Valparaiso and Vina Del Mar

After a good nights sleep, in a bed! after the last two nights spent on a night bus we got up and got on a bus to Vina del Mar. After the weather didn't go our way in Mar del Plata (Argentina) we hoped the chilean equivalent would preform a bit better. We arrived around midday and after lunch we eventually found our hostel after a bit of confusion. We finally got in a cab and assumed it would take us to where we wanted to go. Little did we know cabs don't work the same here. We got dropped off on the motor way in-between  the two cities with the driver telling us to get out and take another taxi. For some reason it was ridiculously cheap so we didn't kick a fuss and went to get another cab to our hostel. While standing on the side of the motorway looking for a taxi, we put together a few observations and worked out how the system works. The cabs aren't private and run on set routes and set prices. Once we worked out what kind of cab and the direction we needed to get, we managed to jump in a half full cab and get to the hostel. 
Still completely shattered from the insane amount of hours spent on a bus, we spent the whole evening relaxing and recovering in our room. The following day we got up and decided to check out Valparaiso, just a short drive from Vina del Mar. Valparariso is the third largest city in Chile. It use to serve as the main port in South America but since the Panama cannel was created it has almost been made redundant other than local goods. The city had a really cool old feel about it. It felt semi neglected as most of the old buildings had seen better days, but also there weren't many new buildings or grotty modernist buildings so the city had a really genuine feel about it. We started by taking one of the characteristic cable-cars up one of the many hills. Locals use these to get to and from the city, they look like they haven't been serviced for a century, really legit. The houses crawl up the steep hills that surround the city and are all painted bright colours. From the top of the cable car we couldn't get over how much it looked like an extremely overpopulated Wellington. With the dock, the harbour, and the city at the foot of similar shaped hills surrounding it, it really did resemble it.  Kind of scary to think Wellington might look that populated in 30years or so. From the top we walked back down towards the city down the steep old streets. After an amazing lunch we continued to explore the old streets. All the big colonial mansions are painted bright colours and in one area everything has all been restored and maintained so its a really nice area to walk around. The other thing that adds to Valparsiso's character are all the murals painted on the walls. There is one section of the city full of murals called the "open air museum".
 After a full day of exploring, we got back on a bus to Vina Del Mar. That evening we met up with Sergio (a friend from Santiago) and checked out a couple of Vinas bars.

The following day we got up, packed our bags, then headed to the beach for one last day on a South American white sand beach. The morning was cloudy but by midday it cleared up and became a scorcher. We spent the day just relaxing on the beach as the crushing waves were deadly, a bit too lethal to swim in. After a full day on the beach we headed back to get our bags from the hostel then got a bus back to Santiago to enjoy one last South American night out.