Valparaiso: Ups and Downs

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Winery in Casablanca Valley

So Dry

We left Santiago on the  cheap ($7 each--they run every 15 minutes) Turbus for Valparaiso, a two hour trip through dry, sunburnt hills and lush agricultural and vinicultural valleys.  Two long tunnels, stops for the basket lady to come aboard and offer drinks and sandwiches then depart;  tickets actually checked and luggage stowed by a real human who also boarded and debarked.  The views, some interesting, some not so.  The lush vineyards make a California-style picture when coupled with the golden, or scruff brown hills.

1940s trolleybus

Valparaiso itself is a hill-climber’s paradise.   The city has one short section of flat land about two or three streets wide, depending on where you are on it, that was the original city.  It houses the port, which is huge, and the trolleybus network, which isn’t.  The rest of the city is totally upendicular, rising above the plain of the port.  Nestled in valleys, climbing over peaks. there are streets and alleys of brightly colored houses, many very, very old, with wide vistas of the Pacific Ocean.  It is, without doubt, one of the naturally prettiest cities we have ever visited.    

Atop Cerro Concepcion

We did a short walk to the nearest ascensore, the Valporaisian word for incline or funicular, that run at 60 degree angles from almost all the hills to the city center.   They are very efficient, but very tiny, holding perhaps a maximum of 10 per trip.  They were, nevertheless, not crowded.  Rising from the station to the hilltop in about two minutes is quite a trip in more ways than one.

 Valpo Port

Our hotel, The Thomas Somerscales, is an old mansion turned into a boutique hotel—something quite common on Cerro (Hill)  Alegre.  It has sweeping views from some rooms, more limited with the ocean and the corrugated iron roofs of the city from ours, and a panoramic widow’s walk at its top.   From there, 360 degree view of the bay, the town and the mountains and the huge port with its cruise liners, container ships and military vessels.  Valpo is the home of the Chilean Navy from what we could gather.

Rumanian Music Video Shots

The city is so unique that we even watched a Rumanian cameraman shoot a video for Rumanian consumption in front of one of the murals on Cerro Alegre, on the street where we are staying.

We have found the food to be interesting, I suppose, but rather bland.  Our first stop was El Desayunador, the Amiral Montt Street’s local lunch and breakfast café, for a quick lunch.  The sandwiches were exactly what they were supposed to be…round Valpo loaves about 15 cm/6 in. across with goat cheese and salami for John and a mix of cooked green and yellow peppers and shreds of chicken for Ben.  More interesting for Ben was the honeydew melon juice he ordered as his drink.  The goat cheese and the salami met standards, though salty, but the chicken sandwich was dull.

Our second food visit was the Cocino Puerto, highly recommended.  It’s in a quaint old house, no views, and offers excellent lemon (pico) pisco sours and a good wine list (a Las Niñas Chardonnay was the choice).  Our first course was rather fun. It was a tureen, about 6 inches across filled with mussels, fish pieces, shrimp and melted white cheese in a broth.  The cheese was like a mozzarella swirling around our soupspoons as we ate the dish.  (Right now, John cannot remember its name.)   It had little spice except for a large chili pepper that John ate but Ben found too strong for the meal.  It was not a hot Thai pepper, which we are very used to.  Cooler than that.

A city full of old buildings of class

Then to the main course, which was the disappointment.  It was like a Portuguese cataplana, a tightly covered casserole dish containing a mixture of meats and fish.  While the Portuguese use local clams in abundance with pork loin, the Valpos use a chicken leg—thigh and drumstick—then a relatively mild longanaza sausage, two slices of smoked pork, a large handful of mussels, a few bits if shrimp of various sizes, and very large pieces of potatoes.  The whole amount was covered with one very large cabbage leaf and clearly cooked till it was almost English in taste—dull.  Additions of salt and black pepper added a bit of razzmatazz but it was not to our taste.

Cerro Alegre Street Scene

Along the way, the evening picked up with the addition of Mitzi, a rancher from Idaho, and her daughter Amy, a luxury yacht chef, who are traveling Chile together for a few weeks.  We enjoyed their company   Amy travels around the world working on yachts and lives in Majorca.  Mitzi, recently widowed, raises cattle in the Salmon River Valley in Idaho.  She grew up in Salt Lake City and, though she did not know him, was a high school classmate of our daughter Anne’s Uncle Nick at East High School!  We found this out as we were discussing our travels, including discussing where we got stuck on a snow bank at Wolf Creek Pass in the High Uintas about five years ago.  She had lived many years in Park City, about the time Nick and Anne’s aunt, Robbie, had lived there.  Small world.  Her family is not native Utah though—from Illinois.

We drank an extra bottle of chardonnay from Casablanca valley, at Mitzi’s courtesy and closed the Cocino down at midnight.  They will join us for dinner tonight where we will celebrate Mitzi’s 66th birthday at the Alegre Restaurant doing a tasting menu from a chef, Sergio Barroso, age 28, who apprenticed under Ferran Adrià at El Bulli in Spain.