Malls, dolphins and Pisco

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Hello all, for what could be our last blog...

We arrived in La Serena after having spent 16 hours on a night bus, our longest bus journey, and also the nicest one. We decided to go with the friendly man advertising his hostel at the bus station since we didn't know where we wanted to stay, and it turned out to be an excellent decision. Definitely the most friendly and welcoming hostel we've been to. It looked like we were living in this nice lady's house, and using her kitchen and her rooms, but she seemed incredibly happy to have us there.

We had a wander round La Serena, and were surprised to find ourselves surrounded by malls, huge department stores and expensive shops: we felt like we'd accidentally stepped into North America. We decided to book a star gazing observatory tour for that evening, and a boat tour to see the Humboldt penguins the next day.

Our hostel turned out to be full of English people, and so it was the first time we'd actually spent a lot of time talking to the other people staying at the hostel. (We're not that anti-social, we just somehow have always managed to miss the party hostels out...) So it turned out we were going on the observatory tour with 3 other English people, so the hour bus journey turned out to be quite fun, our driver even stopped to let us buy some beer! Northern Chile is home to loads of observatories, many from different countries, because the skies are so clear here and the Southern hemisphere is better for stars anyway. We went to the Mamalluca observatory (which is built specifically for toursists) in La Vicuna in the Elqui valley; the Pisco grape growing valley next to La Serena.

Our guide spoke very good English and was very informative so I had a break from translating things. Through the telescope we saw Saturn, a Nebula, red and blue stars, and star clusters. Lots of things were explained and we went outside to have more things pointed out to us. Seeing the Milky Way was the highlight for me, its amazing to be able to look up and see into the galaxy. The Incas used to read the stars by the black bits of sky in between the stars rather than the stars themselves, and you can quiute clearly see a llama and a snake shape in there somewhere. We both decided that we want to be astronomers instead!

We didn't arrive back at the hostel until about 2, and had to be up in time for the penguin tour at 8, so we were quite sleepy by the end of things. We drove for about 2 hours before we got to the dock and even then we had to wait while our guide solved some kind of old fisherman feud to get us onto someone's boat, which took a while. We went round the island looking for penguins and saw about 10 throughout the whole trip, which was a slight let down, but we did see lots of other birds and some sea lions which was exciting. The best bit of the whole trip however was spotting a pod of about 15 or so dolphins who were jumping and swam with the boat for a while, which was really exciting!

We got to walk about one of the islands for about an hour which was nice but seemed slightly pointless, though we do think we saw some dolphins feeding in the distance which was cool.

After having had lunch which was slightly dissapointing (is it really that hard to have fresh fish when you live by the sea?) we made our way back and had a homemade dinner of scrambled eggs and ham.

We took a bus the next day to Pisco Elqui in the Elqui valley, which was so named by a Chilean president in order to lay a claim to having invented Pisco (which is an on going conflict between Peru and Chile.) Pisco Elqui is a really lovely place and the weather was definitely preferable to La Serena. We stayed in the house of yet another extremely nice person, recommended to us by our hostel in La Serena. She had a lovely house, and 2 nice dogs who kept following us into town. We stayed there a night and then went to the Pisco distillery there the next day for a tour, which was interesting. And we got a complementary pisco sour at the end, which everyone loves. However we've decided we still like the Peruvian one better!

After the tour we walked down to the river and innocently read our books whilst enjoying the incredible scenery until someone came along and told us it was private property and we had to pay to be there, just as we were leaving. What luck!

From Pisco Elqui we bussed it back to La Serena and got another bus a few hours later to Santiago, from where I write this now. So we've been quite busy trying to pack lots of exciting things into our time in Chile, and we've certainly liked it here. Chile is the most developed country in South America (hence why everything is more expensive,) and has the lowest corruption rate in SA as well, and actually lower than countries like France and Japan! People here are much less bothersome, they dont care nearly as much whether or not you buy their stuff. It is also doifferent with regard to the proportion of indigenous people, which is incredibly low, so much so that when you see an indigenous person its a shock, whereas in Bolivia you only really see indigenous people. Its also a ridiculous shape as I'm sure everyone is aware, but did you know its the length of Norway to Nigeria!

Perhaps we'll write a short Santiago blog during our 14 hours of imprisonment in Atlanta airport, if not, its the end of our trip! We've had super fun and managed to fit in so much stuff into just 7 weeks, and managed not to kill each other along the way either. We're both looking forward to coming home to our own beds and being able to do stuff like eating without paying loads of money for it. Thanks to everyone who has read the blog, we've really enjoyed reading people's comments and its nice to know we're not doing it in vain!

So we'll see you all soon! Bye bye South America, until we meet again

Ciao x

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Comments

[The Ryan of Murphy]

Yay, you're coming home!!! I is well excited! Glad you had a great time.