Having decided to visit Valparaiso for the weekend, prior to embarking on our study adventure, we manage to successfully (bar a few moments of gormlessness) purchase two boys tickets entirely 'en española'. We are hugely pleased with ourselves, given we have not actually started our course yet (I am conveniently forgetting that we have been trying to learn it through various apps for quite some time - and that my learning session via the app last night yielded the uncompromising message 'would you like to revise this section and correct your 19 errors?') and even more pleased when we realise that we seem to have been awarded a mystery discount so that our tickets are nearly half the normal price. We have no idea why.
"Awesomeness?" Suggests M. I am not convinced that there is a discount for 'awesomeness' and that, if there was, we would qualify for it, but we begin the day with glee. AND the fruit basket at the hostel this morning, normally containing a few sad, soon to be ex fruits, contains my favourite bitter green apples. Hooray. We are easily pleased. And even that fact is pleasing.
We proceed, having snored the journey away, to check in to our hostel. It promises a perfectly central location, clean beds and a 'huge' cheap breakfast, all of which it appears to deliver on, though, no doubt much to Seb's disappointment, there are no signs of anyone having sex in the corridors. Oh well, you can't have everything. We can always rectify that later.
The highlight of the day, and in fact our opening to the city, is a guided walk run by a company called 'Tours for Tips'. This is rather less disingenuous than the 'Free Tour' we took in Santiago which also turned out to be for tips, and there is a sort of semi compulsory nature to tipping here, and set amounts for different services. This tour was actually much better, and beautifully thought out, with small surprises scattered throughout, including sampling of a pastry, a glasd of Chicha, a sweet fermented wine drink, a Chilean folk song played to us on the guitar by a leathery skinned, smiling musician perched on a wall on one of the hills.
Valparaiso itself is, as I had been told by somebody at the barbeque the previous night, "all about the hills'. Known in Spanish as Cerros, Valparaiso perches precariously on a series of them, and whilst there is town on 'the flat', it is for practical purposes mostly and lacks, I felt, the huge charm of the Cerros. Houses, colourful and each unique seem to balance, like cheeky children upon one another all the way up the hills. Murals adorn as many of the walls as possible (more about those tomorrow) and the steep nature of the terrain means that knowing your neighbours is very important to make living more comfortable up on the hills. Everybody knows someone who can provide some service, favours can be done for each other, And when somebody is going down to the flat, they might be able to pick up supplies for others. This description, compelling though it is told by our lively guide, is, I suspect, a little more in keeping with a previous time, before cars. Nowadays people can drive up and down the hills and carry things in their motorised donkey. Having said that, we saw very little in the way of traffic, and what there was, was hotly protested by the numerous stray dogs which were doing their best to reclaim that lost golden age of simplicity and save the planet by biting as many tyres as possible.
Valparaiso is beautiful, peaceful on the hills (assuming you chose the right ones - some are poor and so dangerous for tourists (a word on that later) and one taking the opposite stance, being very much set up for tourists), and it is rather like walking through an artist's workshop. There is mess, and a sort of disorganised anarchy, but art is being conceived, experimented, created everywhere. I fall a little in love with Valparaiso and its hill top living.
There are sad stories to tell though, centring mostly around empty houses, an idea which. In Valparaiso, where the houses have such colour, and the terrain has been so fiercely conquered to make it possible to live on, an empty house seems especially tragic.
We gaze at a beautiful building, full of gables and beams and colourful designs, a mixture if Italian and Chilean influence, known as the Palacio Baburizza, now a hotel.
However the Palaccio Baburizza was not always the Palaccio Baburizza, but the Palaccio Zanelli. It was built by a man with a dream for his family. Ottorino Zanelli wanted his family to be safe and comfortable, and he had the house built to ensure that generations could live in it.
Sadly, he died shortly after the house was completed and the family had moved in. In a horrible irony, his family found it too emotional to stay there, and so sold the house and moved away. Baburizza was in fact the house' second owner. He made some modifications and, when he left, the house was left for some time to ruin. It was used by vagrants and children to play in, and gradually the interior was more or less destroyed, before the city bought it, restored it, and turned it into a museum.
It makes me sad to think of Zanelli's big dreams, so transformed into a wrecked and disintegrating, and, most tragically of all, empty, house.
Zanell's is not the only empty house in Valparaiso. Our guide shows us a sad looking structure on one of the UNESCO protected hills, explaining that, whilst the UNESCO protection is in many ways a good thing, it also makes it very expensive and difficult to keep the houses in good repair. Once damaged by earthquake, fire or other natural accident, the house must he restored, at least externally, in exactly the same way it previously was, and this requires expertise greater than just how to repair a house. It becomes very expensive. The owner of this house was literally waiting for it to fall down naturally, so that he could put the land it stands on to some use. As the house has already withstood two fires and an earthquake, he may be waiting for some time yet.
Another rather sad story, a broken house representing an equally broken dream, is the old hotel on what was once the richest street in Valparaiso. Prior to the opening of the Panama canal, Valparaiso had been a port of great importance and that street had been lined with the grandest of hotels, restaurants and shops to service the demands if rich tradesmen. One building in particular, had been designed to be the most luxurious hotel in Valparaiso, however the opening of the Panama Canal and the accompanying reduction in visitors rather crushed its purpose. Having been bought with the intention of this development by an Italian businessman, he used the building as a home for his family for generations. Now only one old Italian lady remains, the sole living member of that family. The building is frayed and tattered, the planned developments never completed. The first floor is used as a store room by street vendors, for a small fee to its sole occupant, who lives entirely on the second floor. It is a sad reminder of what was once an embodiment of such big dreams, standing forlornly on what was once Valparaiso's richest street, now part of an area so poor we have been warned not to go there.
That particular warning rather exemplifies a general sense of resignation which pervades Valparaiso's attitude to its poor or its sadnesses, and forms a sadder base note to the otherwise jubilant and lively melody that fills this city. If tourists are warned not yo go to the poorer neighbourhood because the desperation and sense of hardened bitterness which tends to coexist with poverty when it is situated amid an otherwise affluent population, might lead to violence or robbery, it removes from those areas the chance to thrive on the same trade as the rest of Valparaiso since the Panama Canal came into existence - I.e. tourism. How can a poor area become any less poor if tourists are warned away? On the other hand, if, as may be inevitable at least at first, tourists are allowed to venture into these areas and are robbed or worse, the rest of Valparaiso would suffer from the resulting bad press, and the entire city may find itself cut off from its livelihood.
And so, we comply. We have dinner in the more prosperous end of town. The poor stay poor. We stay safe.
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