Viña del Mar

I´ve managed to stay put in Viña del Mar and will finish out my trip here. It´s a nice town and I´ve found plenty of things to do here. The manager of the hotel also cut me a deal if I stayed with them for the rest of my stay, so I took her up on it and haven´t had to move, which has actually been really nice staying in the same place for more than a day or two. The other day I was chatting it up with one of the local firefighters who was happy to practice his English and give me the low down on their fire department. He informed me that every city in the country of Chile is manned by volunteer fire complanies. The problem they have is lack of fudnding, and explained to me the purpose behind the raffle they were doing. He said the city government provides part of the funding for operating costs, the national government a part of it, and the rest of the money required for training, equipment, fuel, uniforms, etc. must be raised by the firefighters themselves. They are out beating the streets to raise money for this raffle for two months of the year during their busy tourist season. When I asked what the raffle prize was, he told me it was a car, that was not donated, but also purchased by the firefighters to raffle off. Many of their equipment and apparatus is out-dated due to this lack of funding, however their numbers for manning remains strong. We chatted it up for about an hour and he showed me all their equipment and trucks.

I took a bus ride up the coast to scout out some of the smaller towns along the coast and made it to a town called Concon. It´s well known for it´s many Pescado (fish) restaurants along the coast. I opted to try out some empinadas, another commonly eaten food down here, that is sort of like a pastie that they fill with just about anything you could imagine. There´s plenty to do along the coast. The coast is steep and rocky and scattered with little secluded sandy beaches and small resort towns along the way. Today I rented a bike and rode about 20 miles up the coast all the way to Concon, where I went the day before. It was nice being able to stop at every little beach along the way and at least take a few pictures. I ran into what may be the coolest house I´ve ever come across (see pic), and will someday live in a place like this! The bike ride was pretty cool with amazing views, but wasn´t so cool when chain started coming off the rear sprocket of my awsome bicycle every two minutes on the way back into town. Made for an interesting / frustrating ride home. I found a place that rents sea kayaks, and I think that will be on tomorrows agenda. There is a big Chilean Navy Base here, so there are plenty of naval ships in the port and fellas running around the beach doing p.t. The Chilean people seem to be a little less friendly than others that I have associated with, and appear somewhat unhappy, but that may just be because I don´t completely understand their culture, so I can´t really judge them. Other than that I´m just living up my last few days in town before I depart.