Last weekend I stayed in Valparaíso for 3 nights. I took a two and a half hour bus ride from Santiago with no plan.
I looked for the closest hostel nearby the bus station, which I learned later is in one of more dangerous parts of town. I took a lap around the block. No hostel to be found. Only street vendors selling veggies, fruit, and fish of all varieties. The unpleasant smell of fish that has been sitting in the sun all day lingered in the air. I retraced my steps back to the bus station and looked at the street I went down initially. I have an app, hostelworld, that I looked at briefly before I arrived so I knew there was supposed to be a hostel around there. I decided to do one more pass down the street. Only a few doors down, a tiny, dusty sign that read “muffin hostel” hung above a gated door.
Muffin Hostel was quite loud, a bit dingy, but oddly a great place to stay. There is no reception, just two Chileans with a clipboard and some cash they store away in an old drawer under a table. Only $8 or $9 to stay the night in a room with 4–8 people. I slept on the top bunk and took ice cold showers in the mornings.
The city of Valparaíso is full of graffiti art and great food. The city is a bit dirty but it’s extremely colorful. I went on one of the free walking tours where you tip the guide at the end. The city is a mix of poor and rich who all live together in the hills.
Some interesting history here: the port in Valparaíso was a big stopping point during the California gold rush. People would sail from Europe, stop in Brazil, go down around the tip of Argentina and stop on the coast of Chile. Here they would stock up on supplies for the last leg of their journey before arriving in California.
There is an old prison located in the middle of the city. It was built in the early 1800s by the Spaniards, turned into a prison in 1840 then was used as a prison until 1999. I was really overcrowded so they abandoned the place and didn’t know what to do with it. In the early 2000s it was cleaned up turned into a public space. Inside the prison walls there are gardens, meeting rooms, and even a gym.
Even on a cloudy day, Valparaíso is full of color.
Just about every building is covered with graffiti. Established artists, Chilean and foreign alike, come to Valparaíso to create a mural and they will include their social media handle to promote themselves. A lot of times people won’t paint over bigger graffiti art because they don’t want to ruin it. Sometimes artists are even paid to paint a solid color over a wall or the metal door of a shop to get rid of the smaller tagging.
Speaking of street performers, I met a Honduran man who has been traveling for almost 3 years living off the money he made from playing the violin in the streets (also known as busking). He travels from city to city, only booking a hostel for one night. He didn’t know how long he would stay in Valparaíso the first night he arrived but he made a ton of money busking the next day so he decided to stay for a little while.
Katerina and I enjoyed the sunset on a hill untraveled by tourists. We sat on the corner of a calm intersection, listening to Chileans gathered at a pizza restaurant nearby.
This week I took a Spanish course at a school in Bellavista, about a 25 minute walk from my hostel in Santiago. Sunday I will head south. My goal is to get to Punta Arenas in Patagonia on the 27th of this month. Everything in between that is up in the air at the moment.
