Touring Valparaiso and Vina del Mar

I don’t know what vina means in Spanish, but vino means wine so I’m thinking vina is the female version and that Vina del Mar means something like Beautiful, Delicate and Wonderful Wine of the Sea. Could be true.

As we exited the ship in Valparaiso (pronounced Val-parah-EE-so) we saw a desk that said City Tours. A group just ahead of us were getting a 2 hours tour in a minivan for $25 each, which seemed quite reasonable but they were already too many to include the three of us. So after they left we tried to get our own tour going. We needed to be a minimum of 4 people as the basic cost was $100, or else we would each have to pay $33. To take a taxi up to La Sebastiana, Pablo Neruda’s house, would be $25 one way. Seemed like a lot. So Hans went outside to see what he could negotiate with a local taxi driver while I went to the bathroom and Teddy looked around for some other people to join our group and help defray the cost.

By the time I got back, Teddy had found another couple and just as we were extolling to them the virtue of joining us, Hans came inside to say he’d found us a better deal. A local taxi driver would take us wherever we wanted to go for $25 per hour.

“Does he speak English?” Teddy and I asked in unison.

“Yes.”

Well, that was a tad optimistic as his English was quite limited. However, between the 3 of us with our smattering of Spanish, his sparse English and much laughter and sign language, we did communicate fairly well and we got a terrific tour.

On our way to Vina, Teddy noticed two brown coloured hills in the distance and asked what they were.

“Dunes,” Eugenio replied, and that’s exactly what they were. Huge sand dunes. We drove out there because there’s also a nice viewpoint of the Pacific on the other side of the road, and we spent a little time walking around the trails there, which were busy with Japanese. The surf pounded the rocks far below us while ahead, the huge rocks thrusting out of the ocean were completely white. And not bleached by the sun. Along the edges where we stood and where there was vegetation, the cliffs were covered with wild Livingstone Daisies in brilliant hot pink. I spent months coaxing these pretty flowers to bloom and here they were blanketing the cliffs and growing wild. Gardening is not fair.

Far in the distance on the other side of the crescent shaped bay that holds Vina and Valparaiso, we could see our cruise ship dwarfed by the distance.

We had arranged with Eugenio that at the end of our tour he would take us to a Super Mercado where we could buy some coke and wine, and that’s where we headed after visiting La Sebastiana. Eugenio was very helpful, carried our basket and led us to the wine section where we were once again able to buy 2 litre boxes of Carmeniere for $4. The coke was darn near as expensive: nearly $2 for 1.5 litres.

So, amply supplied with wine and coke for our next three days at sea, we were deposited back at the dock and our ship.