La serena

La serena is a coastal town whose centre is about 2 km frm the sea. However, its main charms are contained within the centre. It is very colonial in style and is quite picturebook in many places. It's about 7 hours from Santigo and an early start  for an 18 hour bus journey to San Pedro.                   
Our hostel, Aji Verde was not quite as spicy as the name suggests but was fairly basic yet a typical hostel where you could meet up and chat with many people. We a meet a couple of people who we bumped into later on a tour from San Pedro.
One negative - La Serena was the first place to date where we allowed ourselves to be done! A restaurant on the main drag next to (despite the position of the man outside) the popular Cafe Colonial. he had avery good spin on his visit to England!
There is a nice market there and a huge supermarket next to it where Anne enjoyed doingher supermarket tourist bit! It's not only me who finds this kind of behaviour 'eccentric' but also the security guards who made it obvious that they were watching!!
The beach is about a 2 km walk away (but in draining heat - this is on the edge of the desert). When we arrived it was a little disappointing. True there was more than a golden mile but it was a bit spartan and there was no shade anywhere. So if you liked doing impressions of peeled lobsters (as many apparently did) it was great! There was a lot of beach, stretching well into the distance - very clean. I use the singular but the guidebooks and the maps like to parcel the beach into 6 different beaches - it all seemed a bit arbitrary.
 For better or worse, the beach is not developed- true there are some hostels/hotels and a couple of cafes but if you wanted to buy water or any other soft drink without sitting in those cafes, you were stuck. We ended up having a Middle Eastern meal in a Palestinian place at the beginning of the beach.

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Apart from the proximity of the beach, the main reason most people come here is for the trip into Elqui Valley and the observatory. Elqui Valley is a trip of contrasts climbing, as it does through a number of different climate zones. It is also the 'home' of Pisco (hotly debated as the Peruvians claim it as their national drink and Chile had actually changed the name of the town where it is made to Pisco Elqui, just to make a claim on the drink). 

The tour of the Elqui Valley was quite interesting as the guide was very knowledgeable and filled us in on all the different crops grown at each level as well as loads of other information. Some of the scenery was quite spectacular as well.

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Anne gets to grip with grapes

the grapes go to Gary's head

our first Pisco Sour

The other trip was to the municipal observatory. Unfortunately it was a full moon that night so we had to rush it a bit before the moon rose. We were filled in on the various constellations and nebulae. The sky was relatively clear for the first hour and then the moon rose. The milky way was out in all its glory right across the sky - the incas refer to it as the celestial river and have various different constellation names based on animals (an illustration of this comes in the post on Cuzco-qorichanga). What was surprising was how clear Jupiter and Venus were. There were plenty of different telescopes of varying sizes and through one we were able to see the different rings on the surface. I also got to take a filtered photograph of the moon.

the biggest telescope

unfiltered without telescope

filtered through telescope

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