With sketchy plans to meet Trilingual Tour Guide later, my two fellow couchsurfers and I walked a mere three blocks to catch the bus to Concón, a beach near Valparaiso. For 150 Chilean pesos (about 30 cents US), we ride for an hour through Valparaiso, Viña del Mar and Renaca. Though none of us are students, we all had the good fortune of still carrying our ID cards; Valparaiso’s a big student town, so everything from the public bus to Internet cafes are cheaper if you are/pretend to be an escolar.

TTG had given us strict instructions to skip Viña - one of the most popular beaches for foreign tourists in Chile - and Renaca - the most popular beach for domestic tourists - and go to his favorite beach in Concón. The bus dropped us about half an hour from Playa Amarilla, so we ventured carefully along a busy, sidewalkless road to a less busy but windy road with cliffs on both sides, at times walking on the non-car side of the guardrail. The walk was lined by pelicans and beautiful views of the ocean and the nearby cities of Viña and Valparaiso.

When we reached the end of our directions, I asked a burly man way overdressed for the 80-degree heat if this was Playa Amarilla- we had trouble believing that we had come this far for a small, dirty beach framed with cement walls. It was, and though the beach turned out to have dark sand and be rather clean, it was not remotely as beautiful as the long, nearly empty (this being a weekday early in the season) beach in Renaca we saw from the bus window on the way home.

After a quick realization that the water was FREEZING, we spent an hour lounging and reading before setting off in search of food. We hadn’t seen any since right where we got off the bus, so we wandered in the opposite direction on a road actively under construction with more cliffs on either side. After about a half an hour we found ourselves in a small pocket of restaurants and food stands. After excessive discussion, we bought fried seafood empanadas, mist of which contained cheese, from an older woman who, to our surprise, made them to order and shared some of her delicious lemon-banana smoothie with us.

View from our lunch spot

Just as we had decided to give up on finding TTG, he wandered down the road out of nowhere. “You three are really noticeable. I just kept asking people if they had seen three gringos, and everyone remembered you.”