A big serving of Humboldt Pie-Part 3 of 3

After eating breakfast again at our hotel and checking out, we got on a local bus and headed over to our final destination of the weekend - Valparaíso, the sprawling port city, separated from Viña del Mar only by a street.  This city is known for its colorful neighborhoods as well as its hills, which you can ascend using acensores, boxcars that take you up the side of the hill along a track.  Most of them are quite old, dating back to the 19th century!  But our first stop in the city was Plaza Sotomayor, located next to the pier, with a number of stunning buildings to look at.

Plaza Sotomayor

We then decided to check out one of the main attractions of Valparaíso, which are the many cable cars that take people up the sides of hills, upon which sit neighborhoods of colorful buildings along knots of winding streets.  The first one we tried was out of order, so we headed over to the Acensor Concepción, one of the more famous ones.

This took us to the top of Cerro Concepción, which provides rather stunning views of the city and the bay.

We strolled around a bit, admiring the view and the quaint buildings along each street, stopping in stores to check out artesanal fare along the way.  We also stopped here to eat some delicious seafood at a restaurant that provided an awesome vista of the bay as a backdrop to our meal.  One of the coolest parts was Paseo Atkinson, a row of buildings in front of which vendors hawked all sorts of goods, from postcards to handicrafts to weird magnets with even weirder sayings on them.

Paseo Atkinson

Unfortunately our visit was on a Sunday, so, as we found out, a lot of things were closed.  There was a museum that we wanted to go to simply to see if the advertised conjoined twin fetuses in jars were still there, but alas it was closed.  We also tried some other acensors, but they were closed as well.  So we ended up wadering into one of the many squares to lounge around and people watch.  There were a lot of people doing various things, from riding tricycles to selling helado to making out on benches.  An interesting feature of this square is that there were four statues, one at each corner, of a goddess representing one of the four seasons.

The fountain in the middle of the square.

And since this was a Sunday with a lot of things closed, we decided after our plaza meandering that we would head back to Viña del Mar and catch our bus back to Santiago.  And here is why the end of our beach visit may have been the most stressful of any time this month.  Had we been thinking ahead, we would have thought that there probably would be a TON of people trying to get buses back to Santiago, since it was the end of the weekend.  And, there were.  So much so that every bus company was sold out for trips from Viña del Mar to Santiago.  But, we could take a bus from Valparaíso to Santiago - of course that would mean hopping on one of those crazy micro-buses whose drivers drive like Jeff Gordon with a cerebellar problem, massive suitcase in tow (by the way, the suitcase now has a gimp wheel because the outer shell cracked and fell off during the journey to Viña del Mar), in a short period of time.  So, that's what we did - frantically hopped on a micro that looked promising, watched like a hawk for any sign of bus station once in Valparaíso, hopping off hurredly because the micro wasn't really gonna come to a "full" stop.  But we made our bus with some time to spare, and had an uneventful ride back home, so all ended up well!  I guess we didn't really plan on visiting Valparaíso twice in one day, but hey, you do what you have to do.
  So that was our beach trip!  Stay tuned to hear about our NICU experience, as well as upcoming blog posts about our other-worldly excursions in the heart of the Atacama desert, which is where we are currently, and surviving thus far to tell about it!