Brett's Southern Crossing

The next major town north from Santiago is La Serena.  It’s known for being in the border zone with the desert area in the north of Chile.  It’s also the disputed capital of Pisco production, the liquor used in pisco sours and other drinks (Peru also claims Pisco as theirs).

My first stop was the Humboldt Penguin National Park.  If you go, be sure to ask some questions because it turned out we went during their nesting season, when they climb up to some cliffs to protect their eggs from predators…so there wasn’t much to see.

Next I headed to Pisco Elqui, the main town in the pisco growing area.  This is basically desert, but they grow the grapes using irrigation.  Pisco Elqui has a winery you can tour for a fee, a restaurant, and a tranquil little plaza but not much else.

From La Serena you can head partway into the valley, near the town of Vicuña, for star-gazing.  The Atacama desert has 330 couldless nights a year, so this region is packed with scientific observatories as well as a number of observatories that cater to tourists.  Sadly, I happened to be there on one of the 30 cloudy nights so there was no opportunity to see the stars.  I had also hoped to visit one of the worlds largest scientific observatories, either Observatorio Tololo or Observatorio Paranal, which have tours on the weekends, but it seems it’s necessary to make arrangements a month in advance.  There’s no opportunity to actually see the stars at these observatories, in fact the telescopes are so powerful they’re mostly just hooked up to computers.  But these facilities cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and I always like to see impressive looking feats of engineering like that.

La Serena was a nice enough place to stop, but I think easy to skip as well.

On my last day of class last month I was lucky enough to witness a tradition I had heard of for new University graduates (my classes are run through a well known University here).  Most of the Argentine students are off in January and February, but a few were still working and apparently had finished their final exams that Friday afternoon.

In Argentina it’s customary to “celebrate” completion of final exams by a friend or relative by mercilessly pelting them with food.  I only saw the end of this ritual, and my video isn’t very good.  It’s a shame, I can imagine this would be great to watch start to finish!  In the brief time I was there I saw them hit with raw eggs, flour, a jar of honey, shaving foam, feathers, and who knows what else:

And a few closeup photos for detail:

The best part about Chinese food is the fortune cookies.  Of course you can add the always popular “…in bed” or “…except in bed” to the end.  But even taken at face value, the ones I got a few days ago were perfect:

Now is a good time to finish up old business

Anyone who has been to my apartment recently knows I’m working hard on this…

You will soon be greeted with unlimimted opportunities

Too right I will!