Mar 3 - Santiago (Valparaiso), Chile

SANDY SHORE : Four buses, two cops and one taxi barely got us to the ship terminal in time for the ship’s departure in Valparaiso, Chile! It was before 4:00 pm and we were less than 12 miles from the town’s center, in a pretty beach community called Viña del Mar (very similar to La Jolla in San Diego) when we made our move to return to the ship’s vicinity. We were due on board no later than 5:30pm. We figured we’d get down to the pier with more than enough time to stock up on Chilean beer and wine before boarding and retiring to our usual departure position at the back hot tubs.

Donna and I had been enjoying a wonderful day with our new friends Dan & Roy… we traipsed up steep, steep hills in the city to reach 3 adjacent, old cemetarios and walked around Viña del Mar before settling in at an ocean front restaurant where we enjoyed local delights before hiring a horse and buggy to take us on a short tour of this romantic little town.

Little did we know that our day of crazy, inappropriate jokes and extreme city hiking would turn into a movie screenplay called THE VALPARAISO INCIDENT starring renegade bus drivers, dismissive cabbies, cute cops and kind strangers.

We knew that we were screwed at 5:00 pm when the “15-minute bus ride” turned into an over hour long “scenic tour” of every hill and back street of Valparaiso. If you ever want to know exactly how much Spanish you don’t know, take a ride on a city bus in South America…

I must have asked the driver 10 times when we would be arriving at the cruisado terminal and he gestured that he was going there around the city and we’d be there in five minutes. Five? Really? I believed that the first five times he said it… We could see the ship from the tops of every hill we sped over… there it was, strikingly beautiful and eager to set sail.

At 5:10 pm we were told to transfer to another bus that apparently was going on a more direct route towards the terminal. The driver wouldn’t even attempt to speak to us and seemingly had no guarantees for us as far as getting us to the ship’s entrance in time, so on instinct we bailed. Jumped out in a random hilly neighborhood of Valparaiso where two young men offered to help us (without speaking English) to hail a taxi. The drivers weren’t really interested in picking up Americans on this day in this neighborhood so they blew on by…

I saw a police officer on a motorcycle and I appealed to him for help. He held up his watch to me and wanted me to point out when we needed to be back on the ship… I pointed to 5:30 and he forced a taxi to stop and told the driver to take us to the ship’s terminal immediately. Note, this taxi driver had already driven by us earlier and wouldn’t stop!

We made it to the ship’s pier, but the terminal at Valparaiso is set up so that you take buses from the terminal (about 1.5 miles from the ship). So while we were just 100 feet from the Splendor, Chilean authorities would not allow us to access it from there. It was 5:25 pm. A kind gentleman saw the panic in my face and asked Roy if we were trying to get on the ship… Roy told him that we were and the man said that he was the Port Captain and he would help us.

He actually did… he walked with us to another bus, which we boarded in heavy, heavy traffic and we rode, rather slowly, to the Terminal entrance. The Port Captain got out of the bus with us and walked us across a busy street and to the entrance of the Terminal and told us that everything would be fine. I gave him a big hug and a kiss before dashing behind my companions to make our way to the final entrance and yet on another bus ride before we could board.

We got on board at 5:58 pm. WAY TOO CLOSE for comfort!
I’m going to share a lesson I learned about myself on this day during THE VALPARAISO INCIDENT… I learned that my body can handle physical stress far more than I realized, but I can’t handle mental stress at this intensity – I’ve had a solid stream of it for way too many years now and I’m certain that I’m maxed out on the adrenalin hormone at this point –As I write this journal entry two days after the fact, I’m still freaked. Uno Dirty Martini por favor!

Despite the craziness of the VALPARAISO INCIDENT, I truly enjoyed the city’s color and what felt like a ‘not taking themselves too serious’ attitude by the locals, who were friendly, helpful and relaxed. I have never seen such artful and colorful graffiti as we saw in Valparaiso… it’s everywhere and it’s part of everything and some of it actually signed and dated as originals. The city is wealthy with fantastic graffiti and what we were calling Dan Brown coding through out the hilled neighborhoods…

So colorful is the word to describe this day’s adventure… colorful houses, street paintings, language and faces! ~ss