Valparaiso

Day 102 – The cradle that rocked

At about 3.30am this morning we awoke to 15 seconds of gentle rumble, enough to wake us up, followed by a terrifying minute of violent shunting side to side where the walls of our dorm roomed turned to jelly and plaster chunks began to rain onto us in the dark. It didn’t take long for us to work out what was going on! Our room was first door on the right and in our sleepiness the right thing to do seemed to be follow everyone else out onto the street. Matt grabbed me and I grabbed my doona to shelter our heads (and the fact that I was only in my underwear!) and we sprinted the 10 metres onto the street. Short of breath from leaping out of bed (we were both on top bunks) and the sprint, we stood looking wide eyed at each other and also around looking for hazards.

[Matt – I woke up and thought there was a big truck going past, until I realised we were on a pedestrian street with the nearest truck route hundreds of meters away. When the rumble all of a sudden turned to big side to side movements I worked out what was happening. Obviously the German guy in the bunk below Erin was a bit quicker off the mark than me, because I saw him shoot out of the room before I could even sit up (impressive given his ankle was so badly strained he hadn’t been off the couch in two days!). I followed suit, pausing long enough to collect my pants and Erin. Getting up the hallway was like being really drunk, every step you took seemed to land somewhere else and nothing would stay still, but once we were on the street things were a bit clearer. The biggest of the aftershocks in the morning sent the German guy shooting out of the room again. I know how he feels, more than a week later my heart still jumps every time an actual truck goes past!]

It being Friday night, the drunks from the bar next door had also poured out onto the street and thought it was hilarious, yelling and clapping! The rumbling was over shortly and then the banter began, everyone both excited from the adrenaline rush, but not knowing what to do next. When nothing had happened for about 30 minutes, Ricardo the night manager took a walk through the house. It appeared the building, built after the 1905 quakes that destroyed the old part of town, had stood up to the test very well and despite being a mess looked to be only superficially damaged. He let us back in through the cloud of plaster dust to quickly grab shoes and pants and then we were ordered back onto the street to wait for aftershocks.

We spent another hour or so on the street and during that time there were only two or three little rumbles, enough to make us nervous. We had no idea how long you should wait for aftershocks or what to do and our Lonely Planet guide was useless on the matter, stating that earthquakes were a fact of life in Chile but nothing more! So by mutual agreement at about 5am we filed back inside to shake out our sheets full of plaster and try and get back to sleep. The power was out at this stage and so we figured there was nothing much else we could do.

Needless to say we dozed at best, with another decent sized aftershock hitting at about 7am [Magnitude 8.8 - OFFSHORE MAULE, CHILE]. By 8.30am the power had come back on and so the whole hostel was out of bed again and huddled in the lounge watching the news, trying to work out the details. The hostel managers and another friend who was staying for the weekend pulled together a decent breakfast of fruit and eggs, serving coffee and not letting anyone else lift a finger.

Some of the plaster chunks that had fallen onto our bed.

An adobe wall in stairwell of the hostel – not too bad.

Some more superficial damage.

We checked to see if the internet was working and given it was we looked to see what we could find out. When we saw that the earthquake had measured 8.8 on the Richter scale (and somewhere in the 6’s where we were) we figured it would make the news at home and thought we had better send some messages!!! The rest of the hostel too was eager to send messages home and so for the remainder of the day our laptop was passed from person to person. Being so close to Santiago, many were at the end of their trips and waiting to fly home so were also desperately trying to find out if flights would be cancelled and what they should do. We were a little more relaxed about such things as we had planned to spend some time in Valparaiso on the coast before heading back inland to Mendoza.

There were over 30 aftershocks over the course of the day. All small but still enough to stop every person mid speech, anticipating if a move should be made (see the above link for the list!). We spent the day inside the hostel, playing board games and picking the brains of other travellers who had come from the direction we were going. I’m not sure Jenga was the best game to play, but Matt and our new friends Ben and Erin persisted, that being one of the only multilingual options! Jorge and his father braved the queues at the supermarket and cooked a big lunch for us and after surveying the damage to our dorm room (being the worst one) moved us into a roomy double upstairs that had sustained much less damage.

The view from our new room. We would not have fancied being in some of those houses on stilts during the quake, but amazingly they look untouched!

Later that evening, we went for a brief walk to the corner shop with a few of the others. We weren’t sure what we would find, as we had just been watching images of people in Hawaii going crazy in the panic of the resulting tsunami. A survey of the area showed that almost all of the buildings in the old part of town were similar to ours, only superficially damaged, although it was a little alarming that many of the ornate concrete facades had fallen down at the front of the buildings, making our decision to run out the front probably a poor one. We read up later and I had had the right idea to pull the doona over our heads, but it seems we should have stayed in bed and waited it out. Next time…

There were rumbles again all through the night, but we did manage to get some sleep, exhausted from an eventful 24 hours!

Day 103 – All is well in Valparaiso

Late the next morning after another cooked breakfast, we decided to go for a longer walk around town to survey the damage and take shots of the graffiti that this town was famous for. We also thought we would survey the craziness at the bus station and see if we could get tickets to Mendoza in the near future.

The view from the Bellavista area where we stayed.

The steep streets that wind up the hills.

Some more colourful creations.

Much of the area is pedestrian access only.

One of the neat little houses, with the hills full of them in the background.

Many of the streets in the old part are cobblestoned, with replacement streets also being paved and not asphalt.

A disused ascensor judging by the plants growing inside the little carriage. We also had a couple of trips in some non-disused ascensors, these snazzy boxes on a pendulum cable take you up and down hills for about 5oc a ride. There are about a dozen left in Valparaiso and Matt was particularly taken by them! (And I, happy not to take the stairs!)

From our walk, it appeared that what was shown on TV in relation to Valparaiso, was a bit of a dramatisation. Yes we did see a number of buildings devastated in the newer part of town (where it is more likely that developers have paid their way to an earthquake proof certificate) but these were maybe one in one hundred, and mostly on the main street in the flat part of town closer to the coast.

The unstacked shelves in a pharmacy.

Some carnage near the bus station, also featured on CNN.

S0me more damage on the main street through town.

The bus station wasn’t crazy at all, business as usual, and we were able to get a ticket to Mendoza for 8am the next morning. All of the guys in the hostel were also able to get tickets to either Mendoza and then on to Buenos Aires to try and pick up flights from BsAs or down to Santiago to take a risk and wait for the airport to reopen. So we were quite lonely at the hostel that night as it was just us and Jorge left!

Day 104 – Over the hills and far away!

Up and out early we walked to the bus station in the dark, were on our bus at 8am and braced ready for the eight hour journey east. About an hour into the trip we met our first section of ‘dodgy’ road. A section of an overpass had separated and lifted about 10 or 15 cm causing a large ‘bump’ in our bus ride – but it was ok, there were witches hats on either side!!!!

We managed to stay awake to get some great snaps of the very high pass the bus route took over the Andes and its 15 switchbacks and some of the other baron but spectacular scenery along the way. The border crossing was slow as usual, but by far not the slowest, and we were in Mendoza, wine country, before dinnertime.

[NB the tiny tunnel ahead through the rock]

We’d lost another day travelling but were happy to be back in Argentina where hostel managers give you a private room even though you didn’t pay for it, guys give you their ticket in the queue so you don’t have to go to the end even though you’ve been queuing longer than everyone else and couldn’t find the secret number dispenser, waitresses chase you down the street to give you your jacket back and other nice things like this.