La Serena and Elqui Valley in Chile

   La Serena, Serena means 'Morning Dew', so 'La Serena' is 'The morning dew'. Such a nice name for the seaside city.
   I arrived on Thursday December 10th in the middle of the afternoon. My new roommate was still in bed, unmotivated, but talkative.... so we realised that we both wanted to do a tour of Elqui Valley, and so then she had her motivation and we set off to find and book a tour and have lunch.
   We did the tour on Friday. Elqui Valley is a lush floor of green, mostly by the growing of grapes, with steep baren mountainous hills rising on each side. The grapes are grown to make Pisco and as table grapes for export. So we naturally visited a Pisco distillery. We also visited a dam, saw cochineal farming, and had a lunch of goat cooked by solar power (This really interested me).
At the end of the day, I decided to tack a Observatory (Star Gazing) tour onto the valley tour. Chile is considered (maybe just by the Chileans, I don't know) to have the best star gazing in the world. At any rate, there are a lot of observatories here, and the biggest telescopes in the world are here and are owned by the more wealthy nations. It was explained that Europe and USA have the money, but Chile has the clear skies. A lot of the time when you look to the top of a hill (these hills are like 2000+m), you will see a dome on top, and realise that there is yet another observatory. The star gazing was very nice, I learnt a bit.
    Then on Saturday I went to La Serena's artisan markets and beach, which wasn't great and was made worse because the sun only appeared for 5 minutes of the afternoon. Actually, interesting name La Serena... more like morning cloud, each day the morning has cloud which usually clears between 1 and 3pm.
    On Sunday, it was election day, the streets were busy, and kind of excited. And it was time for me to move on... to Huasco.

The cochineal insect lives on the leaves of the prickly pear, the female bodies are dried to make red dye. So, if you were vegan, I guess you'd have to be choosey about buying red things?

The Pisco distillery, at the final stage. Now that I have tasted it straight, I realised it definately needs mixing... which I tend to think why bother persisting with something that has to be mixed?

Elqui Valley. The contrast between the green grape fields and the baron hills is striking.

Lunch was solar cooked. I just might build one of these one day.

 This carving in the plaza of Vicuna took my eye. Vicuna isn't a great place to have to wait 3 hours.

Notes:

Accommodation: La Serena Aji Verde HI hostel, dorm bed, member. $13 per night. * * * * *

Collectivo Taxi, Ovalle to La Serena $5. A collectivo taxi is shared with other people. I could have taken the bus and save 40c, but it would have taken 30 minutes longer and left me at the bus terminal on the far side of town.

Tour, Elqui Valley $32. Worth doing.

Tour, Observatory: $28. I wasn't disappointed, although I probably wouldn't recommend it to me.