I found myself next to him waiting for our luggage after the bus pulled in. Likely I was regretful about saying something that might have come off as rude to a local so maybe I apologized to him. Maybe I didn't though, I honestly don't remember. He looked at me.
"You wanna smoke a joint?"
"Yeah sure," I said.
"Ok, come with me."
I almost lost him. He got ahead of me and I had to jump up on a moving bus I saw him board. He was in his thirties, traveling with a woman that age or a bit older and her teenage kid. Through a mix of English and Spanish conversation I found out he lived in Santiago but was from Valparaiso originally and was here visiting. We went to their hostel and bought beer and drank it in their room. No weed was produced and I started wondering what was going on. Finally I asked him and he said he didn't have it and we'd have to go get it. Great. Whatever, I'd let it unfold. He had some errands to run first though.
After the hostel the four of us headed down to the street. My new acquaintance was carrying a duffel bag he had with him on the bus. We walked into a tienda off the main road. Dude made warm greetings to everyone in the store. He seemed to know everyone in Valparaiso. A fat lady behind the register appeared to be in charge and he heaved the bag up onto the counter in front of her and began to take from it all manner of store-bought goods, bottles of liquor and packaged meat and razorblades and cans of insecticide, to name a few. She questioned him on the price of various items and then they completed what business they were able to agree upon. He repeated this bit in several other stores until I finally asked him, in earnest, if there was some price difference in goods sold in Santiago versus Valparaiso from which he hoped to profit. That was naive. He then unashamedly pulled out some woman's credit card with which he'd bought the items.
He really wasn't a bad guy. He did force me to wait even longer after the fencing while he and his family went out to lunch in some disgusting restaurant but then finally we got a cab and were on our way. Valparaiso is on the Pacific Ocean but the land on which it was founded quickly rises up to surrounding hills and into these we drove. We went higher and higher and I was starting to worry. The property was getting shabbier, as it tends to in Latin American cities when you climb, and I had my ipad on me. Eventually the cab came to a stop at the end of a dirt alley that terminated at the edge of a cliff. I gave him twenty bucks and he ran inside a house. He came back five minutes later and got in the car and tossed me a handful of tightly-folded paper wads that contained maybe half a gram of shwag marijuana each. He'd bought some too and did the courtesy of rolling one for the ride down. The cab driver had nearly crashed head-on into a truck on the way up, while sober, so it made me nervous when we pulled over at a roadside vista and he smoked with us. But what the hell. And thus is the story behind the below picture:
When we got back into town he tried to fence the rest of the goods. Finally he led me back to his hostel and I collected my backpack. We said goodbye and I walked off toward my own accommodation. I got his number and told him I'd call him. I never did.
Neruda's house was a joy, and Valparaiso lived up to its vaunted reputation. I took some great pictures there, had some great walks. Now I was leaving the Southern Cone, and its relative wealth and development. Parts of Buenos Aires could be mistaken for Europe, parts of Santiago for a North American city. That wasn't going to happen where I was headed. I was going to Bolivia.
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