It’s been a cool, cloudy, foggy couple of days so we’ve made the most of it and stayed at home, writing away, watching the occasional Netflix drama and generally taking it easy. I nipped down to El Plan to the local supermarket during a brief sunny break – a walk down steep steps (yes, steps,…

We’ve spent almost 3 glorious weeks in our apartment high up overlooking this tipped out paintbox of a city. We found this place on Airbnb with Gabriel as a Super Host (TIP – you seem to get a heightened and more reliable experience with a Super Host who rely on good reviews to sustain their…

We have been to two bars here. And back several times. Because they both have what makes a bar: regulars. Bar Ingles is marvellous for the generosity of the free pour and its complete lack of Englishness – red phone box toilet doors and Diana snaps aside. Two regulars we met playing dice as we…

In this portside town of ragged colour, where restaurants don’t of themselves invite you in, the lure of a prix fixe menu of onion soup and beef stew with corn mash for seven thousand pesos was irresistible. Photographic opportunities aside – the chance to dress in grandmother’s clothing for fond relatives – the room was…

You can be walking the streets of Valparaíso, minding your own business, when you suddenly become aware of being followed – not by a human mind you, but by one of our furry friends, a Chilean street dog. When you catch their eye, they pretend to be doing something else, perhaps they’ll suddenly sprawl out…

In the 18th and 19th Century, British and European immigrants who arrived in Valparaíso and who weren’t Catholic were not accepted into any of the city’s cemeteries and were instead buried in shallow graves in the consequently plague-riddled cliffs at Playa Ancha. It wasn’t until 1823 that non-Catholics got their own special ‘dissidents’ cemetery, the Cementerio de…

The Thomas the Tank Engines of South America (I’ve named our locals Alfonso and Ángel) spend their days lurching up and down Cerro Artilleria, having done so now for 126 years. Not surprisingly though, they’re looking a bit worn and tired these days with a worryingly wonky overgrown track to cling to that incrementally guides…

For a while there we were above the fog as we wandered over towards ocean-facing Playa Ancha, but then, as we got closer to the beach the fog pressed in and the air got decidedly colder. I have to be honest here. Chilean infrastructure and general upkeep of things, particularly in Valparaíso, are bad. The…

Today we encountered the famous Humboldt current, an ocean system that runs up the coast of Chile from the cold Antarctic waters of southern Patagonia, with deep sea nutrients and some of the richest fishing grounds on the planet. Here in Valparaíso it regularly produces super chilled pea-souper fogs, like this morning, with thick tendrils…

Sunrise here is quite spectacular though we can’t quite make out the Andes this morning with the early morning haze. But I’m sure Aconcagua will make an appearance sometime today once the winds kick in. I still can’t get my head around the fact that here we are on the Pacific coast looking east across…