Tetera tierna en Chile: The North!

I just got home (to Conce) after a week of traveling around northern Chile with Amy. It was a good week--we got to see a lot of different types of places and have some adventures. To describe the week, I present photographic evidence of our travels, as well as some travel tips:

Travel tip #1: Don't forget your towel. Some hostels have them, some hostels rent them, sometimes you want to go to the beach...life's just easier with a towel. Amy forgot hers, so we tried to buy one in the grocery store in Santiago, the first stop on our journey. As it was just a normal-sized supermarket, her best option was a double-absorbent floor cleaning cloth, about 1 x 1.5 ft. She bought it. It did the job.

Travel tip #2: If traveling by air within Chile, wear whatever shoes you like...you don't need to take them off to go through security!

Travel tip #3: If leaving from the Santiago airport during this travel, buy a piece of pie de limon (lemon pie) before getting on board. It is quite the treat for a plane flight...

Travel tip #4: Don't spend the night in Calama. If you're in Chile and want to go to San Pedro de Atacama, the #2 (?) tourist destination in Chile, you can get on a 24-hour bus ride or a 2-hour flight from Santiago. Amy and I chose flight (with pie), which meant we arrived in Calama, the nearest city to San Pedro, late at night, after all the buses to San Pedro had left. We stayed at a hostel in Calama. Eww. We covered ourselves head-to-toe with clothing before climbing into our previously-slept-in beds (evidenced by hair from other sleepers). We slept quickly, and were up and out of there on the first bus to San Pedro...

Travel tip #5: Go sandboarding. It's fun, and not that hard. Climbing the dunes was the most tiring part, but once you're at the top, you get to sit on top of a sand dune!

Travel tip #6: Go to the Valle de la Luna and the Valle de la Muerte (Valley of the Moon and Valley of Death). Without the crowds, if possible.

Travel tip #7: If experiencing signs of altitude sickness, lay down for awhile with your feet higher than your head. This may be useful if you go to see the geysers El Tatio, a geyser field that's a two-hour-ish bus ride from San Pedro (which leaves at 4:30 AM). If you're lucky, your tour guide might feed you cookies and chocolate for breakfast (like ours), or eggs hard-boiled in the geysers.

Travel tip #8: If you get a chance to try llama meat, go for it. We ate llama meat ke-babs in this teensy village called Machuca on the way back from the geysers. it was a pretty strange place, an old town that has basically been preserved purely for tourists' visits. Between five and six people live there now, one of whom sells llama meat to the tourists. Ironically, the entire village is alongside a llama pasture...

Travel tip #9: The Termas de Puritama (thermal baths) are lovely.

Travel tip #10: GO SEE THE STARS. If you're in San Pedro, you should definitely sign up for a star tour. Amy and I did--it met up in the town and bussed us to a badly-lit location (with the goal of escaping light pollution). Our "tour guide" was a French astronomer who now lives in San Pedro and gives star tours (www.spaceobs.com). He explained the basic astronomy we should understand before beginning (ie. the Earth is round, the Sun is the center of our solar system), and then showed us the Southern hemisphere's constellations with his laser pointer. He told us how he thought many people were probably on drugs when they defined some of the more absurd constellations, and he made us feel really small by explaining the size of the Earth in comparison to the Sun and other stars-galaxies-etc. He taught us how to take a date stargazing. Haha. There was a set of large telescopes that he and his assistant focused on specific things, so that we could see some star clusters, emerging galaxies, the rising moon... and in the end, we were all herded inside for some hot chocolate. Success. It was interesting, entertaining, and beautiful. The stars were so clear and plentiful-- they actually twinkled!

Travel tip #11: Grado 10. If in San Pedro, this tour company is good. We went to the salt flats (where there are flamingoes! they can exist in the middle of a salt desert because there are pools of water in which grows a certain type of algae, which feeds a certain type of plankton (sea monkeys!), which feeds flamingoes) and the Altiplano Lakes with them. The guide was interesting, the bus was comfy, and the lunch they prepared was delicious!

Travel tip #12: Don't arrive at your destination at 7 AM on a Sunday. In Chile on Sundays, everything is closed. We hadn't thought about that before our arrival in Caldera. Oops. Since we were only going to spend a day there (on the beach, in Bahía Inglesa), we didn't have a hostel to crash in or anything...so we took a taxi to the beach. Some nice hotel receptionists let us store our backpacks in their hotel for the day, and we ate breakfast in a strange dome-shaped restaurant...

Travel tip #13: Wear your sunscreen, even when it's cloudy. The sun was hidden for most of our day at the beach. We went for a walk along the shore, napped on the sand, ate lunch, rented a kayak, and (finally) sunned at the end of the day. However, against Amy's wise warning, I didn't apply my sunblock. And I got burned. My skin is currently peeling to teach me my lesson...

Travel tip #14: Talk to the locals. When we arrived in La Serena, we walked around the city for awhile (which we liked--it's pretty, with lots of palm trees and colonial arquitecture), and then we headed to Coquimbo, because we had heard there was a nice beach there. A woman in the grocery store bathroom, however, pointed us to a better beach, where we headed after browsing the port area.

Travel tip #15: Tours to the Valle de Elqui are fun. The Valle de Elqui is a fertile valley between La Serena and the Andes. It's an area of a lot of contrast, because the valley is completely green, aided by the Elqui River, but the surrounding mountains are desert-like. We went on a tour to explore the area, and we saw lots of plants (for papaya, avocadoes, grapes, etc), a pisco factory, and some small towns. We ate at a restaurant where all the food is cooked in solar ovens!

Travel tip #16: Don't expect foreign movie theaters (Chilean ones, at least) to offer a wide selection of good films. Before our night bus out of La Serena, we had a good six hours to kill, so we decided to see a movie. Our options included Terror in the Antarctic, 2012, New Moon, and The Princess and the Frog. Guess what we saw? The newest hand-animated Disney feature. Dubbed in Spanish. It was kind of fun.

Travel tip #17: If spending a day in Santiago without a hostel, you can leave your bags in the Middlebury in Chile office (if a Midd student), or in the baggage custody area in the Alameda bus terminal. What a back-saver...

Travel tip #18: Watch out for false advertising. Amy and I had read about a restaurant that served American-style pancakes, no the skinny crepe-like kind the Chileans usually offer. Since Amy still has two months in Chile, we decided to search for the restaurant. We found it, and we were even more excited to see they had maple syrup on the menu! And real coffee! With anticipation, we took our first bites, and instantly realized something was wrong. They had lied about the maple syrup. It was something else. Don't go lying to Vermonters (and pseudo-Vermonters) about your syrup...

Travel tip #19: Cerro San Cristobal in Santiago is a great place to go to see a panoramic view of the city, but you may wish to buy funicular tickets for going up AND down. Amy and I decided we'd ride up and hike down...How hard is it to walk down a hill? After reaching the top, and seeing our fill of smoggy Santiago, we realized there isn't really a direct way down. There is a road that winds around the hill, but it takes a long time to walk (we were pressed for time to make our busses), so when we saw a path cutting through the woods, we took it. We ended up muddy and on the other side of the hill when we finally reached the bottom. Ha. It was fun to be "lost in the woods" in the middle of a huge city...