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!

The Moon!

 As planned, most of the rest of our time was spent hanging around on the beach, so here's a few random pics:

Struan with brown limbs and head, and shining white torso

Anna with her ice creams

a nice inquisitive dog

Beach times! This will be our last blog post before Christmas, we'll do a post next week specifically about Christmas, but, for now: 

chao!

La Serena Jazz Club

Our classes finished earlier this month, and although we still have some admin to finish it can all be done online, so we decided to head back up north to take a little holiday in La Serena - the beautiful city in norte chico Chile that we visited on bicentenario (see previous post). Although we've been there before, for various reasons we planned to go back sometime - we'll do another post on our time there more generally, but this one is another about music. We managed to get into the La Serena Jazz Club!

             

The jazz club in La Serena is in a beautiful old building, a cafe during the day with live jazz some nights of the week. It's very well regarded, and gets well-known jazz musicians from around South America - though several of the house band serve coffee during the day.

We had a coffee there one morning during our stay in La Serena and asked the waitress about when there would next be live jazz - she said this weekend and offered to get us in for free! Whoop! A well known jazz trumpeter, Cristian Cuturrufo, was coming to play with the house band.  

So we turned up at the right time and gave the suspicious looking guy on the door the code word we'd been told, then went in and ordered a lovely bottle of carmenere reserva and settled in... it was an amazing intimate venue, no more than about 30 people in total, and we were about 2 metres away from the band. There was even a point when the compere, reintroducing the band after a break, turned to us and asked where we were from. The music was excellent, a good balance of jazz wizardry and good old fashioned raucous tunes, played by one of the most enthusiastic sets of musicians ever.

Here's a few pics, with some videos. If you don't fancy all of the vids then we recommend the "Tequila" ones, but they're all worth a watch, or at least we think so. 

this guy was an awesome bongo monster!

Get ready for some full on accordian action:

parp

Let's go "Tequila"! And watch the bongo player...

the talented old boy on the accordian

This is also great:

After being persuaded to come back and play some more, they finished with this - it's weird but cool being in a room full of chileans shouting "when the Saints... go marching in" at each other... and if you look carefully at some points during this video you can see that by this time a crowd of people had gathered outside and were dancing away on the pavement (plus an overweight man in an orange t-shirt) - the doors behind the drummer were wide open with just the security grilles on so everyone outside got a pretty good sound too! You can also see at points one of the kids of a bandmember going crazy at the front...

Finally a picture of Struan with the man himself, believe it or not they are pretty much both the same distance from the camera:

Awesome raucous jazz, certainly one of the best things we've ever been to and we feel very privileged to have seen such talent!

chao!

El Abrazo - a Chilean Music Festival!

A couple of weekends ago we went to our first music festival in Chile, "El Abrazo" (The Embrace), held in a park in Santiago and featuring a long list of the most popular Chilean and Argentinian artists. We were familiar with a few of the bands and artists playing, but not most of them so it was a great opportunity to see lots of Chilean and Argentinian music in one go.

The festival's full title was "El Abrazo - Cristal en vivo". Cristal is one of the largest brewers in Chile, if you read our Colo-Colo post you'll have seen that they sponsor football teams, and they sponsored this music festival. So shortly after arriving, Struan went for what looked like the beer tent:

Beer tent in the distance?

Surely a beer tent, it says Cristal on and everything...

However, on full investigation it turned out that there was not an alcoholic beverage in the whole festival - no licence at all! We later asked one of our Chilean friends that we bumped into there why this was - she said "because we are Chilean". There are two ways to take that, either she was referring to the occasional lapse in logic that occurs here, or that putting large numbers of Chileans in one place then giving them alcohol is a recipe for disaster. On the second, Chileans can drink, but like the Brits generally can't handle it. They're better natured with it on the whole, and it's relatively unusual to see problems like fights, but they do happen when there are large numbers of very drunk Chilenos.

Either way, having a music festival sponsored by a beer company, but not actually selling the beer there seemed very strange to us. 

Then the food. Having fond memories of everything from lovely paella to falafel to keralan fish curry served at Glastonbury, and the grilled meat from the fondas in this very park, we quickly checked out what was available. It turned out that the other corporate sponsor was Pepsi, who provided soft drinks, obvs, and burgers and hot dogs. No ribs off the grill here.At the time, Anna described her burger as "squatting like a toad in front of her, having the last laugh."

There is definitely a problem with American style corporatism in Chile, something we might talk about another time, or maybe not as it's not much fun. It's odd watching music which celebrates and to a large extent defines Chilean and Argentinian culture while surrounded by Pepsi logos. That's apart from the fact that in our experience allowing lots of small traders to provide different foodstalls has an infinitely tastier outcome for punters than giving over all refreshment rights to one large drinks manufacturer.

Struan thinking dark thoughts AND speaking with his mouth full

Anyway, after we'd got over these disappointments we got down to enjoying the music. The line up alternated between a Chilean band/ artist, then an Argentinian one. Some of the musical aristocracy of both countries were there, comparable (in a South American rather than global sense) to artists like Elton John and Elvis Costello.

We have some definite favourites among these bands, one in particular is the hugely popular Chancho en Piedra, a Chilean funk band known for wearing cool stage outfits and having fans who bring dressed up porky pigs to gigs.

Chancho en Piedra - awesome outfits!

Chancho en Piedra is actually a spicy tomato sauce usually put on meat in Chile. We have no idea why the band is called this, nor why the sauce is called this - as chancho is pig in Spanish, and piedra is stone. Neither of these things are particularly odd, band names don't have to make sense, and imagine trying to explain, say, Toad in the Hole to a Chilean...

Let's go Chancho: 

...and again:

Whoop!

You may have noticed that the pig element has been picked up by fans who buy these yellow plastic porky pigs and dress them up. Here's a few more pictures of sartorial chanchos:

Slash chancho, and Gene Simmons chancho

some sort of superhero chancho, and one with a red hat

a bit dark, but worth it - it's Barcelona chancho!

Supergirl, some sort of bear and a smurf?

Look carefully, it is, yes, BA Barracus chancho! He wins.

While looking at the crowd, we finally managed to achieve what one of our friends had asked us to - to get a photo of a Chileno with long hair held in place by a thin black elasticated hairband, an iconic figure for sure. So hopefully this will do the job: 

And the obligatory pic of a stray dog, they really will sleep anywhere:

Another of the artists that really stood out for us was an Argentinian called Fito Paez. He's rock royalty down here, having been around for years going from a sort of poodle haired Michael Bolton lookalike in the 80's to something approximating Elvis Costello now.

He was fab, here's a bit of video:

Ole, ole, ole, ole - FITO - FITO! 

Now a bit more samba styleee from earlier in the day: 

To finish with, as we didn't get any video of them ourselves, a youtube clip of one of the most-loved bands in Chile, the folk outfit Los Jaivas (The Crabs). 

On the way home, outside of the park we found where all the interesting food was. This is a "kebab van" Chilean style, huge sausages and, in that big pan, Guatitas - basically tripe and onions... 

Good times! Chao!

Pomaire and more Cajon del Maipo

A couple of weekends ago we took a trip back out to Cajon del Maipo, and to a famous village just outside of Santiago, called Pomaire.

We had a bit of a hike up the Cajon, accompanied by a pack of local dogs, under a blue blue sky, so here's a few photos.

one of the pack, with a huge tongue

The next photo was supposed to be Anna with the pack of dogs. We decided to try to get them to go along with Anna, and then for Struan to take a photo. Anna walked along the path and none of the dogs moved - they all just looked expectantly at Struan!

Only this photo was possible, due to the unwavering loyalty of the canine pack to the male ape:

Akela

On to Pomaire... Pomaire is a village about an hour's bus ride out of Santiago. It was one of the first pueblos de indios, a settlement specifically reserved for indigenous people. The village has long had a reputation for pottery, and now is also known as the place for restaurants serving excellent Chilean Comida Tipica. So far so guidebook, in fact, apart from a couple of shops selling traditional clothes (ponchos etc) and one or two selling organic food like local cheeses, Pomaire is entirely given over to pottery shops and restaurants (and the houses for the locals), and is probably the most touristy place we've been in Chile.

There are no direct buses to Pomaire, you have to be dropped off at the side of one of the largest motorways heading out of Santiago. We rather wish we had some photos of this, but we were so freaked out that we didn't think about it at the time (and even more freaked out on the way back). Eventually we worked out where we needed to go to catch a colectivo (shared taxi) into the village. We were waiting by the side of the road with a middle-aged Chilean couple, and the first colectivo that arrived had three spaces. We waved the Chileans on, but they tried to insist we get in with them - the man's wife saying to Anna: "my husband will be pleased for you to sit on his knee". We waited for the next one.

a shopping mall, Pomaire style

Chicken and chick, and bike

Pomaire's restaurants are indeed excellent (if you like large chunks of flame grilled meat), though you have to fight through a horde of touts who talk/shout at you while you're trying to read the menu or make a decision. The guy in the hat got us, eventually by dragging us inside to the grill and giving us each a piece of pork to try:

Anna finally had bif a lo pobre - a huge flame grilled beef steak with chips, sauteed onions and a fried egg on top! Sometimes it can be a little greasy as they often tip the oil from the pan onto the plate along with the egg (possibly intentionally) but this was perfect.

Struan with massive rack of pork ribs and potato mayonnaise!

Pomaire is also famous for giant empanadas, we couldn't fit one in, but here's some pictures of how good they look:

The round things in the left of the picture above are large round breads called tortillas. As far as we're concerned tortillas are either the round wraps that mexican fajitas come in, or the potato and egg spanish omelettes. It seems actually that anything large, flat, round and edible can be called a tortilla. These ones came in two varieties, with something whose name we didn't recognise, and without it. We went for without, then checked the word when we got back to Santiago - turns out it was pork rind so probably best not. Imagine pork scratchings inside a loaf of heavy bread, if you can. 

A few more pics wandering around Pomaire, to finish with:

spot the sleeping cat

We'll go back to Pomaire nearer the end of our stay to pick up some pots, so we can always make our own pastel de choclo!

chao!