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I arrived in La Serena at about 6:30am and felt groggy to say the least. I did get some sleep on the coach but it wasn´t the best. As I jumped off the coach, I was greeted by a lady selling me a room at her guest house. It wasn´t the one I was planning to go to, but since I didn´t know my way through town, I went along. The place seemed nice and I had a room to myself. I was too tired to go elsewhere anyway and decided to crash there.
I woke up around 11am feeling much better, showered and dressed, I went to see if anyone was downstairs, and met Roal there. He was a Belgian chap who was travelling for a few months and was due to travel up to Iquique in a few hours. We chatted for a bit and decided to get some lunch together. Town was quite busy (it was a Monday), although Roal had said the weekend was really quiet, probably because it´s a university town. Roal left a couple of hours later and I decided to explore town a bit by myself, while I set some laundry on in the guest house.
La Serena is much different from Valparaiso, there are far less dogs on the streets for a start and it seems to have a bit more class about it. The sun drenched plazas look great, as the water features in the centre flow, flanked by Greco-Roman statues, adorned by well manicured trees aside the clean pathways.
The city centre is essentially a number of high streets off the main central road but it looks clean, the people look happier than Valparaiso and Santiago, and so do I. As I was walking around town, I stopped to check my map, looked up and saw a tiger staring back at me, next to it a lion and another tiger, caged though. Turns out the circus is in town. I went back to freshen up as the sun was going down, and came back out to search for a restaurant. Since I was the only one in the guest house, I went alone, but that was okay as I´ve been with people for a while now and some time to myself is good.
I´d seen a good restaurant earlier in the day, so headed in that direction. As I´d be dining alone, I decided to buy a book from a bookstore to help my Spanish. I explained to the shopkeeper I was after a children´s book, with simple Spanish but had to further explain it should be for perhaps a 10 year old, when they showed me books for maybe 3 or 4 year olds. I explained I didn´t really want to sit in a restaurant reading an A4 size book with colourful characters on, in front of fellow eaters. It would have been interesting to see their reactions though. Instead, I ended up buying a far more conservative book, which is in a similar fashion to some books I read around the intended age, "The Three Investigators". At the moment in the book, I´ve grasped there´s trouble afoot at the old library and the three kids are snooping around. "But shouldn´t they be at school or something? Well, if it keeps them off the streets I suppose..." I thought to myself.
At the restaurant, ´Beethoven´, I went for the avocado (as it´s highly regarded in these parts) and steak for mains. At one point, as the waitress checked all was good with meal, I told her it was fine but needed help with a word in the book. Things didn´t go well from there. Well, she couldn´t really explain the word to me so went over to the manager´s table where he was dining with another chap, and they tried to explain it to me. Of course, when you´ve got 3 of them round your table trying to explain this word to you in Chilean Spanish (which is quicker than normal South American Spanish), my frown became almost permanent. With no success there, the waitress went to another table of 3 German ladies to ask them. My attempts to say it was okay, she didn´t need to went unheard, as the German lady explained what the word meant. "Ah, I understand" was my reply, and thanked everyone with a big smile and a laugh as everyone went back to their business. I remember thinking it was like something from a Monty Python sketch, bringing more and more people in to explain this one word to me which really didn´t matter anyway! All this while one of Beethoven´s classics belted out from the speaker behind me. Back to my steak then...
After a good night´s sleep, I got up to see glorious sunshine outside. I decided to go check out some more of the town, so headed to the parks. As I walked in, I was surprised to be greeted by some parrots in a cage, then a bit further along by some emus, and still further, condors in a cage. In all, the animal park area had rabbits, budgies, doves, ducks, a giant turtle and falcons. I remember once having a conversation with Ad, from uni, who said he didn´t like zoos for the same reason I didn´t like the one today. The falcons were being kept in a cage maybe 30 feet long by 15 feet wide by no more than 10 feet high. One of them kept flying the length of the cage and back, I just felt really bad for them. The kids around were loving it, but of course, they wouldn´t have a clue they would much prefer to be in their natural habitat.
The next park I came to was a Japanese garden. I believe they´re meant to fill you with a zen-like calmness but all I felt was anger. I took what I think was a rather good photo of some geese wading in the stream and some rather arrogant looking guy tried to tell me I was doing it all wrong because of the sun. Maybe I walked the wrong way round and messed up my Chi or something but I just didn´t like him!
So, onwards to the beach! As I walked past the modern looking university building, along a gravel central concourse with palm trees either side, that separated the roads, I saw the lighthouse in the distance. I approached the lighthouse, took a couple of photos and saw my first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, ever! Only tens of metres away from the ocean now, and then I saw a dog hurtling toward me. It just wouldn´t leave me alone, and as I got close to the surf, the dog felt it necessary to chase all the birds away. It kept digging holes in the sand and burying stones, "Maybe winter´s closing in", I thought.
So, back from the beach, I´m in the internet cafe about ready to head back to the guest house. I´ve booked a visit the one of the local observatories. I couldn´t go last night as they thought it was going to be cloudy, but turned out to be clear skies. Some of the world´s best observatories are here in Chile and I´m hoping to see some good stuff. Tomorrow, I´ll visit a local Penguin and dolphin reserve, then I´ll probably head out of here and take the long bus journey to Calama to buy a train ticket to Bolivia. It´ll be San Pedro de Atacama for a couple of days then I´ll get the train to Uyuni, Bolivia, to see the supposedly fantastic salt lakes.
Update (18th April):
Last night, I went to the observatory, about an hour drive from La Serena. I didn´t know anyone on the tour but got chatting to a French guy and a Chilean girl. As we approached the site, I could see lots of stars coming out for the night. It wasn´t until I got out of the van that I saw how many stars were actually there. You could clearly see the Milky Way and thousands of stars. Living in a populated area of England makes it difficult to see much more than Orion, and the last time I was awestruck with the stars like this was in the jungle in northern Thailand.
After seeing a 20 minute video presentation, narrated by Morgan Freeman, we split into the Spanish and English speaking groups, and headed to the different observatories, theirs inside and ours outside. The guide was able to point out lots of constellations for us, many of the names I can´t remember but what I did see included Jupiter, Saturn and two other galaxies - yes, galaxies, around 250,000 light years away. They´re known as the Magellenic Clouds from when yep, you guessed it, a Magellan voyage first identified them for the modern world.
The guide also showed us some of the Inca constellations. They aren´t so much made up of stars but of the shadows and space not occupied by the stars in the Milky Way. One was of the Llama, which really looked like the shape of a llama! He also told us some of the constellations such as Scorpio were identified by the people of Nazca, who drew it as a monkey, now viewable for all to see from the air over the Nazca desert. Through the various telescopes, we saw the crab nebula, and jupiter and saturn up close. We got back to La Serena around 1am, but I couldn´t lie-in, as I had to be up for 8am to go to Isla Damas to see penguins and other wildlife.
We arrived to Isla Damas around 11am, after a two hour van journey through the desert and an hour boat ride. We circled the island in the boat, taking in the views of lots of different types of birds and many small penguins. We didn´t get to see any dolphins as it´s not the right time of year apparently. After, we headed to another nearby island and I got chatting to the Chilean girl from the observatory the night before, Cynthia. She´s a nurse living in Viña Del Mar and is to return there tonight, around the same time I´m leaving for San Pedro De Atacama, on a 16 hour bus journey. I can´t wait.
After some more photo taking we went back to the mainland and back to La Serena, where I bought my ticket to San Pedro, speaking Spanish the whole time with no problems, go me!
I´m going to get a bit of dinner now before the bus, and go to the station. The next time I update I´ll be in San Pedro, the meeting point for travellers going to and from Bolivia. Everyone says the salt lakes are great, so I´m looking forward to that.
Until next time...
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