Think there are people on those stairs?

Decorating Valparaiso’s twisty hillside roads and main streets is more graffiti than I have ever seen in my life. I wrote previously about graffiti in Buenos Aires, but Valparaiso rewrites the book on this artform. There’s a bit of ugly scribble - almost none of it as overtly political as in Argentina - and a seemingly endless amount of impressive graffiti art. Several-story tall people, brightly colored animals and made-up creatures, shaded stencilwork, geometric designs…

These aren’t small pieces dashed off under the cover of darkness. They’re intricate, labored-over art pieces done in a graffiti style. This artwork is such a part of the city that there’s an outdoor graffiti ‘museum,’ though most of the pieces highlighted along this windy walking trail are older (15 or 19 years take their toll quickly on paint here) fading and less impressive than much of the newer artwork.

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.”

Goodbye crazy amounts of beef (mostly). Hello sea creatures.

Small restaurant in the front of a house selling fresh fish and homemade empanadas on the beach in Concòn, near Valparaiso.

Fresh fish (pescado) and seafood (marisco) fill markets, menus and even empanadas on the coast of Chile. It´s common to see people fishing off piers and from the tops of cliffs. A common soup, Caldillo de Mariscos or Paila Marina, comes with a thin broth packed with clams (almejas), mussels, (choros) shrimp (camarones), cuttlefish (jibia), surf clams (machas) and piures, a red seafood with a mussel-like texture that I´ve never seen before.

A popular empanada is stuffed full of clams, mussels and other random shellfish, deep fried and sold on the street. Others contain shrimp or surf clams covered in cheese and, again, deep fried.

And fish itself is, of course, served every way possible: fried whole, grilled, baked …

Much of Valparaiso´s charm stems from all the little cafes and bars tucked away in different parts of the city. After a very long walk up and down hills yesterday, Thoughtful Travler - we share the same couchsurfing host - and I stopped for some fresh fruit juice at a cafe featuring natural food on a small plaza downtown. In addition to the shock of finding out the place was vegetarian, we were amazed to discover they actually serve brown bread. In two and a half months, I have seen non-white bread about four times - and at least three of those times the bread was simply a mix of white and whole wheat flours. This bread, on the other hand, was dark and flavorful with some seeds and spices.

Although the plethora of bakeries in Chile and Argentina means freshly baked bread is always available, TT and I are plenty sick of the white bread. Thus we decided to invest some time finding the bakery that supplied the bread to that cafe, which is on a street that isn´t on the map. Knowing generally where to go, TT and I walked into several dead ends and got some bewildered looks from locals before we finally navigated through the maze that is Valparaiso to the small pedestrian street where Panadería Feliz is located - Pasaje Galvez. Three turns on this tiny, residential path later, I noticed a small mural about bread making. We had arrived. No sign or name or actual shop - just someone´s home that they sell bread out of.

We purchased two large loafs, baguette style, from the baker: one with poppy seeds (a word neither TT nor I knew in Spanish, so we had to have a funny conversation about seeds and opiads with the baker) and an even more flavorful one with oregano.

Pasaje Galvez

The mural outside Panadería Feliz

TT, holding both loaves of bread, talks to the baker and his wife outside their house/bakery

Eating the baguettes with fresh avocado on a bench overlooking the water and the city

Pale South African Traveler, Trilingual Tour Guide and another couch surfer drinking coffee on the ledge (look below for what they´re looking at…)

I come outside with my cup of coffee and find Trilingual Tour Guide and the other two couchsurfers sitting on the top of one of Valparaiso´s many (many, many, many) staircases, sipping their coffees. And admiring the stunning cliff, beach, mountain and city view that reappears unexpectedly around corners and between buildings here.

TTG, our couchsurfing host, lives on the southern end of this small but incredibly vibrant, artistic city. The northern end hits Viña del Mar and several smaller beach towns. Downtown Vaparaiso – literally the flat part by the water – is a long (north to south) and only about four blocks wide, fitting in most of the restaurants, bars, markets and plazas before the residential and university buildings take over the Steep hills and cliffs. (Though bakeries, kiosks, small shops and pubs can be found around the many small parks and tucked into neighborhoods.)

Staircases and ascensors – angled outdoor elevators – help people navigate up and down the steepest areas. The overused descriptor for here is undoubtedly bohemian, and parallels to San Fransisco are very common. In addition to the terrain and music and art scene, Valparaiso and San Francisco are (randomly) the same distance from the equator, share some similar (unexciting) history and are close to larger cities that overshadow and yet underwhelm them. More about that later…