Stary Night at the End of the Road

Stary Night at the End of the Road

Monday, Jan. 30, Vicuna and Pisco Elqui, Chile

I arrived in Vicuna yesterday morning around 10:00. I didn´t sleep well in my small room in La Serena; it had a severe dip in the middle, so I found myself trying to stay on the edges to keep straight. Anyway, I was up early, got to the bathroom before anyone else, and was lucky that a bus was ready to leave just as I got to the station.

The trip here took a little over an hour winding through a lush valley surrounded by desert mountains. The valley is watered by two lakes that collect snowmelt. We passed one of the lakes--so blue and beautiful in contrast with the dry, brownish-gray mountains. My guidebook describes the plants in the valley as being an irridescent green. I can see where the writer got that idea. It is definitely lush in a fresh, lime-green way.

The first two places I went based on my guidebooks were full. I then stopped at a horrible looking hostel nearby; they had only a double room which I could have by paying 16,000 pesos ($30!). I didn´t even look at the room which I know would have been depressing and might not even have a private bath. Vicuna is a small place, so I started worrying. I looked for a third place I had marked as a possible splurge place, and it wasn´t there. I began to wander the streets looking for places with signs. There weren´t any! (Some people here could make some extra money by renting out rooms during the tourist season!) But as I crossed an intersection, I saw the splurge place down the street about two blocks from where my guidebook had said it would be. They had a room, and it was only $4 more per night than the crummy hostel. (I´ve always said that hotels are better values than hostels. Tourists THINK that hostels are cheap and don´t know better. Also, they like the comfort of knowing they will be around fellow travelers who will visit with them.) Anyway, I took the room and enjoyed having it. It was filled with antiques and two nice beds that had both bedspreads and then crochetted coverlets over those. There was cable TV and a modern, tiled bathroom. There were two windows overlooking a beautiful courtyard. And this morning I had a breakfast with tea, fresh juice, toasted bun, real butter, jam, a slice of ham, and a slice of cake. It felt good to stay in such a nice place!

I went around the corner to a place filled with local people for lunch. I had a salad, roast beef in its juices served with mashed potatoes, and fruit salad (peaches, bananas, and honeydew melon). The meat just fell apart with my fork. UMMM!

I walked to the edge of town to visit the local pisco distillery. Pisco is a local drink made from muscatel grapes. It is a type of an aguardente, similar to cachaca and to tequila. Following the tour, we had tastings of about 6 different drinks. Most people got their premium pisco, their regular pisco, their pisco sour (pre-mixed), their light pisco sour, and a coffee liqueur made with pisco. For me, they pulled out a bottle of their extremely expensive highest-quality pisco and gave me a taste. The latter was smooth and nice for someone who likes straight alcohol, but the full-strenth pisco sour was the best of the lot. It was delicious and tasted a little like a caipirinha.

On the way to the distillery, I saw one of the observatories on top of a nearby mountain. It has a stainless steel dome that was glistening in the sunshine. What this area is known for is the pisco and the observatories.

I returned to my room to rest and relax. I watched a movie on TV. Then I saw a great ballet from Lyon. The title was Mozart-Tango, and it was choreographed by Maurice Bejart (spelling). It was so nice to see good ballet. It´s too bad none of the cable channels in the U.S. tend to show it regularly.

In the evening, I wasn´t hungry. So I went to a local ice cream shop. I decided to have 1/2 liter of ice cream--banana, coconut, and melon. Wow, it was good! The elderly lady who served me sat with me. I couldn´t understand half of what she was saying, but she was sweet and I could tell she liked me. I understood that she makes the ice cream herself. I couldn´t have had a better dinner.

In the late evening, I had a GREAT experience. I had booked myself to go to the city-owned observatory--the only one in the area where normal people are allowed to actually view through the telescopes. First, it was a perfect night with clear skies and no moon. Second, the tour guide Juan was great. I had assumed he was a student of astronomy from his knowledge, but he had a great response to that. He said he is a "tourism engineer" who has had a love of astronomy since he was 12. He added that he finds pleasure in being a "romantic astronomer" and would have no interest at all in serious astronomy. He had such a great sense of humor in how he expressed himself in terms of what he was showing us. And he used a laser which was perfect to point out specific stars and other objects. And the third and final reason it was so great a tour is that it was so thorough and long.

The tour had three parts. First, Juan had us outdoors. He pointed out various heavenly bodies and clusters using the laser and talked about them. We could see so many stars so clearly with just our nakid eyes. It was just amazing. But he had a telescope out there that he would put on things and give each of us a chance to look. He pointed out a star and then let us see through the telescope that it was 2 stars! And he explained that it is really 3 stars with a more powerful telescope. Besides the Milky Way, we could see two other "clouds" in the sky. He pointed out that these are two other gallaxies. And again, we were seeing them with our nakid eyes. In the second part of the tour, Juan took us to the more powerful telescope in the dome. There he showed us things we had seen from outside. But this time, where we had seen maybe what looked like a cluster of 5 stars or another area that looked like a blank part of the sky, he would let us see that there were thousands of stars in each of the areas. It was totally fascinating--a once-in-a-lifetime experience! The third portion of the evening, he took us to the computer and showed us a program called Stary Nights that will allow one to look at any part of the sky with photos taken by astronomers at various telescopes. The program does much more by letting one see what the sky looks like on any night over a 10,000 year period from any spot on the globe or from any spot in space! We had left town at 10:30 for the 15 minute ride to the telescope. It was 1:20 a.m. when we got back to town!!

There is a Danish-Irish couple in town. I kept seeing their signatures everywhere I went--at the tourist office, at the sign-up for the observatory tour, etc. Well, they were the only passengers with me on the bus to the observatory. (Others had their own transporation.) It was fun visiting with them. They live near Evy and Arvind. He´s a physicist from Ireland and she is a Copenhagen native working on a Ph.D. in food science. It was fun to share my knowlege of their city with them.

Today, I took a bus to Pisco Elqui, a smaller town in the valley which is where the paved road ends. It is a quaint, stucco place with a bit of a new age slant to it. It also has a pisco factory--one of the oldest in the area. I toured it and tasted their finest. I wandered the streets. I sat in the square and watched people. It was a day to relax, since I was up so late last night.

I returned to Vicuna to have a late lunch around 4 p.m. I had a local dish called pastel de choclo. It is like a dressing made from sweet corn and sweet corn meal. Baked inside it are pieces of chicken, olives, and other items. It was sweet and delicious. I would enjoy trying to recreate it at home.

I´ve spent the rest of the day in the square relaxing and reading. I finished The Book of Salt by Monique Truong. It was a good book with moments of brillance in the writing. It told the story of a Vietnamese cook who worked for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas during 5 of the years they were in Paris in the 1930s. Of course, it also tells about their lives and the writers and artists who were around them all the time. I gave the book 3 stars out of 4.

I have a ticket for an overnight bus to Santiago leaving at 10 p.m. That´s two hours from now. I need to post this to the blog and then go pick up my luggage at the hotel. I don´t think I will have anything else to eat. I´m not hungry.