Valparaiso, Viña del Mar and Casablanca valley, Chile

As nice as Santiago is, it's even nicer taking a day trip to Valparaiso and Viña del Mar on the coast ... and meeting some of the Porteño dogs.

The closer one gets to the ocean, the greener the countryside.

Valaparaiso and Viña del Mar are about 120 km west of Santiago. The first bay below is Viña del Mar; the second bay -- the town at the back -- is Valparaiso.

We were in Viña del Mar on Sunday and it was buzzing with families out and about in the parks and beaches, and having their photos taken with Comic Con characters. In 1962 Chile hosted the FIFA World Cup and the floral clock, with a Swiss mechanism (natch), was designed for the occasion.

Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is a Chilean territory. Picture those huge upright heads / statues called moai ... there are almost 900 of them and only two have ever been removed from that site. One is in the British Museum (go figure); the second one, unsurprisingly, is in Chile. But surprisingly, it is on a back street of Viña del Mar. It could be anything from 700 to 1000 years old, and here it is in this little fenced circle. Remarkable.

In the second half of the 1800s, Valparaiso was a boom town -- it was the major stopover for ships travelling between the Pacific and the Atlantic. But its raison d'être became shaky in 1914 when the Panama Canal was built, and it languished for about a century until it was refreshed as a cultural, art and education centre. It's now seriously hip. If you live in Valparaiso, you're a Porteño (port city person). A badge of merit, it appears.

Valparaiso is still a serious fishing centre. This is the Valpo fish market. I liked the seagull perched on Saint Peter, the fisher of men, but I also found the roll of fishermen who'd lost their lives quite moving. It's a dangerous business environment, the sea. Which I'm sure those maritime denizens, the sea lions and sea gulls, appreciate. The chance of fishy scraps from humans is not to be growled / squawked at.

Valparaiso is a colourful, decorated town. Street art is a thing. (Salud, Darwin!) In two of these photos below you'll spot dog art.

That's because dogs are a big part of Valparaiso. They're not street dogs, they're community dogs. A *big* difference. The community looks after the dogs -- they are fed properly by a responsible person, they are inspected regularly by vets, the council gives them a bath every week. But they don't belong to an individual, they belong to a neighbourhood. This is an absolutely charming situation. Our guide Claudio, whose home town is Valparaiso, introduced us to a number of neighbourhood dogs including Paula, who is now 17 years old. Paula was accepting of her celebrity status but soon bored by the attention. I just want to be left alone, sighed the diva. Her kennel, on a public walkway, acknowledges that she was the first 'tour guide' in Valparaiso.

On the more serious side, the town cemetery is in the centre of the town and the shanty town is on the hills. We've seen this everywhere we've been. The flat land is where moneyed people live; the poor people build shanty towns on the hills. There's no running water or electricity, and in rainy conditions, life must be very tough. The new Chilean government was elected on a platform to improve the situation for the shanty-town dwellers, by reducing the time from 5 to 2 years before they could apply for services.

The flat part of Valparaiso is all reclaimed land. The 'plan' (Spanish for flat) is built on multilevels. Two ways to move from level to level are the Valpo slide (yes, we did) and the funicular (yes, we did).

Our final stop on our day out was in the Casablanca valley, which is a wine centre par excellence. We tasted a sparkling wine, a sauvignon blanc and a carménère. The whole experience was very pleasant, so who cares how the wine tasted? (It was fine.)

I'd have liked to visit the Museum of Pre-Colombian Art and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago. The latter commemorates the victims of human rights violations during the Pinochet regime (aka Pino-shit, according to Claudio). But all museums are closed on Monday, which is super-annoying. Ah well, travel, hey.

Next: Rio de Janeiro