Reserva para doce: Valle del Elqui

Hi all,

Here, Thursdays off become long weekends. And long weekends become opportunities to explore more of Chile.

Two weeks ago, I sent a casual message to a friend about how it would be fun to travel to the Elqui Valley this upcoming long weekend. Four days later, we were on a bus with ten other friends from our program heading north, into the desert.

The trip came together incredibly quickly and really required me to give up a lot of my "plan it weeks ahead so you know exactly what's going to happen instincts." I actually had a bus ticket in hand before I knew where I was sleeping when I got there! The trip itself was worth all of the stress, uncertainty that came with the frantic flurry of activity that was the two days before it.

We left early on a Thursday morning from the bus station in Viña del Mar. After six hours on the bus, we arrived in La Serena, one of the bigger cities in northern Chile. There, we found our hostel and sorted out the physical logistics of housing 12 people in a space meant for 6 and the costs of our stay with the slippery dueño of the hostel.

Because Thursday was a national religious holiday, most everything in La Serena was closed. We did however, get to walk around the city and hit the two things I really wanted to see. First, a huge Japanese garden complete with bonsai tress, a stream, and a rock garden. And second, the beach, which  we reached just in time for sunset and combing through the mounds of shells and rocks deposited by the rough surf (ok I admit, that might have just been me collecting while the others looked for a place for dinner).

Some of the girls at the Japanese Gardens

Pacific shell collecting

After a cramped night (who says you can't sleep 3 to a double bed and 2 to a fold-out couch!), we were off early in the morning to Vicuña, a main jumping off point to the string of little towns that make up Valle del Elqui. There, the bus dropped us off at the end of a dirt road that we hoped led up to our second hostel. After walking for a few minutes, the sound of the dueño's car tearing down the road, breaking the otherwise complete silence of the valley, confirmed that we were in fact, in the correct part of the middle of nowhere.

The dueño, Mehrdad, an Iranian immigrant and bahai'i missionary, turned out to be incredible sweet, welcoming, and helpful. His little hotel was beautiful, clean, and peaceful and he graciously allowed us little perks like a $2 lunch he'd cooked himself and a free late check-out (if you could even call running out the gate  and down the dirt road to catch the last bus back to civilization yelling thanks and well wishes over your shoulder a "check-out").

The road leading to our hostel

It's for sale if anyone's interested!

After lunch on Saturday, we caught a bus to a village called Montegrande, the village where Chilean hero Gabriela Mistral (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1945/mistral-bio.html) grew up. There, we visited her tiny museum (it's incredible that a woman of such importance only has a two tiny displays in her honor) and grave-site on a beautiful hill above the village. The inscription on her tomb stone was the only thing that could rival the beauty of the site:

Lo que el alma 

hace for su cuerpo

es lo que el artista

hace para su pueblo.

- Gabriela Mistral

(What the soul

does for the body

is that which the artist

does for her village.)

My wonderful group of fellow travelers

The river where we had our picnic

After a picnic lunch by the beautiful river that runs through the valley, we caught the bus back to Vicuña, the departing point for a start-gazing tour at the Mamalluca Observatory. Because the moon was nearly full, we weren't able to see quite the show everyone raves about. But, the act of looking through a telescope to see hundreds of stars in an otherwise black patch of sky was eye-opening. Also, I got this awesome photo of the moon:

Through the telescope

The next morning, after a wonderful breakfast all together, we caught yet another bus to the village of Pisco Elqui, one of the most remote villages in the valley known for its famous Mistral Pisco Distillery. The village was quiet, picturesque, and full of craft markets, bike rental shops, cafes, and hostels catering to the younger, backpacking crowd.

The main plaza of Pisco Elqui

The day passed so quickly, that before we knew it, it was time to jump on the bus back, grab our things from the hostel, and jump on yet another bus back to la Serena, where we waited for yet another bus to take us overnight back to Viña del Mar, where I caught a final bus back to Valparaíso, where I arrived home with the final stragglers from the bars and the rising sun. 

What a trip it was. What I'll remember most will not be not the stars we almost saw, the way you can feel the dessert air drying out your insides as it comes into your lungs, or the Spanish I learned out of absolute necessity. 

Instead, it will be the bus rides through the Elqui Valley. It will be the array of life right before my eyes. It will be the swaying of the bus as it round another bend and leans way to close to the edge of a cliff. It will be the lingering sounds of the English and wavering, labored  Spanish of my friends mixed with the flowing, effortless Spanish of the locals, and the sputtering, rumbling noise of the bus that seemed to mimic us both. It will be the consciousness of our starkly opposed reasons for being there: travel and life, adventure and consistency, wonder and routine. And finally, it will be the impossible, quiet excitement that overcame me when I realized that if only for one more heart-wrenching turn, we were all on the same bus.

Love to all.

(Reserva para doce means "reservation for twelve" - a phrase I found myself using quite a bit over the weekend.)