South America trip: Chile

Wow! It was a good flight. Maybe a bit bumpy, but all the connections were good, and on time. The airports were fine, I actually slept a little on the plane, and we didn’t even have to pick up our bags, the Holland America team collected them for us (brought back opposing memories of my old fly/camping trips when you could check three bags each for free, then haul the mountain of bags out to the rental car). Santiago is in a valley, and is semi-arid, like eastern Colorado. The trip into the city was along a wide riverbed, mostly dry. On either side of the highway were very poor looking barrios (or so I thought at the time, I hadn’t yet seen Peru). We didn’t see the business district, because a 6 km tunnel took us under it.

The Santiago Sheraton is what you would expect from a Sheraton, and it had an exceptionally beautiful pool area. We had a lovely lunch, of which we had no idea the cost. Chilean pesos are in the area of 400 some to the dollar.  It is early fall in Chile, and yes, the sun is in the northern sky. Santiago is at the same latitude as Atlanta, except in negative numbers. We lounged in a cabana by the pool, played some cards, and then as the sun set, moved to seats around a gas fire pit and ordered ice cream. Dad wanted a sundae, and they didn’t quite understand how to make one, but they gave it a good try. Just no syrup.

March 31. Boarding the Veendam in Valparaiso, Chile.
Our first tour in Chile was actually the bus trip from Santiago over to the coast. We rode the tunnels through mountain ranges separating the valleys, and got our first look at ocean fog, which is the main source of moisture for watering the crops in this part of Chile.

Stepping onto a ship is always a big moment. Leaving the land, sailing, an artificial home for a time. Off to see and do extraordinary things.

April 1. The ship brought us to a morning wake up in Coquimbo/La Serena, Chile. I had my first of several Lido omelets, and headed off the ship for my trip to Cerro Tololo Inter-american Observatory. There was a bit of a moment when the crew swiped my ship ID to sign me off the ship. The photo on my card was of a white haired lady. MOM. They had our pictures on the wrong cards. They also had our credit cards mixed up. It took a couple trips to the purser's office to get that all straightened out, but eventually our cards had our correct photos, and when we shopped, it was billed to our correct accounts.

The bus took us through the Elqui Valley (famous for wines and orchards) to the gravel road which wound up the mountain through quisco cactus, until we got too high for cactus. Then there was gravel.

The scientist at Cerro Tololo were celebrating their part in the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics:
 "The Nobel Prize committee announced that the 2011
Nobel Prize in Physics has been won by three astronomers, for the
discovery that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up. Saul
Perlmutter (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab) led the Supernova
Cosmology Project while Brian Schmidt (Australian National University)
and Adam Riess (Johns Hopkins/Space Telescope Science Institute) were
leading members of the High-z Supernova Search team. Present (Chris
Smith) and past (Mark Phillips, Nick Suntzeff, Mario Hamuy, Bob
Schommer) Cerro Tololo staff members were also members of the High-z team.
Both teams announced their results in 1998. This unexpected finding
led to the idea that the acceleration is driven by the mysterious dark
energy and that the Universe we see (stars etc) are a very minor
component. (SAUL PERLMUTTER BTW IS ONE OF SHELDON'S NEMESES ON BBT)
They also wanted us to know their connection with Nicholas Sanduleak, an astronomer who did a lot of star mapping from Cerro Tololo, and who lived to see the star named after him go super nova in 1987.
We returned down the steep gravel one lane road in a 45 minute trip back to the Elqui Valley, where we were fed a lovely lunch with much local wine in the garden of a hotel.

April 2. Sea Day. We took part in various of the ship's Explorations programs, including yoga, computer/photography classes and a lecture on the history of Chile.

April 3 Tuesday

Arica, Chile

Started the day with the 7am stretch class, then watched the ship pull into port.

Our excursion today was "The High Heartland of Chile," an all day bus trip to the village of Petra, at about 12,000ft elevation. As soon as the town of Arica ended, the Atacoma Desert took over. We at first were driving through the Lueta valley, and the valley floor had some irrigated crops, but it was several degrees of magnitude dryer than the Elqui Valley. Where the slopes of the Elqui were dotted with brush and cactus, the slopes of the Lueta are devoid of any growth. If there was a lichen somewhere, I didn't see it. What CAN be seen on the north facing slopes are numerous petroglyphs, made by cementing black lava rocks (the guide said the nearest lava is hundreds of miles away) onto the gray slope. We saw representations of giant men with backpacks, llamas, eagle, condor, cougar

They are among the many mysterious contructions in the Atacoma desert. No one remembers how, when, or why they are there.

Before leaving the Lueta valley, we stopped at the village of Pocachile. We visited the church and graveyard. The graveyard was quite festive with tents and flowers. The guide explained that families celebrate feast days with their dead, bringing the whole family, food, and music to the cemetary.

We left the valley to climb into the mountains. The road rises in ridiculously steep switchbacks. Big trucks use the road to come down from Bolivia. We saw two that had careened off the road. At 7000 feet the complete desolation of the desert is broken by candelabra cactus. They are gone again by 8000 feet, but above that the desert was in gay bloom (they had had record rains in January). Whole sides were purple with lupine (I think) as well as yellow and pink flowers, and some green bushes.

We got high enough to see the Andes in the distance, and the 16,000 ft volcano which defined our skyline.  We were fed empanadas  and cacao leaf tea for lunch in the community center at the  village of Petra, an oasis watered by runoff from the volcano.