happy hill

Here in Valparaiso, I'm staying in Cerro Alegre or Happy Hill. It's a charming neighborhood, formerly bohemian, now full of wine bars and cafes and gorgeous street art.

The streets are steep.

The houses are old, or at least as old as Valpo's last big earthquake. As Ruth pointed out, Valparaiso like San Francisco, which it resembles in more ways than one, was nearly destroyed by an earthquake in 1906, and rebuilt in a similar era.

Because it's a tourist town at the height of the season, lots of boutiques were open on my street.

After a suitably late brunch, hanging out with a couple from SoCal on an awesome 6-month trip and my neighbors from Amsterdam, I took the ascensor (funicular) down to the port as Guadalupe recommended.

Also like San Francisco, Valpo has cable cars that run on actual cables, not just electric wires. 

A brake man sits at the top. 

8 or 10 people climb in.

It's a really steep hill.

You pay at the bottom: 100 pesos each way or around 15¢. What's only apparent going up is that it's a balance system: there are two cars and as one goes down, the other goes up. I'm not sure how they work it out if there are more people in one direction than the other.

You do get a great view, looking out over the port.

Next stop was the lanchas—tourist boats that fill up with passengers for a half-hour ride for 3000 pesos ($4.50). 

It was like a ride at Fisherman's Wharf, somewhere I ordinarily wouldn't be caught dead. But in the spirit of things, I bought a giant cone of cotton candy and joined the masses of local tourists.

We had our Gilligan's Island moment, as we headed out to sea before the life preservers were passed out. 

The guide made jokes in Spanish about who would float and who would sink. I understood quite a bit of it, or at least the spirit of it.

As you can see, it's an important working port. Chile is a major exporter of wine, produce, and minerals like copper. Containers lined the docks.

The armada (the Navy) also had a few vessels in port, one of them Colombian.

Here's the view looking back. Feels familiar, right? 

Downtown didn't seem too much the worse for wear, although it smelled awful. Broken glass and confetti lined some of the streets.

Last stop was a charming wine bar back up on happy hill, where I ate conejo (rabbit) served with a puree I thought was beans but turned out to be sausage. Camilla poured me a delicious assortment of Chilean wines to taste. Not a bad way to kick off a new year.

You can see why artists have flocked here for years from all over the world, attracted to the sun and the sea, and the sense of possibility, on the western edge of the continent.

lost in paradise

Like many Americans, I'd been mispronouncing Valparaíso, without realizing there's extra syllable. It's Val-para-I-so, short for valle del para-diso or valley of paradise. And even though I've only just arrived on the last day of the year, I see what they mean.

Valparaiso is the coolest place to be on New Year's Eve in South America. Rio apparently gives it a run for the money, but everyone else is here. Double-decker buses left Santiago every 2 minutes in a crazy scramble that would be comical or horrifying in another country. Friendly guides in chartreuse asked every few minutes if they could help me find my bus, which would arrive at Gates 6 through 11, or 1 through 11.

A tall friendly Canadian asked if I was staying in Valparaiso and what I intended to do there. Drink champagne? "If you like poetry, Pablo had a house there." I loved his casual romantic name dropping, like Pablo was an old pal from school. This bus situation, I said. "Yeah," he agreed. "It's a real clusterfuck."

Valpo feels a lot like San Francisco, a port built on a series of steep hills, bohemian, with troles and exuberant streetart.

As I walked up the hill to my delightful B&B, where I'm renting a cubbyhole with bunkbeds at New Year's markup, a woman in a doorway smiled and gave me a souvenir: a blue caracole (snail) on a stick. As good an omen of the new year as any.

Later I was walking around taking photos of the exuberant murals (I first learned of Valparaiso because I'd seen pictures of the streetart on Twitter), and ran into Sole, who works at the B&B on weekends. She invited me in for a celebratory drink. Here we are in our mascaras. I joked that her apartment was like a veritable United Nations.

Sole also gave me 12 grapes so that I could eat one for each month of 2017, to bring me luck. I first learned of this tradition, and the ubiquitous yellow underwear, from Eduardo in Mexico City, where you're supposed to eat one grape for each toll as the clock strikes 12.

The most beautiful tradition is environmentally suspect. People buy orange paper lanterns and set them on fire, which makes them float through the sky, burning up the disappointments of the past year. They go by the romantic name globos del deseos.

They fly high and glide down, hauntingly. Before the fireworks, the sky was full of them. This one landed in front of me, like a still-beating heart.

The crowd assembled at 11:45 to watch the fireworks spectacular shot from boats on the bay. Young and very old, everyone is here. "Chi chi chi/le le le/¡Viva Chilé!" everyone shouts. Then it starts.

Lots of kids are armed with silly string and tubes of confetti. Meanwhile this dude brought his iPad.

A beautiful night, and a great place to welcome the new year, with new friends. May the coming year bring you felicidad y paz.