We travel so rarely to wintry places it’s hard for me to remember the risk involved in doing so: the weather may be too cold or rainy to enjoy the destination. In the case of our current adventure, there was no avoiding winter if we wanted to see the total eclipse that will occur here tomorrow, July 2. July is winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Since the whole of the continent (from north of Santiago in Chile to Buenos Aires in Argentina) falls within the path of totality, we did have to choose where to try and experience it. We’d never visited Chile before, so that made us want to go there. But the weather west of the Andes is notorious for being gray and rainy in winter. We finally decided to start out in Chile but then make the short flight to Mendoza, Argentina on the eastern side, where the skies were much more likely to be clear. Still, with weather, any choice made months ahead is a gamble.
As I wrote in the last post, we lucked out in Santiago when the rain that had been forecast didn’t materialize on Monday until late in the afternoon, then Tuesday turned bright and sunny. Clouds moved in again on Wednesday, the day we drove into the countryside to see the wine country (an experience I hope to report on later). The gloom there never turned into rain, but my spirits sank when I saw my Apple Weather app was predicting downpours for both Friday and Saturday, the days I had earmarked for taking walking tours around Valparaiso and its tony neighbor, Vina Del Mar.
Happily, apps sometimes get it wrong. All day and into Friday evening, the sky only looked threatening. Steve and I spent hours enjoying a guided “free” (i.e. tips-supported) walking tour, while Michael and Stephanie roamed the city on their own. All of us enjoyed the place. Valpo (as it’s known) has had it’s share of hard knocks over the past 100-plus years. It developed on the shores of a fabulous natural harbor, but one so plagued by pirates in the 1500s that the original Spanish rulers decided to build their capital (Santiago) about 60 miles inland.
Mining and seafaring activities made the coastal city boom in the late 1800s, when more than 30 steep funicular elevators were built to help locals ascend and descend the town’s vertiginous hills.
But then a quake in 1906 devastated the place, and the opening of the Panama Canal in 1915 took more wind out of its sails. When the Germans invented a way to make a synthetic substitute for saltpeter chemically, that decimated the mining that had fueled the city’s short-lived boom. Valpo declined steeply throughout most of the 20th century, earning a reputation as a place of crime and decay.
When several of its oldest neighborhoods were declared a UN World Heritage Site in 2003, that attracted tourists whose presence has helped to turn things around. It also imposed a thicket of bureaucratic regulation, and we heard that local property owners have been divided over whether the UN designation has been worth it. From the visitor’s viewpoint, the wild architectural jumble that now exists is lots of fun to look at.
Some buildings have been beautifully restored, while some have been abandoned because the costs of fixing them up are now so prohibitive. Most buildings are brightly painted, and a burgeoning mural scene has added to the eye candy.
We met up with Mike and Stephanie after lunch, planning to take a walking tour of Vina del Mar together, but it wound up being canceled (because, we were told, the guide’s home had been broken into and burglarized), so we wound up seeing some of the sights on our own.
Only by late afternoon did light sprinkles (and tired feet) drive us back to our hostel for a break.
The rain started in earnest Friday night and we woke Saturday morning to the sound of such a deafening downpour it made me want to snuggle down in bed and stay there all morning. Instead we checked out of our rooms, left our bags at the hostel’s front desk, and took an Uber to the one-time home (now museum) in Valparaiso of Chilean poet/diplomat/politician Pablo Neruda. La Sebastiana, as it’s known, is an enchanting place, full of color and art and interesting insights into Neruda’s large life.
Like magic, when we left the house, the rain had cleared, and we were able to walk for a while before catching another Uber, returning to the hostel, and hitting the road back to Santiago’s airport.
The weather’s been good since we landed in Mendoza Saturday night. Lots of clouds yesterday, but they cleared by Sunday evening, and today the weather app prediction for San Juan looks like this:
We plan to drive to San Juan, a few hours north of Mendoza, this afternoon. We’ll use it as our launchpad tomorrow: Eclipse Day. If the weather stays clear, that’ll be great, since it will let us concentrate on the other big looming challenge: figuring out where to go to watch the celestial drama.
At home and abroad 