La Serena Day 1

This past weekend I traveled to La Serena, a town that is a 6 hour car ride north of Santiago. I got up early Friday morning and met my group at the IES center and then we all took a bus together to the airport. The flight was only 50 minutes, and we arrived in La Serena at around 10. The airport there is so small, there are no terminals to disembark on, you just walk out onto the tarmac. We were then picked up from the airport by a bus that took us to Valle del Elqui, a beautiful green valley where farmers grow grapes for wine and pisco. La Serena is on the coast and is also in one of the narrowest regions of Chile so it is also in the foothills of the Andes. It was a bright, sunny day and the drive through the valley was gorgeous. We stopped at a small hydroelectric dam that provides all of the electricity for the region that La Serena is in. We bought cactus ice cream and drank papaya nectar with aloe. (It’s supposed to cure anything) It was so nice to be outside of Santiago because the air in La Serena is amazingly pure, which gave our lungs a chance to breathe some clean air. After the dam, we got back on the bus and visited the town center of Paihuano, a tiny town of less than 1,000 is in a small valley to the south of La Serena. We stopped there to talk to the town planners and get a feeling of small town life in Chile. People tell me that in order to experience the “real” Chile, I need to leave Santiago and travel around the rural areas. They are right. It is a different Chile outside of Santiago. Life is very relaxed and people are very, very friendly, every local that I passed on the street said hello to me. Some people are also very poor, but they don’t seem to mind. After the town, we continued to drive into the valley and stopped at a restaurant that the program director, Maricarmen, knew and ate the most tender pork that I have ever eaten in my life. The restaurant overlooked a wine vineyard and from your seat you could gaze back up the valley. After the restaurant, we went and toured an organic pisqueria, which is a place where they make pisco, a grape liquor that is very popular here. It is one of the only organic pisquerias in the country; they only make pisco in March and April, harvest time for the grapes. At the end of the tour we got to drink different aged pisco, it was very strong. After the pisqueria, we drove back down the valley and stopped at Gabriela Mistral’s house, the female Nobel Prize winning poet from Chile. By now it was about 5:30 and we drove to Vicuna, another town near Valle del Elqui. We had dinner in a restaurant and I will always remember the waitresses because they were the nicest waitresses I have ever had. The called all the boys “mi amor” and would chat to us while we ate. Just another benefit of small town Chile. After dinner it was dark and we drove up to an observatory outside of town. There are quite a few observatories in this region of Chile because they have pure sunshine 320 days a year. At the observatory we listened to a presentation about the universe and the stars we were about to see. Did you know that the milky way galaxy has over 100 million stars in it and that there are at least 100 billion more galaxy’s in the universe? If you went to a beach and looked at all the grains of sand, and every grain of sand represented 10 suns, there wouldn’t be enough grains of sand to represent all the stars in the universe. After the presentation we went to look at stars through a two meter long telescope. We saw the Southern Cross, which is the equivalent of the North Star in the northern hemisphere. Our guide would focus the telescope on what we thought were two or three dim stars and when you looked through to telescope there would be 300 in that same spot. We then went up into the actual observatory and looked at Jupiter and other stars through the electric telescope. After realizing how small and insignificant we actually are, we got back on the bus and drove to our hotel in La Serena, arriving around midnight.

Pisco Sour

$4,000 bottles of wine

Ari and Hattie

La Luna

Valle del Elqui