La Serena and Bicentenario!

Viva Chile!

Chile celebrates its independence from Spain on 18 September - known as dieciocho, or this year as bicentenario - the bicentennial of independence in 1810. Since thursday (16 Sept.) lunchtime pretty much the whole country has shut down for las fiestas patrias - something like patriotic parties. Yay!

For us this meant a five day break from work as the monday is also a public holiday - so a chance to head further afield out of Santiago. We decided to take a bus to La Serena, a relatively small city about 6/7 hours' bus ride north. La Serena is Chile's second oldest city, and a very popular but unusually pleasant beach resort in the summer. It's also close to some amazing places in Chile - including the beginning of the northern desert, the beautiful Elqui Valley - and due to exceptionally clear skies a number of international observatories are nearby. It's located in the part of Chile known as el norte chico - the little north, the sector between the mediterranean climate of central Chile, and the huge expanses of desert further north in el norte grande. Anyway, it's a great part of Chile so we took the opportunity to visit.  

Chile doesn't really do trains - the whole network has essentially disappeared over the last 50 years due to competition from the buses. And the buses are good, fairly punctual and comfortable:

Anna reclining in a salon-cama

We were also left puzzled again by the inexplicable failure in the UK to combine edible good value food with travel. Why are service stations in the UK so bad at food? The contrast is most evident when you fly from the UK to the continent - why does a ham and cheese sandwich taste great in Spain but awful in Heathrow? Our bus stopped after about 3 hours at a great little service station so we could have a break and get some food.

"Churrasco" - that means they do amazing grilled meat sandwiches!

We stayed in a really nice friendly little hostel - Hostel Maria's Casa. Basically two houses owned by a family - run by mama Maria and her two adult sons. They were all fantastic, we had a great chat with Maria about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones - she is old enough to know them first time round and wandered around cleaning with her ipod on.

Patio at Maria's Casa

Inside with some lovely and cheap wine!

some cool decor

some pouting decor

Las fiestas patrias kicked off on thursday night so we headed up to the central square to see some of the celebrations. Incidentally, most Chilean cities seem to have a central Plaza de Armas: literally the place for arm[ament]s - when these cities were founded all the men had to leave their weapons in the plaza and only pick them up if the city was under attack.

In La Serena they had a small light show on the city hall and some bands playing in the plaza. They also showed on big screens the huge and amazing light show at La Moneda in Santiago (the seat of Chilean government, see previous posts), broadcast live across all of Chile! The show has been repeated every night since, until tuesday, and we saw it at La Moneda on monday night when we got back to Santiago.

Hopefully you can make out some of the music from the La Serena celebrations on this video:

Also, here's some video footage of the light show at La Moneda - not ours though. 

We didn't see everything La Serena has to offer, mainly because our main reason for going up there was to take two trips to nearby attractions - firstly, el desierto florido (the flowering desert), and secondly the Valle de Elqui (Elqui Valley). To avoid this becoming too much of a huge rambling post we've posted separately on those.

So some more highlights of our stay in La Serena itself. La Serena is famous for the number and architectural beauty of its churches so we thought we'd better capture some. They are very impressive, and this is just a few:

   

On a related note, we also visited La Serena's little archaeological museum. 

There are some great pieces in here, and some fab peculiarities. Take this chronology chart, with what appear to be papier-mache props stuck to it so you get the point:

the colonial era ship up close

That silliness aside, here's some excellent pieces:

grrrr

a really long canoe!

doh

This is just a photo of a nearby dig, which excavated a burial ground. You can see that the humans were interred with animals, camelids, probably llamas:

Anna with a desert mummy

The picture directly above is a very impressive and painstakingly produced abstract reconstruction of some indigenous people creating rock art. Very impressive, and photographs beautifully, but it's one of the oddest things we've seen in a museum. Particularly here, when other reconstructions were like this: 

pretty, but lame

The big hombre in this museum is however the resident Easter Island Moai statue.

He's a big lad

This Moia has had quite a time, there's a display which describes viajes del Moia - his travels. He went from Easter Island to La Serena in the 1950's but was just put in a public square in the city. In 1996 he was exhibited in Europe in Milan and Barcelona, where he had un grave accidente - he fell over and his head came off. On his return to La Serena, he was restored by European and Chilean experts, and there was enough insurance money to also build him a residencia definitiva - a brand new extension to the musuem, a permanent room of his own. It's frightening to think sometimes about how national treasures get treated, thankfully large stone statues tend to be quite hardy!

Incidentally there was a Moai on loan to the British Museum which we saw just before we left for Chile. Also, in case you didn't know, Easter Island has been a Chilean territory since 1888.

viajes del moia

Anna in the musuem courtyard

Another great thing in La Serena is the craft market La Recova. We love Chilean markets and this is a good one - mainly selling clothing made from Alpaca wool.

And we met this chap

 Upstairs is an array of marisquerias - seafood restaurants (although it's not obvious from this post, we are right next to the sea). We had lunch in one on sunday, Anna had a beautiful local white fish (Reineta - which we also ate on our desierto florido trip) and Struan had a pastel de jaiba - loosely translated as a crab pie.

These pastels are really good, the usual type is a pastel de choclo. This is served baked in a stone bowl with chicken, boiled egg, olives, tuna, potatoes, onion, all under a mashed corn cover, yum! See below from earlier in the week in Santiago. 

pastel de choclo

Pastel de jaiba, which we think is local to La Serena, is also served in a stone bowl but it has no crust, instead it's a bubbling bowl of basically bechemel sauce with loads of crabmeat in it! Both are really good.

From our restaurant we had a great view of the buses coming down the hill - these are the local buses, not the intercity ones we mentioned earlier, so much more chaotic. See the guy hanging out of the door below - he's the conductor. Every bus has them but on the intercity ones they wear uniforms and help with bags, check tickets etc. On these local buses they wear jeans and jump off the bus shouting the destination touting for business!

We'll defo head up this way again. Finally, we should relate some of the happenings in Santiago when we got back on monday, the last day of the public holidays. Public holidays in Chile are often passed at Fondas - something between a music festival, a barbeque, and a pis*-up. Basically they put large tents in parks, with grills outside, music and drinks inside and a lot of Chileans - usually whole families. We went down to one in the day and evening in the large municipal park Parque O'Higgins. This was so much fun. 

kites - chileans love them

Anna and a llama

over here

a majestic animal

another majestic beast

pouring out the chicha

On dieciocho Chileans drink chicha - it's a sweet alchoholic drink made from grapes or apples. We bought a bottle of homebrew:

chicha moonshine

Anna with some chicha

wow - half a cow on the parillada!

 

La Chilenita - one of the fonda tents

plenty of terremotos (see previous post) available!

A great thing about the fonda in O'Higgins Park was that it was generally free to get into, a few tents had an entry fee but mainly there was a real cross-section of chilean society. In one tent that we had some food in there were two old boys, very drunk, probably tramps, just dancing and showing each other some love:

I love you

chef

waitress -bol*ocking a drunk

stoking the fire

Struan, happy with kebab

Anna, happy with kebab

sunhats!

night begins to fall - terremoto time?

Anna with tsunamis!

Unbelievably, the bar we went to had run out of terremotos, so instead we had tsunamis - a bicentenario version, with chicha instead of pisco (as a reminder, this drink is a pint, half pisco/ chicha plus half white wine, with a dollop of pineapple ice cream in the top!).

great band!

Hopefully you can make out some of this video, give it at least a minute to see everyone get really excited:

another banging tent

And, even with all the drinking and dancing, the kids are still out:

aaaah

After the fonda we hot footed back into el centro to catch the light show at La Moneda.

Finally, really this time, sorry for the epic but we have a lot to say and show this time - here's footage of another bicentenario celebration of quite a different nature, but very inspiring: the 33 trapped miners in their cave. 

Please have a look at the other two La Serena posts when we've finished them!

chao and viva Chile!