We spent the night in Santiago after arriving back from Easter Island, then headed off to Valparaiso on the coast in the morning. When we had arrived we dropped off our bags we went straight out to join a walking tour in the centre of the old town.

It is a really interesting place with UNESCO protection, and the tour was very good. We started at the central plaza, then walked up and around the two most popular hills, cerro Concepcion and cerro alvere. There are lots of funiculars around to take people up, and we went on a really old one, the Queen Victoria. The town used to be a centre of shipping, particularly during the California gold rush, up until 1914 when the Panama Canal opened, and the town went into decline.

The government used to subsidise paint costs if people painted their houses a different colour, so all the houses all over the hills are multicoloured, using lots of shipping materials like corrugated iron. There is graffiti everywhere, so people also use a lot of wall murals to deter people tagging their walls. They have 17 fire companies because most houses of poor people are wood, crammed together, and it's very windy. Apparently they have loads of fires, the most serious was devastating in April 2014. People were very upset after this and it apparently caused them to elect a non politician as mayor, the first place in Chile to do so.

Most importantly, our tour guide also advised of an amazing local dish for dinner, and local cocktails for later on! They also gave us a shot of a local drink, Chachi, and a chocolate biscuit thing filled with dulce de leche. Yum.

On the whole it's a really cool place, very cosmopolitan. We loved it. We went for dinner to have chimichurri(?), which is just a massive plate of chips covered in roasted onions and beef and some cheese. It was so unhealthy, but really nice (unsurprisingly). With it we had a pisco sour (tastes like a lime rum cocktail), a vainha (still pisco but tasted like sweet coffee) and then moved on to a bar to have a terremotta / earthquake, which we'd been recommended. The next morning when we were feeling sorry for ourselves, we read that it was a litre of sweet white wine with pineapple sorbet in. It was nice at the time...