La Serena, Vicuña, Valle de Elqui

May 1-4, 2009

My friends Cali, Vanessa, and I took an early bus out of Viña Friday morning in hopes to get to La Serena the estimated 4-6 hours later. Since the only seats left to buy were camas (as oppose to semi camas), we were really comfortable...a little too comfortable. Our bus driver got lost and we ended up not getting to La Serena until about 5pm. We walked around and saw some pretty churches and found a cool market where Cali got a trenza! We had a nice dinner and came back to crash at our cute, but cold hostel.

The next morning we checked out a famous artisan market and then headed to Vicuña (about 1 hour). We absolutely fell in love with Vicuña. It was smaller, more beautiful, and less bustling than La Serena. The slower pace of life with less tourists was just what we needed. It had a real "campo" feel. We stayed at the most adorable bed and breakfast run by 2 German ladies.

That afternoon we visited the house where Gabriela Mistral (influential female Chilean poet) was born and then made a deliciously cheap dinner at our hostel before heading off to an observatory to take advantage of what is considered one of the 7th best skies to view stars in the world (another one being up North in San Pedro de Atacama). This was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. We had the opportunity to visit a newly opened observatory about 45 min. away from Vicuña to a place with not a light in sight and an eerie feeling of undiscovered earth. Here, we were introduced to best telescope in all of Chile. The tour consisted of only 10 other people and our tour guides were incredibly knowledgeable and patient with pointing out star formations and teaching us about what we were seeing. What we were able to see was spectacular. I especially loved seeing the moon (and all its craters!) and saturn (and it's ring!). It was pretty wild to see all different constellations (being in the Southern hemisphere and all...). They had a very cool computer program that helped demonstrate what we should be seeing. We saw one star that is in the process of exploding. When it explodes, it will be the first one since 1500!!!

After having the most glorious breakfast, we headed into Valle del Elqui (about 1 hour). This was a beautiful ride, filled with vinyards, mountains, and sunlight. We were let off in the "center of town" and walked around a bit before we took a tour of the pisco vineyard Gabriela Mistral. Chile is famous for its pisco, an alcohol made by the fermentation of grapes. Chile and Peru are constantly fighting over who has the better pisco. The tour was interesting since it was the first non-wine tour I've taken. We got to sample some piscos at the end of the tour and was given a complimentary pisco sour.

After a nice picnic lunch of fresh palta (avacado), cheese and tomato sandwhiches, we took a beautiful stroll to the nearby Andean village where Gabriela Mistral grew up: Montegrande. Here, we visited her house and saw her school. We took the bus back to grab our stuff in Vicuña before making our way to La Serena in order to catch our 1am bus back to Viña. Or so we thought...

As we were waiting in the cold La Serena bus terminal, it suddenly dawned on me that the bus ticket people sold me tickets for 1am on Sunday when I said I wanted a bus ticket for Sunday night/Monday morning "like at 1am"...so after a lot of frustrating conversations, we finally got tickets back to Santiago (since none were going to Viña) at 3am and backtracked 2 hours to Viña.

All in all though it was a fabulous trip and an incredible learning experience. It is way more fun to learn Chilean culture hands-on!