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| Trip "fishes" in Valle del Elqui |
Getting There: Elqui Valley
Although they have direct flights to La Serena, which is nearby, we drove the eight hours north to Valle del Elqui. The trip was very pretty because Ruta 5 north travels alongside the coast most of the time, offering great views of the beach towns and ocean, and we got to stop along the way at a very famous cheese and papaya roadside store.
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| The trip from Santiago to Valle de Elqui (map courtesy GoogleMaps) |
Hacienda Huentelauquen is a roadside restaurant that sells papaya juice, canned papayas, mantecoso cheese (a light, white, creamy cheese) and fried cheese empanadas. Now with the most expensive mantecoso in the grocery stores throughout Santiago, Hacienda Huentelauquen was really just a humble roadside store, but now it has a huge line of cars waiting to park, and a huge line of Chileans waiting to eat empanadas by the kilo.
It was a perfect stop along the way to take us to the coastal town of La Serena, where we hit the grocery store (thankfully because goods were hard to procure once you entered the valley), and basically turned right towards the mountains, and headed toward Valle de Elqui.
The Juice on Valle de Elqui
So, Elqui Valley was a huge surprise to us. We had heard to go there, and we had heard that the sky is so clear at night that you can see multitudes of stars, but we didn't know much more than that.
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| Stark Contrast: Green vineyards in the middle of the desert |
In fact, Valle de Elqui is a narrow valley between the Andes mountains that was formed by the Elqui River. The mountains on either side of the valley are dry and desert-like, but because of the river and very smart irrigation, the valley is filled with bright green vegetation.
In Elqui Valley there are fields and fields of perfectly manicured vineyards, and the grapes are mostly used for the local favorite, pisco, which is a grape-based brandy and the main ingredient in pisco sours. They also cultivate papayas, which are different from the ones I grew up with in the Rio Grande Valley, as they are smaller and sweeter, and the meat is yellow instead of salmon-colored. It looked like they also had a fair amount of olive trees and avocado trees, which are also very popular throughout Chile.
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| Morning clouds dancing on the mountaintops |
The main town in Valle de Elqui is Vicuña, but the area is dotted with a number of tiny little pueblos that seem to be built into the sides of the mountains -- whereas the prime real estate (the valley floor) is allocated to the vegetation.
What to Do
The valley is supposed to be very spiritual, with many people saying it has healing powers. I don't really know about that, but I can say that it is breathtakingly beautiful, truly an oasis, and when the sun goes down, the sky becomes so bright with millions of stars.
Nonetheless, there are a ton of interesting yoga, meditation, massage places and retreats, as well as many observatories where you can take a tour of the stars.
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| Patrick fly fishes in Elqui River, Valle de Elqui |
In addition to the star-gazing, my favorite thing about this trip was the river. We spent a splendid afternoon playing in the river just steps from the cabins where we stayed. Trip and I "swam" (basically waded), and Patrick and our friend Judy fly fished.
Interesting to note: Famed Chilean poet, feminist, educator and diplomat Gabriela Mistral (aka Lucila Godoy Alcayaga) is from Vicuña, and she serves as the only Latin American woman to have ever won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1945).
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| Life is good |
