Santiago
Onto Chile
– Santiago
for one night. We arrive at our hotel at 10.30pm and no one was there to open
up for us, so we banged on the door for around 20 minutes. The room was like a
prison cell, narrow, dark, boiling hot, made of plywood so could hear
everything that was going on in the hotel. Luckily we were there for about 7
hours so we could cope with that.
 |
| La Serena |
We took an Uber to the airport the next morning to go to La
Serena in the Elqui
Valley. Baby D was wearing his police cap from Colombia and the Uber driver
drove off when he approached the car as Uber is not allowed in Santiago! The
next Uber driver tried to dump us at the airport cargo terminal instead of
passenger terminal, so not a great advert for them in Santiago.
Elqui Valley
When we got to La Serena, again there was no one in at the
hostel so we walked around town for a while until we could get in. Starting to
sense a theme in Chile...
We visited the completely random but stunning Japanese
botanic gardens in La Serena, a social enterprise initiative called Kokoro
No Niwa, then we booked a stargazing tour for that night.
 |
| Kokoro No Niwa |
The astronomy tour was to the Mamalluca
observatory in the next town, Vicuña.
We paid 16,000 Pesos each, although if you can get to the observatory yourself
it’s only 7,000. The last local bus back to La Serena is at around 9pm so you
would need a car.
 |
| Telescop at Mamalluca |
This area of Chile is the best stargazing spot in the world
because of its clear skies (approximately 200 cloudless nights per year), and
its ultra-dry climate being sheltered by the Andes and although it’s next to
the Pacific, its high altitude keeps it arid. Our guide for the evening had worked
in astronomy since the 80s and he was refreshingly enthusiastic about it. We
saw Saturn through the telescope, as well as binary stars and far off galaxies
such as Andromeda, and he pointed out planets, constellations and nebula
visible with the naked eye. I would definitely recommend this tour to anyone
going there; it really gives you a sense of how vast the world is and how
insignificant we are.
 |
| Pisco Elqui church |
The next day we took a bus to a teeny little town called Pisco
Elqui, famous for its pisco making. Brits will know what pisco
is of course (!?), bearing in mind that the pisqueria (pisco brewery) we
visited, ABA,
which has been around since 1921, exports 60% of its produce to the UK. Anyway
it’s a spirit made from muscat grapes, double distilled in copper pots and then
matured for between 12 and 24 months when it is mixed with water to dilute it
to 40%, and it is the most popular alcoholic drink in Chile. It can be drunk
with fruit juices or tonics, and we were told, never with coke. Try telling the
rest of Chile that, the nation’s favourite drink is Piscola.
We had a free pisco tasting and tour, and ended up buying some delicious pisco
and mango juice, making the mistake of drinking it like it was beer, before
remembering how strong it was.
 |
| ABA Pisqueria |
We headed into Vicuna for a cheap supermarket picnic and
then realising that it was Monday and yet again, all museums were closed. The
main one we wanted to visit was the Gabriela
Mistral museum. She was a Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet and humanist
from the Elqui Valley but we missed out on learning any more about her.
San Pedro de Atacama
 |
| Church in San Pedro |
After our day out, we prepared ourselves for a 15 hour bus
ride to Calama in the north, eventually arriving in a small town in the Andes, San
Pedro de Atacama, set in the driest desert in the world, with 5% humidity
and you could feel it. I suffered with a few nosebleeds due to a combination of
the dryness and the altitude which is 2408m.
 |
| Salt lakes |
We met a couple of fellow travellers on the bus who we
knocked around with for the next few days including taking bikes and cycling to
the Valle
de la Luna (Moon Valley). It was 11km to the entrance of the national park,
and then another 11km to the end from the entrance. We made it to the salt
cavern about 5km in, before turning round and heading back to town. We had to
get the bikes back anyway, but it was ridiculously hot and we had run out of
water.
 |
| Moon Valley |
I was astounded that you couldn’t buy water anywhere in the national
park. They are definitely missing a trick. You need probably 3 litres each if
cycling. There were people there that had run out of water that were on proper
bus tours, and were filling water bottles from the tap in the toilet even
though they were told the water was undrinkable.
 |
| Desert |
The Valle de la Luna is pretty
awesome (what we saw of it anyway); it’s like being on the moon. The salt
cavern was a natural geological cave formation formed from quartz and other
rock, and we were able to walk through it for around 10 minutes, then climb
over it to get back to the main road.
 |
| Vicuna |
The following day we were off on a full day tour to see the ‘piedras
rojas’ or the red stones, which were situated next to a beautiful salt lagoon.
We firstly stopped for breakfast in a charming little town called Toconao
where we visited a shop selling llama and sheep wool products, and saw the
llama, sheep and goat living in the garden.
We also saw wild donkeys and
vicuna, which look something like a cross between deer and llamas and are
related to llamas.
 |
| Wild donkeys |
We had also seen another activity we were interested in,
astro-photography, but because the photographer needed a minimum number of
people in order to make it viable for him, we ended up paying him a bit less
and just having a photo-shoot of us under the stars looking up at the milky
way, sharing a bottle of wine.
 |
| Stargazing |
|
|
|
|
|
#chile #sanpedrodeatacama mamalluca
stargazing #laserena #pisco #abapisqueria #chaxa #miniques #miscanti #toconao #flamencosnational reserve #piedrasrojas #valledelaluna #elqui valley #astrophotography
No comments:
Post a Comment