We had banked on a bit of walking to find a hostel for our stay but we turned up at our hostel of choice without a booking to find they had two beds left in a private room – result.
The following day we jumped on a bus to the Elqui Valley with Sam and Julie, a really nice couple from our hostel. We bought a ticket which allowed us to hop on and off the local bus at any of the towns and villages on route so we headed to the last stop on the line Pisco Elqui.
The Elqui Valley - a lush green oasis
The main attraction of this sleepy village was the Mistral Distillery, where the Chilean national drink ‘pisco’ is made. Luckily, we had missed the 11am tour (a bit early to get on the alcohol) so we wandered around the village until the next tour commenced.
The tour was only in Spanish but we managed to get the gist that the Pisco making process was the same as making wine and then distilled to make the liquor. We finished off the tour with some tasting – one a bit like brandy and the other a bit like tequila. I expect both of them taste better when mixed with coke or made into a pisco sour! After a relaxing half an hour sat in the pretty gardens sampling the pisco sour with our friends, we hopped back onto the bus to the nearest town Vicuna.
Pisco Elqui main square
The tour was only in Spanish but we managed to get the gist that the Pisco making process was the same as making wine and then distilled to make the liquor. We finished off the tour with some tasting – one a bit like brandy and the other a bit like tequila. I expect both of them taste better when mixed with coke or made into a pisco sour! After a relaxing half an hour sat in the pretty gardens sampling the pisco sour with our friends, we hopped back onto the bus to the nearest town Vicuna.
Giant cactai in Pisco Elqui
Mistral Distillery terrace
We split with Sam and Julie on arrival to explore at our own pace and quickly realised that apart from the main square and a couple of churches, there wasn’t much for us to see.
We walked down a couple of streets and found a cheap bar to contemplate our next move. We picked a cracker of a bar that basically had 2 drunks, a bar man and a duke box playing awful Chilean country and western style music. We are certainly not saying that all Chilean music is awful just the music the drunks were selecting!!! We somehow got chatting to the resident drunk. Well, perhaps chatting is a bad description. He kept mumbling a load of drunken Spanish to us, the bar man then translated into normal Spanish and we got the gist of it. Mostly it was having a go at the Argentineans saying that Chile was a better country serving better wine and pisco and has better men (indicating himself we could only assume!)
An artist at work in the main square in Vicuna
We walked down a couple of streets and found a cheap bar to contemplate our next move. We picked a cracker of a bar that basically had 2 drunks, a bar man and a duke box playing awful Chilean country and western style music. We are certainly not saying that all Chilean music is awful just the music the drunks were selecting!!! We somehow got chatting to the resident drunk. Well, perhaps chatting is a bad description. He kept mumbling a load of drunken Spanish to us, the bar man then translated into normal Spanish and we got the gist of it. Mostly it was having a go at the Argentineans saying that Chile was a better country serving better wine and pisco and has better men (indicating himself we could only assume!)
Somehow I was persuaded to start dancing with the crazy fella, something I instantly regretted as the man got far too close for comfort. It gave Ryan and the bar man something to be chirpy about though!! Safe to say, we left shortly after in a cloud of embarrassment…
Rach and some strange man dancing to Chilean country and western
We headed back to our hostel to be picked up at 830pm for a night of star gazing at the Observatorio Cerro Mamalluca, located 9km from Vicuna. We arrived for the English speaking tour at 11pm to be wowed from the instant we arrived. The Elqui Valley has between 345 and 360 cloudless night skies per year making it one of the best places in the world to star gaze. The night we arrived was no exception, and without telescopes we could clearly see the Milky Way, Orion, the Seven Sisters, Taurus, Gemini, Scorpio, Cancer, the Southern Cross and Beatlejuice amongst others (with the help of our guide and laser beams of course). We also used several of the public telescopes to view clusters of stars - 3 or more stars are called a cluster. One of the clusters we viewed had 250+ stars within the cluster, of which our naked eye could only see one. It was amazing and to top it all off, we saw several shooting stars as clear as day (or night!). The guide was brilliant, really enthusiastic and engaging and made quite a complex subject really fun.
Telescope at Observatorio Cerro Mamalluca - one of the only photos the camera could manage to take! [James Bond I thought...Ry]
The following day we spent some time walking along the beach front at La Serena before jumping on the night bus to San Pedro de Atacama, our last stop in Chile.
Sun setting behind a church, La Serena
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