Struan and Anna in Chile: La Serena - the beach, Coquimbo fish market, and an observatory!

As mentioned in our recent jazz club post, our classes have finished for the semester so we took another trip up to La Serena, a city about 7/8 hours out of Santiago, in the semi-arid zone of Chile, the little north. We last went to La Serena in winter, and as it's known for having good beaches we planned to come back later in the year. That, and there are various great day trips out of La Serena (we previously posted on the Elqui Valley and the flowering desert) which we haven't yet done.

So some pics of us chilling at the beach, and visiting an observatory!

First a couple of pics from the bus following the coastal road on the way up, to see what the norte chico is like:

The beaches at La Serena are about 3km from the city centre, and stretch for 8km around a bay all the way to the neighbouring fishing port of Coquimbo. We hired bikes for a couple of days so we could go whenever we wanted.

First up, one day we rode all the way round to Coquimbo to go and eat at the fish market there.

Anna on a bike, like in Cambridge but with more sand and water

fishing boats

fishermen selling their catch - razor clams, about £1.40 p/kilo!

another angle, Coquimbo in the background

Navy helicopter on the La Serena helipad

Coquimbo's crest has a Union Jack in it, probably due to historic British commercial involvement in the port, much like we saw in Valparaiso.

Now Coquimbo fish market. Slightly difficult to find, but it turned out to be a place approximating heaven on earth, assuming you like seafood...

The market sells raw fish and seafood wholesale, as you might expect, but also as you can see in the photo above has tables of cooked ready to eat shellfish which you can buy in pots, with a bit of lemon juice and parsley on top. It's difficult to explain in a blog just how pleased we were to be able to choose bits of octopus, mussells, unrecognisable bi-valves, and prawns, and have them all put into a plastic pot that we could eat from while we walked around. Yum, yum, yum!

Reineta, different crabs - yes yum!

As ever with Chilean fish markets, there are a set of cheap restaurants here serving lovely food. We were trailed relentlessly by a friendly waitress with an eye for added value - she got a free English lesson out of us, asking for translations of names of various fish, and when we insisted on waiting until one of the tables with a sea-view came free, she wanted "with a sea-view" in English too. Big plans for capturing her next gringo customers.

view from our table

To start, in good Chilean style, an empanada. This one is fried, locos with cheese. Locos are apparently abalone, which is a type of large sea snail. They're very popular here, usually about four are served whole on a plate (they're about the size of a meatball). A bit less scary chopped up in an empanada, and very tasty!

entertainment

After having eaten a couple of pots of assorted cold seafood, empanadas locos con queso, and a fish each, and having drunk a tumbler full of cheap white wine each, we were well satisfied and got on our bikes to roll back to the beach.

"Fliper"!

The next photo amused us with all of the passengers on board this large boat wearing lifejackets. Chile's approach to health and safety is usually rudimentary, and that's not just a reference to miners, there are huge holes in the pavements throughout downtown Santiago, one in particular springs to mind with a snapped thin tree trunk coming out of it creating a perfect spike for innocent passersby to be impaled on! We'll post some photos of Chilean scaffolding also another time.

However, here on a large boat which wouldn't leave port if the water was too choppy and where everyone is either seated or on a high-railed deck, they all get lifejackets from the off. In case... someone dives off the boat?

girl and puppy playing football - aw!

Before we leave the port, a quick scrap which started with one little dog biting a bigger one's bum:

okay, finished. ahem.

the mosque at Coquimbo, partly funded by Morocco

Coquimbo

local footie match

Now for something a little different. Northern Chile has some of the clearest night skies in the world, and is a major location for some of the biggest telescope arrays ever built. The European Southern Observatory has the Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert further north, and work has started in the same area on the European Extremely Large Telescope, which will be the biggest telescope array in the world.

North Chile has two big advantages over other places for telescope placement - incredibly low rainfall in the Atacama means very few clouds, and low habitation means comparatively little light pollution.

About an hour into the desert outside of La Serena is an observatory built entirely for visitors, no serious research takes place there, it's just for education, and it's possible to visit any night!

A fantastic guide took us around and showed us the night sky through various telescopes, it's pretty amazing to be able to see Jupiter in clear detail, and star clusters which are too far away to be visible to the naked eye. We learnt some interesting things which, in retrospect, seem obvious, but then we've never thought about them before. In the Southern hemisphere all of the famous constellations are the same, but they're upside down and, there's no pole star.

Now for the daddy though, we slowed the shutter speed right down and the guide put the camera on the optic of the telescope, and we got a picture of the moon!