Northern beaches

   As we’ve gone further north, Kizzy has started to view our passage through the Andean countries with greater trepidation.  Despite our plan to follow the sun into the North American summer, we are now wondering if our warm clothes are warm enough as we approach our month-long stretch at altitude, mainly above 3,000m.  In preparation, we headed back from Mendoza to Valparaiso for the start of 8 days on Chile’s northern beaches.

   The port city of Valparaiso is billed as the cultural heart of Chile but for us it was a bit of a dive.  The hostel we stayed in was crowded, disorganised and unwelcoming and we quickly determined not to extend our stay beyond two nights.  There was a funny moment in the main square when an enthusiastic crooner did a marvellous rendition of the Carpenter’s “Close to You” in Spanish.  He delighted us with some truly committed dancing in the instrumental sections.  He also gave an account of the sad story of Karen Carpenter to prepare us for the full emotional impact of the song.  It was enough to keep us there for perhaps 15 minutes. 

   Viña del Mar had more going for it.  It has a beach, which was always going to win Kizzy over and we duly spent several hours sunbathing and contemplating a dip in the ocean before retreating to the ice cream shop.  Late in the day we pulled out the guide book and I got excited all of a sudden when I read that the local Museo de Arqueologico e Historio houses one of the best collections of Easter Island artefacts, including a real Moai sculpture. 

   Moai are huge stone statues of rather stern-looking contemplative figures that the Easter Islanders catastrophically deforested their Island to erect.  Ever since reading about the history of the place I’ve been fascinated by them, eager to see one, albeit not eager enough to fly into the remote corner of the south Pacific where they’ve congregated on a ledge looking out to sea.  This was a great opportunity and with twenty minutes until the museum closed we tore across town, prepared to pay any entry fee for a brief visit to the star attraction.  As it turned out we didn’t have to.  We arrived with 10 minutes to spare to find the Moai perched on a small plinth outside on the grassy forecourt enjoying his freedom in the sunshine.  It made my day. 

   Our next four nights were in La Serena, which is described as Chile’s premier beach resort with 360 cloudless nights a year.  La Serena, we found, has a fabulously wide and very long beach about 20 minutes from town.  However, most of the beach (i.e. all of it as far as we walked) was closed for swimming, being laced with rip tides and largely unpatrolled out of season.  We were fortunate enough that our visit coincided with the rare phenomenon of a cloudy night.  In any event it is only the nights that are usually cloudless.  The days are buried in a deep fog that rolls in with the sunrise.  The one thing we’re sorry to have missed so far was a trip to the observatory in the Elqui valley.  We wrote it off as a bit too pricey when we got to La Serena and as our last night was cloudy we were to late to act on the advice of fellow travellers who highly rated the night-time tour.

   After four days enjoying the excuse to laze about and venture out mainly for the sunset, we continued northward on an overnight bus to begin our sojourn at altitude in San Pedro de Atacama at 2,460m.