Snatch! Dash! Crash!

On the way to Valparaiso, a seaside city an hour and a half northwest of Santiago, I thought to myself, "self, you've been getting too serious with your posts. What with all the dour political news of voting problems and passports. It's time to liven things up a bit. Start travelling. Put some action in there!" Which is why I ended up going to the hospital again. All to give you some excitement. A rush of adrenaline. Something worthwhile to read when you check my blog.

OK, maybe it didn't quite happen like that. Maybe it even involved a certain level of foolishness, but I can pretend it was otherwise.

After arriving in Valparaiso yesterday and having one of the best meals I've had in months (thanks for the cafe recommendation Jess), Anne and I checked our map and decided to following one of the short routes marked as a walking tour. The city reminded me a little of San Francisco, being set on a bay with colourful houses covering the surrounding steep hills. We rode a couple of the ascensors that are dotted around the city on the way to the start of the walk. They're sort of like elevators on extremely steep train tracks which you can take to avoid climbing stairs up some of the hills. Built in the 1880s, the originals are still running today, complete with creaking wood sounds.

Shortly after starting the walk, we began to see some shifty-looking people lazing around. Stopping to look at a local fish market, someone tried to open Anne's backpack without us noticing. But we did and he walked away quickly. In hindsight this may have been the obvious point to turn around, but theft is always a danger when you look like a tourist and it didn't seem unusual.

After walking on a bit further, we found ourselves in an area with a nice view out over some of the hills, empty save for what looked like a young university student who had been walking ahead of us. If you've noticed the lack of pictures so far, you may have guessed where this is headed. Anne got her camera out, took a couple pictures, and just afterwards had it snatched from her hand by the ex-student/newly revealed thief who then made a dash for it.

Reacting instead of thinking, I ran full speed after him only to find his friend throw a large rock at me, then another. After the first hit me on the arm and I dodged the second, it occurred to me that now was the time to stop chasing, and they ran off.

No major damage done, only bruises and cuts. In hindsight there were a lot of obvious clues we should have taken to turn back, but before it happened I had unfortunately not yet developed hindsight. I'm left wondering why the makers of our map plotted a walk through what we later found from the police is one of the more dangerous areas of town, especially so in the daytime.

Luckily as we are in Chile, the police were very helpful. Three of them accompanied Anne and me in a police car to the hospital, where I got my cuts cleaned. They waited for us and afterwards gave us a ride back to our hostel.

In the end, I lost a couple pages full of resume revisions I was in the process of making (left behind at some point in the confusion), and the thieves got a camera half broken due to the previously mentioned manufacturing defect. Good thing Anne has insurance.

Sunshine managed to break through at the end of the day, when Anne and I discovered "completos". Take a hot dog, load it with onions, tomatoes, avocado, mayonnaise and ketchup, sell it for $1, and you have a completo. Dinner was good.

If the lack of pictures has decreased your level of interest in this blog, feel free to chime in in the comments to suggest more fun antics I can get up to in order to keep the excitement level of my posts up.