We decided to go and visit Valparaiso.The Lonely Planet (that bloodly book) says it's a hightlight for many tourists.With colourful houses stacked up along the hills and a beach to visit.OMG how wrong the Lonely Planet is.This was my least favourite place on the whole trip.In fact, it was really the only bad place we visited, so I guess that's pretty good going.We got the bus anyway.Took about an hour and half.We were looking at this town as we were driving in thinking, jays what was the Lonely Planet on about.The houses are colourful and all plonked on top of each other up the hill but they were totally run down.It was the slums basically.Yeah it's makes for a nice picture but up close it's pretty grim. I actually took no pictures of the place, hence the unrelated picture above. The bus dropped us at the random place on the street and after getting off we realised we had no idea where to get the return bus.We had no idea where we were, no map (very prepared), I was dying for the loo and it was freezing.It was lovely and warm in Santiago so we were decked out in shorts and vesties, not at all appropriately dressed, especially seeing as we seemed to have been dropped in the dodgy area of town.Of course it doesn't really matter what you wear in SA (with a few exceptions) men and sometimes women will still stare because you are so obviously not from there.You get used to it.
Anyhoos, we aquired a map and ascertained where we were.We were miles from the beach.We did walk around a bit, had lunch, basically just to get in off the steet, walked around a little more then decided we better start walking back to get the bus.A few lewd comments along the way.As it happens the bus was not leaving from where we were dropped off.Nice of them to tell us.We asked in a shop and were told there was a bus station.It's amazing how people can understand each other even if they don't speak the same language.We found it anyway and got our bus but we were definitely not impressed by this place.Other people have had better experiences.I guess cos we were dropped in a random and dodgy place, had no idea where we were or where to go, we just got a bad view of the place.But I think it's a less dodge at the beach area and had we been dropped there we may have a different view of the place.But I will always think of the place as a dump.Of course I thought all SA is going to be like this, I wanna go home!!We should have done a wine tour that day!!!