had one suitor who was clearly very pleased to see her and was barking none stop right next to us so we could barely hear our guide. Without fail they would follow us from picture to picture and stand in front of each one barking. It was funny to start with but then it got really annoying so we started to try to lose them by tricking them to join another group but they just wouldn't go. As we walked we recruited more and more dogs and our guides face dropped when he saw another 2 that hang around together who he described as the most hated dogs in Valparaiso as they are so disruptive to tours. Apparently the street dogs are a big problem for tourist groups as they like to follow them around and bark. Those dogs walked with us for 3 whole hours!

After the tour we went to go for lunch with Kim and Alisha as this would be the last day that we would be travelling the same route. We wanted to find somewhere nice to go for our last meal together so what better place to go than the Welsh pub we had spotted on our tour. The football was just due to start as well which was a bonus (not sure Alison and Alisha agreed though). The pub is owned by a Chilean that lived in Wales for several years. I'm not sure if he has got the ambience of the place quite right as it was very dark and depressing in there and was also very expensive. We decided to move somewhere with a bit more atmosphere and had a nice lunch at the base of one of Valparaiso's biggest pieces of street art.