Took a Pullman bus to La Serena yesterday morning. The bus was on a 30-hour journey up to Arica in the far north; a distance of 2100km but I was going ‘only’ 500 km up to La Serena, Chile’s second largest city. My neighbour was an Aymara woman heading up to Arica – complete with billowing petticoat and bowler hat. Travelled on the Pan American Highway (Route 5 in Chile); which runs from Ecuador straight through to as far south as it can go in Patagonia; that’s a mere 7000km. It was a fairly uninspiring 7-hour journey to La Serena bus station on the southern outskirts of the city. Headed inland to Vicuna in the Elqui valley right away. This area is awash in observatories – the skies above Northern Chile are some of the clearest in the world and most of the world’s largest observatories are here; from the American Tololo to the European Paranal and La Silla. And that was the main reason for my trip here.Vicuna is 60km east of La Serena; the bus quickly filled up with schoolchildren on their way home – after the driver confirmed there were no more paying passengers. He seemed to know the kids and their families and cheerily waved them goodbye after dropping them off. Had a village bus feel to it – stopping every 2-3km to drop the kids off!
Vicuna is the main town in the lush Elqui Valley – a thin strip of green created by rivers and streams that flow westward from the Andes to the ocean. Elqui is also home to the Pisco Sour, Chile’s favourite cocktail (and one they hijacked from Peru).
Vicuna is also the birthplace of Gabriella Mistral, Chile’s ‘other’ Nobel laureate. She replaces friends O’Higgins and Prat as the statue in town plazas. She looks a very severe woman with a face like the woman on the cover of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Vicuna is a pleasant enough place but the high point (literally) was a trip that night to the Mamalucca observatory. It is run by the Vicuna municipality – and is the only observatory in the world which allows night visits; or so they say. You need to book a month in advance and there are a limited number of tourists allowed each night.
The sky is so amazingly clear up here that you can see a million stars, nebulas and even the milky way – even without a telescope. We had a very informative guide who showed us Saturn, Sirius, a nebula near the Belt of Orion and clusters of stars. 
There are open and closed clusters – open where the individual stars are far apart and closed where they are close to each other…The high point for me was seeing Saturn’s rings! Also figured out what those white domes in observatories are. The dome slides to reveal a rectangular opening in the ceiling – almost like a skylight to the stars. The panels of the dome can be rotated so the skylight faces the celestial object you want to see through the telescope mounted at the centre of the dome.
This morning was spent having a quiet wander around Vicuna and taking a country bus to Monte Grande – a village some 30km away, just to get a feel of the valley. A newspaper vendor got talking to me at the tiny Vicuna bus station on the delectably named Avenida Las Delicias. He asked me if I had a photo of Krishna and whether I did yoga. When I was leaving, he said Ciao, Hare Krishna!! Even the people at my hostal were friendly with Ricardo, my host, showing interest in where I was from and how India was. Of course, given yo hablo muy poco espanyol and Ricardo no hablo inglesi, we couldn’t communicate much. Late
r, as I walked around town, I heard someone shout ‘Shiv’ and turned to find Ricardo waving cheerfully from across the road. The hostel (and many houses in Vicuna) was set around an open courtyard; a bit like our ancestral home in Thiruvidaimarudur, Tamil Nadu. The courtyard in my hostal had paisley printed power blue sofas and interesting paintings and plants on the walls – felt like a place out of a Marquez novel.Decided to head out to Iquique in the far North tonight; that’s an 18 hour journey; passing through Copiapo (4 hours from LS), Antofagasta (7 hours from Copiapo) and finally to Iquique (another 7 hours from Antofagasta) with pretty much nothing between these towns except the Atacama desert. The drive out of La Serena this evening was magical – there was heavy cloud cover as we drove along the ocean – and you could see the mists rolling in and dispersing the last rays of sunlight.
Photo album for this post available at: http://picasaweb.google.com/shivmoulee/ElquiValley
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