Premier beach resort, my a*$e

After a surprisingly good breakfast, featuring more good brown bread along with ham and some fruit, Pete, Mollie and I went out to explore the city a little bit more and then head over to Valparaiso's sister city just up the coast, Viña del Mar. Our principal objective in town was the Museo Almirante Cochrane, celebrating Chile's favourite adopted Scottish naval hero, which was at the top of Cerro Cordillera. The plan was to get the ascensor up there, look around the museum, then head back down to the town centre and the railway station. Unfortunately, this failed to take into account two things - firstly, the ascensor wasn't operating, so we had the best part of 200 stairs to climb (you can all imagine my joy at that...); and secondly, the museum appeared to be somewhat less than we had had indicated to us - my generous spin was that perhaps they were refurbishing the place, but basically there was nothing to see as most of the house was closed off, and all you could do was go out on the back terrace and take in more views of the city.


So we swallowed our slight disappointment, and headed for Viña, reputedly Chile's main beach resort town. The first surprise was quite how close the two cities are - the connecting train only took about 15 minutes or so. The second was how unlike any of our idea's of a beach town the place looked once we got out of the train/metro station. The third was the discovery that said beach resort had built a municipal carpark on what appeared to be a mass of reclaimed land in the estuary of the town's river, taking up about 3/4 of the potential channel. When we then discovered that much of the seafront was a jumble of rocks that wouldn't have looked out of place on the British coastline, liberally festooned with rubbish, and that when you did get to the sand, the vista was dominated by probably one of the world's ugliest piers, we came to the universal conclusion that Viña del Mar is actually a bit of a hole. And an expensive hole at that, judging by the cost of food.

Back in Valpo, we headed back to the hostel to freshen up, then went out to investigate one of the food places recommended by my Footprint guide, called Mastodonte. The book describes fairly kitsch interior - what this actually means is that, on the Mastodon/Mammoth theme, there are large, colourful murals of jungle scenes and the like, and fake stuffed heads on the walls in the ground floor part, whilst the basement section is more like a prehistoric cave. On the bright side, it does very good traditional (i.e. fairly unhealthy) Chilean food, in massive portions, and has beers from the local El Puerto brewery (including Redbeard red ale, and Blackbeard black ale - can you see what they did there?). I had a chacarero, a Chilean slant on the "massive beef sandwich" theme, containing lots of green beans though not, as far as I could tell, any sauerkraut this time. Oh yeah, and about half of Mollie's salmon, as the portions were a bit big. Yum.


After that, we went back to the hostel, where Pete and I, who had been tormenting Mollie for much of the last day with our mass of shared cultural references which meant nothing to her (Mysterious Cities of Gold is one that comes up a lot here, for obvious reasons), introduced her to the wonder of the BBC Comedy department which is Coupling, which Pete helpfully had the first couple of series of on his laptop. She lasted a couple of episodes before crashing out, whilst we hung on for a couple more, glorying in the comedic genius that is Jeff, and giggling along to the classic episode "Inferno". And then it was time for bed again.