Valparaiso to Los Vilos

Leaving north out of Valparaiso, I'm reminded of why the capital of Santiago was founded in the first place. (How's that for a somewhat mind-boggling opening sentence?) When Pedro Valdivia back in the 16th century headed south out of Lima, Peru, looking for gold and fame, he spent days and days crossing the Atacama Desert. This is reputed to be the driest spot on earth! It's not a desert in the sense that we might envision Lawrence of Arabia riding a camel across the endless sands of the Sahara. It's a desert as in rock-strewn ground, and high mountains.
Valparaiso is just about the same latitude as Santiago. Immediately north of Valparaiso there are some nice fertile valleys with crops, notably grapes. Then there are a few curves through some mountains, the road goes through a very long tunnel ("de Melon"), and then comes out on the coast. On the western side of the road is the Pacific Ocean, with (today) large waves pounding the shoreline. To the eastern side of the road is scrub brush and cactus, not unlike the high desert around Reno, the Mexican west coast around Baja, or the Sonoran desert of Arizona. What a dramatic change! No wonder Valdivia and his crew were delighted to come upon the fertile valley that would turn into the teeming metropolis of Santiago. And, to tell the whole truth, the fact that there are cacti here and scrub brush means the area this far south is not that harsh. As one travels farther north, it gets drier and drier, becoming the (in)famous Atacama.
Back in the good old, bad old days of pirates and buccaneers (the Spanish word for boat is buque, pronounced 'boo-kay'; a person who sails the boat is a bucanero, and the English attempt at saying it is buccaneer), Francis Drake and his ilk went plundering and pillaging up the western coast of South America. One of his compatriots was allegedly a gentleman by the name of Lord Willow. Local legend has it that Lord Willow left his mark on the shores of Chile, as represented by the spanish attempt at honoring his name: Los Vilos. There are numerous businesses in the town labelled "Lord Willow." The less romantic and therefore less interesting interpretation of the origin of the name is that it's the indigenous word for snakes. Needless to say, you know which interpretation I prefer.
Which is a VERY long way of saying: "Greetings from Los Vilos!"
Well, whether or not there were fanciful English pirates mucking about in Los Vilos in the 16th or 17th century, there was definitely a warship here in the latter part of the 19th century, the famous monitor Huascar which I talked about in Concepcion (below), under the command of the Peruvian Admiral Grau. Today, the battles in Los Vilos only take place between fishermen and their nets.
This nice little town reminds me of one of the beach communities on the central California coast near Morro Bay. It's fall here. The sun is out; it's still shirt-sleeve weather during the day, but there's a nice cooling breeze that blows in off the water.
Unfortunately, throughout the whole day there's a haze that spoils attempts at majestic seashore photographs. It seems the cold water happens to meet the high pressure hot dry desert-like air and the result is a haze that muddies up the air a lot of the time.
Los Vilos has a beautiful long beach. Yesterday when I arrived the waves were quite big and a dozen or so surfers in wet suits were out there taking advantage of them. They were the only ones in the water. The other dozen or so people on the beach were the inveterate beach strollers, out getting their exercise on the beautiful empty beach. Los Vilos offers about a dozen restaurants, one cafe with "real" coffee (!), and a couple of dozen more shops offering kitsch/artesan products.
I had another wonderful "Chile experience" today. At "onces", my coffee break, I asked the waitress in the local chileno version of Starbucks, where there might be a bicycle repair shop in town. She asked why. I said I wanted to rent a bike for the day and thought that might be a good place to start. The other customers then put their heads together and all agreed there was no bike repair place in this village. With that, one of the customers said "You can borrow my bike for the day." So today, I got both exercise and another opportunity to experience Chilean friendliness to strangers.