Valle del Elqui

Nicole returns to LA, Gloriana heads off to her course in Quintay, and I'm leaving for Chiloé tonight. Before I leave, I thought I would post a few pictures from our adventures together. If I have enough time, I'll write out separate posts from different legs of the trips. If not, then you'll just get to see our adventures in Valle del Elqui first. It's going to be more of a picture dump because I don't really have a lot of time to write about everything before my bus leaves. But I hope you enjoy them!

We stayed at Hostal Donde Rita in Vicuña, which felt like staying at my old German grandmother's house. Her breakfasts were amazing and her house beautiful, complete with pool and solar oven:

On our first day, we ate at a solar oven restaurant where they cooked all our food even dessert in the solar ovens!

 Line of solar ovens, which can reach up to 200 ºC in the strong Valle del Elqui sun.

 Nicole trying a juice made from cactus.

 Solar oven baked bread.

 Cooks removing food from the oven.

 Leche asado, a dessert that kind of tastes like flan.

Goat meat - delicious!


















After our lunch, we walked along country roads lined with vineyards towards the Capel pisco plant where we had a tour and tasting:

 Grounds of the Capel Pisco distillery.

 Distillation vats.

Nicole tasting the samples, which oddly enough were not pure pisco. Instead, they had chirimoya and pisco sour mixed flavors.












The next day we took a colectivo into La Serena for the sole purpose of introducing Nicole to Locos a la parmesano (abalone baked in cheese). She agreed they're pretty delicious, especially with a coke made with real sugar:

After lunch, we laid out on the beach where we both ended up falling asleep (hence, no pictures) and then walked through a nearby casino. That night we took it pretty easy because we had tickets for an the La Pangue observatory tour led by real astronomers. Supposedly, Valle del Elqui has the best stargazing in the world. Too bad the pictures didn't come out:

Picture of telescope and sky. Red thing is remote control for telescope.

















Because it was AMAZING!!! I've NEVER seen so many stars in my life, and different from ones in the Northern Hemisphere, like the Southern Cross and Magellanic galaxies. Through the telescope, we saw nebulas, supernovas, and collapsing stars! Although the road up to the observatory is a scary adventure in itself, it was well worth the trip. You MUST visit Valle del Elqui and go stargazing at La Pangue if you ever visit Chile!

While we were in La Serena, we discovered that all the buses to Valparaíso were booked on the 30th so we had to leave a day earlier so we weren't stranded in La Serena on New Year's eve. I'll post our adventures there next.