La Serena and Valparaiso

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

Our bus journey to La Serena was nice and comfortable. Lots of leg room and the luxury of tarmac roads, meant that the 12 hours went by quite quickly. We didn't arrive in La Serena until nearly midnight though, so we were glad that the hotel we'd chosen was still open and that they had a room. La Punto Hostel, is the nicest place we've stayed in ages. The room had actually been thought about and it was really pretty with our own little outside area. They also included a good breakfast in the price.
La Serena itself was quite a nice town, some interesting old style buildings mixed in with some very modern shops. Chile is far more developed than Peru and Bolivia. We had a look around a little craft market and went to visit the archeological museum. We mostly wanted to go there so that we could see their Moai, it's too expensive to fly to Easter Island, so that was quite a good find. They also had more dead people, which seems to be obligatory in Chilean museums, and a couple of completely disgusting shrunken heads! We also went for a walk around their pretty Japanese garden, which had some tranquil water features and some nice ducks.
For our second day in La Serena we took a walk to the coast. Unfortunately we are approaching winter time, and the weather wasn't really conducive to sunbathing. But it was a nice walk and made a change from all the high up places we've been recently. There wasn't much to see along the seaside, except for a lighthouse (which was quite tacky).

On Saturday we took another long bus ride, this time to Valparaiso. Chile is a long country and that makes for long bus rides, but it was another comfy journey. Valparaiso is by the coast but most of it's houses are up on the hills and as such it has 15 acensors or funicular railways, to get people up and down. We stayed the night in a rubbish hostel and then spent Sunday (or funicular fun day sunday, as we liked to call it) going up and down the ascensors. Again, it was a grey day, but it was still fun. Although, we weren't really convinced of the structural security of the railways.
Valparaiso is a funny town. It had some really beautiful buildings, but also a lot of horrible areas that had never been cleaned up or fixed. There were lots of tramps and stray dogs but also cool murals and interesting funiculars. Once we'd had enough of the funiculars we took a shortish bus ride to Santiago.

Santiago seems like an okay kind of capital city. It's pretty modern, but also has interesting old stuff to look at. We're spending today having a look around and then going up a hill to see the giant Mary tomorrow (it's very catholic around here!).