Day 52 - Melbourne is famous for ......

Valparaiso

Give me a "C"

This morning we headed down the hill to join a walking tour and one of the first things they did was take us part of the way back up the same hill on a funicular (locally known as an ascensor) - pity we didn't know about that funicular yesterday. We retraced some of the area we had walked yesterday but this morning we had someone pointing out the interesting things that we had missed, like the set of steps that we had walked up that had been painted like the keys of a piano, apparently done for a photography shoot for a local band, now famous and known as the "Piano Steps". This was just one example of the street art that we saw all over Valparaiso, much of it was quite impressive (not all of it though .... taggers are everywhere!).

Apprentice tour guides

Of course a walking tour in Chile is never the same without stray dogs joining the group - this time we had an incredibly clever dog that left us at the start of the funicular and met us at the other end after climbing the steps! Valparaiso is also famous for mountain bike racing down the stairways and narrow lanes. Since dogs hate bikes (well they do in Chile anyway), they collect all of the strays beforehand  and keep them locked up, then release them when the event is over. Some other useful information the guide gave us was showing us the boundaries of where we, as tourists, shouldn't go as the areas are considered unsafe! Valparaiso has had a bad reputation for petty crime, although we were told it's no worse than Santiago.

 No idea what this means

After the tour we went for coffee at the interestingly named Melbourne Café, which had lots of pictures of Melbourne on the wall. We had a flat white (which they call an "Australiano"), which actually wasn't too bad! We then walked along the waterfront (avoiding the "no-go" area we had been told about just one street back) and caught the Artilleria acensor to the 21 de Mayo promenade, which had some great views over town, and the usual tourist stalls (where K found an alpaca scarf she wanted to buy, but when they were taken out of the huge pile they were in each one she looked at had dirty and faded lines where they had been sitting exposed to the air and the sun).

Not a bad looking (or tasting) flat white

We then caught the bus to Viña del Mar, not too far out of town, which is a beach seaside holiday area with a lot of high rise apartments along the beach. As it's autumn it was a little cool with drizzly rain so the place was pretty quiet, We walked along the beach for a while, having seen enough for today, then headed back to Valpo. Once there, we caught a different funicular to take us up the hill towards our apartment. This one was really old and a bit shaky, they don't look too safe from the outside but they do the job, many of them have been working for well over a century.

Reminds me of someone I know .....