Oop north (Norte Chico and Norte Grande, Chile)

After waving goodbye to Alex and Rosanna, I caught a flight back up to Santiago to continue my travels in the northern half of Chile. My next stop was the coastal city of Valparaiso, a hugely important port throughout Chile's history and an interesting and exciting place to visit. The city is less than two hours west of Santiago with buses running there every few minutes, so after spending my Sunday morning watching Spurs win the North London derby :-), I was able to jump straight on a bus and be in Valparaiso by early evening.

Valparaiso

The city is divided in to two main sections - a flat section along the sea front known as El Plan and the hills (or cerros) surrounding the port, most of which are accessed by a complex web of narrow steep lanes and several ancient funiculars (at one time there were over a hundred, although only around 30 remain, many of which are out of service). Valparaiso's glory days very much came during the mid 19th century when it was a major stopping point on the sea route from the east coast of America to the west, when marine traffic still had to pass around the Cape of Good Hope. However, the construction of the Panama Canal in 1914 (along with a massive earthquake in 1906) swiftly brought the golden era to an end and to some extent Valparaiso is a pale imitation of its former self. Nevertheless, it still has a certain vibrancy and appeal, not least because of the large array of street art that exists across the city (providing you like that sort of thing).

Valparaiso funicular

On my first morning in Valparaiso I joined a free walking tour around the city, similar to the one I had done in Santiago several weeks before. Our guide, an American who had studied here and fallen in love with the place and so had come back to live permanently, walked us around the city pointing out various points of interest and telling us about Valparaiso's history. On the way round we stopped to buy some Chilean alfajores (biscuits similar to wagon wheels), took a ride on a trolley bus, and sampled the famous Chilean drink pisco sour (although Peruvians would dispute this!).

That afternoon, I headed along the coast to Vina del Mar, a seaside resort a 15 minute bus or train ride north of Valparaiso, accompanied by several other tourists I'd met on the walking tour - Tom, Jake, Colin, Vanessa, Anna and Mor - some of whom I was to spend quite a lot of the next couple of weeks as we were all heading in the same direction north through Chile. Vina is more of a typical beach resort so less appealing than Valparaiso, but we spent a pleasant afternoon soaking up the sun on the beach, although attempts to swim in the sea were quickly aborted due to the cold temperatures and the rather greasy sea water!

Vina del Mar

The following day I went to visit one of Pablo Neruda's houses, La Sebastiana. I had been to the outside of La Casona, Neruda's house in Santiago, but this time I decided to pay the fee to have a peek inside. The house had spectacular views across Valparaiso and out to sea (Neruda was a big lover of the sea) and was full of weird and wonderful trinkets and ornaments, making for an interesting hour wandering around the five floors of his house and learning more about an interesting character in Chile's cultural and political history.

La Sebastiana

I spent the rest of that day wandering around the intricate maze of narrow streets visiting several of the cerros that make up the city and taking lots of photos of the incredibly diverse street art and graffiti - a few of my favourites are below:

After a third night in Valparaiso, I caught a bus seven hours north to La Serena, another coastal town in the Norte Chico region of Chile. I had originally planned to head straight for San Pedro de Atacama in the very far north of the country, but the potential 25 hour bus journey from Valparaiso persuaded me to break the journey here.

The main attraction to visit from La Serena is the Elqui Valley, so I booked myself on a one day tour of the valley, which Tom, Jake and Colin also joined me on, having also caught a bus north from Valparaiso the day before. The tour took in most of the main sights of the Elqui Valley, including a papaya farm, a pisco factory, a microbrewery, and the small towns of Vicuna and Pisco Elqui. The tour had been due to culminate with a visit to the Mamulluca observatory, but cloudy skies above meant this was cancelled, although we more than made up for this with a star gazing trip in San Pedro de Atacama.

The following evening, the four of us then caught an overnight coach to San Pedro de Atacama, still a 16 hour journey from La Serena. After a reasonably good night's sleep I awoke to the sun rising over a vastly different landscape to that which I'd been used to so far in Chile, particularly compared to Patagonia where I'd only been a week earlier. Gone were the glaciers, lakes and rivers I'd seen down south, and we were suddenly in the Atacama desert, the driest place on Earth.

After checking in to our hostel, we went for a wander round the small town of San Pedro and booked ourselves on some excursions in the surrounding desert. The first of these was to the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) so called because the Belgian priest who named it thought it resembled the surface of the moon. Here, we clambered through some caves and up and over the rocks and sand dunes that make up the valley, before being driven up to a good vantage point to see the sun set over the desert. Although the scenery was pretty much as dry and barren as I might have expected, what I hadn't anticipated was that we would still be in view of vast snow-capped volcanoes, which dramatically changed colour as the sun set against them.

Valle de la Luna

Sunset over the Atacama desert

The next evening saw one of the highlights of my whole trip so far - an evening visit to a small observatory for a few hours of star gazing. With not a cloud in the sky, the stars were brilliantly clear and in the course of an hour staring at the sky with the naked eye I spotted six shooting stars. Our guide for the evening gave an interesting and entertaining talk about the night sky above us, explaining how man had first used the stars above to rationalise and explain (often wrongly) the world around us and how the different stars and planets had come to get their names. I've always enjoyed looking at the stars, without really knowing what I'm looking at, so to have it all explained by an expert while the stars were so clear was really fascinating. We were then given the opportunity to look through some of the observatory's telescopes, which gave us some great close up views of Saturn and Jupiter, as well as several clusters of stars at the far reaches of our galaxy.

Jupiter

Saturn

Despite not getting back from the star gazing until nearly midnight, I was up again by 4am the next morning to head off on a trip to see the El Tatio geysers at sunrise. This geyser field is the highest in the world at 4200m, and with over 80 active geysers also the third largest in the world after the Yellowstone National Park and a site in Russia. We arrived to see the sun rise over the geysers, which was a spectacular sight, particularly as this is the time of day at which the geysers are at their most active, bumbling hot water to the surface and  pushing huge columns of steam up in to the cold morning air.

We were then led over to a thermal pool for an early morning dip in a warm natural pool of water. While it was tough to strip off given how cold it still was, the water was so warm that it was more than worth it, particularly as the pool was surrounded by the geysers and the mountains beyond them. The water was quite sulphurous so we couldn't stay in for a long, but it certainly made for a nice start to a Monday morning!

Monday morning dip in a thermal pool

The fourth and final excursion from San Pedro de Atacama was to a series of lakes in the Salar de Atacama, the largest salt flat in Chile. We were able to swim in two of the lakes, one of which was sufficiently salty that we could float in it and another which was a form of cenote (a limestone sinkhole most commonly found in Mexico) and thought to be up to 500m deep, meaning we could safely bomb and dive in from the side!

Floating in the salty lake

Cannonball!

The day finished with us taking in the sunset over the salt flats, watching as the sun changed the colour of the salt and the moutains behind. This proved to be a suitably beautiful conclusion to the final night of my six or so weeks in Chile, which had provided several fantastic highlights and allowed me to at last fully explore a country I had only been given a brief glimpse of fourteen years ago. The next morning we were off on an epic adventure in to Bolivia, but you'll have to wait for the next blog for that story...

Salar de Atacama

My last Chilean sunset