Around (the north of) Chile in 4 days

Valpairiso is just two hours away from Santiago, and used to be a very important port in ye olde times. A glamourised version of it appears on many postcards in Chile - it is eminently photogenic as it is built on several steep hills, and boasts many cheerfully colourful buildings. The best way to describe it is to say it is full of character, a euphemism akin to saying someone has a great personality. It is not postcard pretty; but it is attractive in an interesting way. Compared to the deserted streets of Santiago, it was full of vibrant life on the Sunday we visited. We hiked our way up through an open-air museum of murals built on one of the city´s hills, which was cool, and checked out the port from a distance. Other activites included drinking coffee, eating completos and exploring the town in in a brief and haphazard manner. Next, a return to Santiago for the night before beginning our journey northward to La Serena.

La Serena is a coastal town which in summer is a popular beach resort, but which was overcast and quiet when we visited.

We stayed at a quaint little guesthouse with actual waitress service at the not-bad-at-all free breakfast. We also continued our run of scoring discounted accommodation by using the revolutionary tactic of asking for it! Thanks, SEAsia, for forcing us to haggle over everything! We arrived late so dinner on our first night in town was a choice between a series of identical looking neighbourhood type grills, offering variations on the same dishes at the same prices. We ate grilled meats with chips and copious amounts of guacamole.  We spent a day or so appreciating the lovely architecture and ancient churches in town. We also drank some more pisco and walked along to the beach, which was pretty in a grey and brooding kind of way. This was also the first time (except from a distance in Valparaiso) either of us had seen the Pacific ocean. (Bonus Where´s Wally style challenge - spot the large cross on the hillside!)

The following day, after two separate Chileans assured us the Elqui Valley was pretty much the most beautiful place in the universe we managed to pack in a tour around the region before catching our bus to Arica at 6pm. And yes, it was really beautiful. Unfortunately we didn´t get as much time to appreciate the landscape (read: take photos) as I would have liked, as we were constantly whizzing between various papaya or cactus fields, learning more about the produce of Chile than I think anyone in their right minds would ever want to know. Still, we visited a cool dam with some great views, and some unbelievably picturesque little villages, as well as the house of South America´s first ever Nobel prize winner, poet Gabriela Mistral.

The tour guide was a personable Chilean guy, and along with us on the tour were a middle-aged couple from Santiago and a couple who lived in Hong Kong, although the guy was a magistrate who originally came from Leeds. Lunch was at a restaurant which used solely solar power ovens to cook the food - interesting gimmick but indifferent cooking. The hightlight of the day was a visit to a pisco distillery, as the valley is where most of the pisco in Chile is produced I believe. (It is a form of grape brandy and not from sugarcane as some inexperienced Pisco drinker attested in the last post...) Therein we tried a mango sour, some straight 40% pisco and some 67% pisco, which David claimed to prefer to the cocktail version. It was just as well we clung to our heritage and drank up, as awaiting us was a 25 hour journey to the border town of Arica. The landscape en route was to my eyes stark and desolate - mile upon mile of bare heaps of dirty sand towering up to grey skies, with the occasional stray dog or wooden cross interspersed. We saw little of Arica before our border crossing to Peru, on the 11th of June.