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I was finally able to open my blog (although I think I killed my home computer, an ancient laptop, last night)! So what I post here was written on Monday night and then on Tuesday night, upon returning from the weekend excursion to La Serena:


I’ve been thinking all day, and for the past few days of my traveling, of how much I wanted to write, to record everything I’ve seen and felt and learned. Worrying that I would forget to say something incredibly important, and that you would never know, how different are some of the smaller aspects of life, such as, for example, going to the bathroom (though if you know me, you’re pretty sure that’s not the smallest aspect of my life…). So I will do my best to resumir my recent travels to La Serena and the Valle del Elquií.

First, I have to say that, apart from the years of taking the dear Peoria Charter to visit Dad, I’ve been a stranger to long-distance bussing. And in South America, that’s the way to get around. I don’t know, I guess I’m used to taking road trips in someone’s personal car, or flying, or taking the train…but acá en Chile, the buses are amazingly efficient, safe, and easy to get from one end of the country to another (not to mention from one end of a city to another). So that is how our group traveled Friday night: Tae, Janessa, Stephanie, and I left at midnight and slept on the bus (a CH$5000/US$8 “semi-cama,” meaning the seats go back pretty far but not quite to make a bed, as on the CH$9000/US$14 buses). For some strange reason, every time I lowered my seat, I would wake up some time later and discover my seat more upright (no, it wasn’t my traveling companions messing with me, though I did suspect them!). Nonetheless, I slept okay.

We stumbled out of the bus terminal at sunrise (around 7:30am) and took the first taxi we saw to the first hostel listed in the Lonely Planet guide. Too bad it was ot longer there…So we walked another block to find the Residencial Viña del Mar (funny, since Viña is actually not anywhere near La Serena), a charming but incredibly musty place where we rested our heads for two nights. It felt, however, more like three nights, since we slept there all Saturday morning, and then we got breakfast there (CH$500, or about US$.75)—traditional breakfast, as far as I can ascertain: that famous bread, jam, butter, tea/Nescafé, and orange juice. Supplemented by some mandarin oranges I brought from home.

I’m not really sure what our professors were thinking when they ordered us out of Santiago on a winter weekend, because most stuff in Chile seems to be pretty dead then. At least that was the case in La Serena, which is a lively beach town in summer but still tries to cater to tourists in the winter. Mostly, however, when we walked the town (which didn’t take long, as the “serene” is quite chicitito), we were the only gringos. We thus received much attention as we cruised the Mercado de Recova, looking at the crafts of the Elquí Valley: proprietors and servers at the upstairs restaurants harassed us, trying to convince us of the superiority of their establishments (in English: “Free appetizers and Pisco Sour! Ours is the best—look at the view/look at the sun in our outdoor seating/look at our menu in English!” Quite sad). So we had to succumb to one of them (chosen quite randomly and out of frustration), and enjoyed a meal that would have been identical to those offered at the other restaurants. Ah, capitalism. It was good food, though: being on the coast (north of Santiago), La Serena offers incredibly fresh pescados and mariscos. And if you don’t eat any seafood or any other kinds of meat or poultry, well, you have to get into the bread, because there’s not much else for ya, most of the time. Ah, I also have to mention, as I think I already did, this weekend is the most intense of the celebrations of Pablo Neruda, so even in La Serena, we heard his poetry read and heard eloquent speeches about this poet that means so much to this country.

Alas, there’s not much to see in La Serena in the winter on a Saturday, as all the churches (which make the town famous: they have something like 30 of them) were closed, as well as the museums. We did, however, find a monument, in a park just outside of the centro, for all the assassinated and disappeared in the Fourth Region (oh, I haven’t explained that—Chile’s geographically and politically divided into twelve regions; Santiago is in the Fifth) during Pinochet’s dictatorship. We couldn’t figure out why it was there, in a pretty crappy park, though it obviously cost a lot of money and was well-put-together. There were two plaques listing the names of the dead and disappeared, including the date. Most obviously occurred right after the coup (September 11, 1973), but many were as recent as 1986, four years before the end of his regime: it was quite chilling.

Did I explain why we were traveling? Groups of up to five people had to go out and see places outside of Santiago, but not as tourists; rather, as a specialist of some kind. Each group should have people approaching different aspects of the area, as a sociologist, astronomers, natural historian, colonial historian, journalists, fine arts critic, architect, psychologist, tour guide, resident, social worker, for example. This provides an excellent reason to see and explore everything possible in the area. This demanded three excursions outside of La Serena.

The first night, we took a bus ride out to the sky observatory Mamalluca, outside of Vicuña, as part of a guided tour. This is, according to my Lonely Planet guide, part of “the most important cluster of astronomical observatories in the Southern Hemisphere.” The location is important because it’s away from the foggy coast, in the foothills of the Andes, where it is almost always clear, except for the lights of the nearby towns. We got an incredibly brief astronomy lesson, with no time for audience interaction with the presentation (oh, by the way, the crowd was overwhelmingly gringo: two groups of 15, one of which was a bunch of obnoxious high school students; with a tiny group of Spanish speakers), and then they took us outside to look through some telescopes at the southern winter sky. Needless to say, I was incredibly impressed. You could see everything, to the point of making one dizzy! The best is just seeing the band of the Milky Way and thinking about how incredibly small we all are. Of course, we also got to see the Southern Cross, which is the marker in the Southern sky to point to the south (duh), which you can never see in the Northern Hemisphere, though is akin to our Polaris/North Star. I like that there’s a “false” Southern Cross that’s a bit bigger than the true constellation, and it’s called Carina, which just sounds a lot like Corina, my Spanish name.

I wish I recorded all the astronomical phenomena I saw that night, but aside from the Southern Cross, we saw Jupiter (MEOW!), which was the only planet in the sky that night, but was incredibly bright. And we got to see it through a telescope, which I highly recommend. Those bands you see across the equator of Jupiter are really there! And so are all its moons. Totally amazing. I guess if you’re not a star geek, this is pretty boring, but I’ll keep going…We also saw a star in the southern sky (sorry to say, I can’t remember its name), which, due to its turbulent atmosphere, appears incredibly trippy. The light pulsates with lots of colors, and even with the naked eye, it appears to be moving. We also saw clusters of galaxies, the Horseshoe Nebula (a nursery for stars), and the star that’s closest to Earth (besides our dear sun), whose name escapes me, but whose distance from us is about 4 ½ light years. Just think of all the crazy things that could be going on right now in that sky…Of course it’s a lot to deal with what’s on our own planet/in our solar system, but still…

That’s about all I can get in for tonight, unfortunately, but I have so much more to tell. It’s about 1am, and I need to get some rest. Still battling my cold. Good to be back in Santiago, though I’m not looking forward to class in the morning or the crappy city air I must commence to breathe. Can’t wait to write more.


martes 13 julio 2004

I guess I’m wearing out my welcome here, as winter is finally here. It’s been raining all weekend in Santiago, from what I hear, and it continues today. I was just beginning to regret bringing my duck boots, too, but now I’ll gladly sport them instead of my ratty Converse.

We’re currently putting together our presentation for our trip, which is actually a pain in the ass. Everyone took hella photos this weekend, so we’re making a Powerpoint thing. I’m picking up my photos today; hopefully they came out okay, and I’ll be putting them on here soon. I’m not crazy about group work, but it’s good for me, I’m sure. We also have to write a paper together, which is tricky, but it’s going to include poems and other creative bits from everyone.

So to go back to the trip…we went with the same tour company the next morning, to go through the Valle del Elquí, which would have been hard to do on our own. Our tour guide was awesome (mmm hmmm), as he’s been doing this for twelve years, so he knows everyone in the Valle, and he has a small papaya operation going on in his yard, making natural juices and stuff. They sell his juice at some of the farm stands, and he dropped off some products along the way.

So we took off at about 9am and headed in the same direction as the night before, but it was much more interesting, as we saw lots of small towns along the way. It’s amazing to imagine what it’s like to live there, in the semi-arid valley with pretty much nothing but lots of agriculture around you. Everyone rides bikes everywhere; it’s beautiful.

Highlights:

We started out in the widest part of the Valle, just in from the coast, which is pretty humid. As we headed east, the Rio Elquí was on our left; a tiny trickle of water most of the way. In the 80s, they had a 2-year drought, and so they had a governmental project to build a dam, which creates the Embalse Puclaro (reservoir). I was not able to ascertain whether this was controversial, but I believe that many people were displaced in the process. It is, however, incredibly beautiful and is now capable of sustaining the crazy and expanding agriculture in the Valle.

Nobel Prize-winning poet (1945) Gabriela Mistral was born in Monte Grande (though the pueblo of Vicuña disputes this), a tiny, tiny town outside of Vicuña, another small pueblo. She was amazingly intelligent and began teaching school for other kids at eleven years old—we went to the building where all that went down. She had a newspaper column at the age of 15 and went to school to become a teacher, but in the 1900s, her advocacy for women’s rights was too controversial, and they didn’t give her credentials. Like Pablo Neruda, she came from a very poor background and ended up in a diplomatic career for Chile. She was, however, more famous in México than in Chile, because of her progressive politics. Nonetheless, she is highly respected in the Fourth Region, and there are two museums honoring her in the Valle. Sadly, we only saw the smaller one in Monte Grande, which was more fome than impressive.

Several years ago, engineering students at the Universidad de Chile spent a lot of time on a project in Villaseca, a pueblito in the Valle, installing solar energy in people’s homes, as a cheap and sustainable alternative to gas. This makes particular sense because that area gets sun something like 330 days a year, and when there’s no sun, they use gas. Five years ago, some of the women in the village took inspiration from this and put started a restaurant there, which today is incredibly successful. It uses energy from the sun to cook everything in these little ovens they have to rotate all day to soak up the maximum sun. So we took lunch there, which was totally amazing, and you will soon see what I am talking about, once I get my pictures back.

Well, I have to stop again, because I am still recovering from a nasty cold and must get to sleep. There is sooooooooo much more to say, and I am afraid it will take me all week to get it all down. Tomorrow, the monitores are taking us to Valparaiso, which actually seems kind of funny to me, considering that we all just traveled this past weekend, but I am looking forward to seeing it, since I still haven’t been there. Of course the weather will most likely be quite icky, but I’m hoping it’s tolerable.



There´s obviously a lot more to come, but tomorrow´s the last day of the ILP, and I have to study tonight for our exam, as well as obtain camping equiptment for the Machu Picchu trip, as well as find a place to live when I get back! Yikes. So I may not get much more in until I get back, which is on the 29th. Cheers!