La Serena

24 agosto, 2008

It turns out I am not a good camera woman, nor am I a great photographer, but thanks to the amazing parenting I have gotten on past family vacations I am well schooled in taking mental snapshots. This past weekend, I got to see sea lions, sea otters, Humbolt penguins, boobies (the birds haha!), bottle nosed dolphins, and an alpaca in the wild!! I have video of most of these, and pictures of those that I don't, but there is no way I can come close expressing the 6-year-old in me that freaked out when I got to see these animals in the wild :) Mental snapshots are all that can do justice.

The ride out of Santiago was really enjoyable as I slept most of the way over in the "semi-cama" or "half-bed" bus. We (the 8 of us girls: Pauline from Oberlin, Alex from Lewis and Clark, Liz from University of Illinois, Lindsay from U Penn., Lucy from Smith, other Alex from Russia, Caitlin from Kalamazoo, and myself) arrived at the bus station at 4:45am with our backpacks and no real idea what we should do for the next few hours until it got light.

So we decided to take off into the dark, towards where the moon was setting (which we knew had to be west) with the intention of finding the ocean before the sun came up. We did find the water, after about a 30min walk, and luckily didn't run into any creepers. Hearing the waves crashing on the Pacific Coast and smelling salt air pretty much made my entire month. I think I was born a water person. Maybe its my Scandinavian fishermen heritage, or it could just be due to the fact that I have always lived within 20 minutes of salt-water, but getting out to the ocean brought me a calm that I have not found in the metropolis of Santiago.

We watched the Sun rise over the mountains behind us and then burn into the mist that shrouded our view of Coquimbo, the town across the bay. Around 7am, accompanied by a possy of about 5 street dogs, we headed back up the hill towards our hostel. It took about 5 rings, but the door finally opened and we were greeted by a disheveled twentysomething year old guy, who looked like he had gone to sleep an hour before we got there.
It was nice to wash my face and put my pack down after a whole night of travel.
We had come to La Serena with the intention of seeing Penguins and of going to a star observatory. We started on our first goal right away and Lindsay called the number from her guide book, of a company that did tours of the Humbolt Penguin colony two hours north of La Serena. Turns out this part of the trip has been the most memorable yet.

Essentially, we got to take a 2 hour car ride through gorgeous country of a "desierto florida," which means that we got to see miles of usually arrid and brown tierra, green and lush with flowers of all sorts blooming from cactuses that I have never seen before. Amazing.
We followed the coast the whole way up, and the water was a clear, saphire (not even exaggerating). Once we got to where we were going we hopped on a 16-18ft fishing launch and headed out to a group of islands off shore. To make a long story short since I need to go do homework, we saw tons of sea lions, one cute little sea otter playing in a tangle of kelp, a couple of Humbolt Penguins (but from really far away so they weren't that big of a deal), black and white boobies which were gorgeous birds, and a pod of what I think were bottle nosed dolphins!!
We had lunch at la Isla de Damas and ate delicios palta (avocado), whole wheat bread!!, mustard!, cookies, and fruit.

Saturday was pretty funny. It rained all night on friday, and then all day on Saturday. I really thought the roof was going to fall in from the amount of plaster that was sloughing off the ceiling, but it didn't. The power did go out on Saturday as I was making an amazing lemon-chicken soup (sorry for all these parentheses, but I have started to eat chicken these days:) but all got fixed within an hour. During the day we pulled a Pacific Northwest and went out in our Gortex to see what there was to see. We checked out the local artisan market which was interesting. I think my favorite part was hearing Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson come on the radio singing "To all the Girls I've Loved Before," thanks to my mother, I have a special place in my heart for that combo. Then we got on a bus to the town of Coquimbo which was essentially dead because of the rain, but had a cute little port that was full of pelicans. When we got home we turned on the Olymics and there was Mr. Amazing himself, Michael Phelps. I got to watch him swim in the IM relay which essentially completed my bliss for the weekend--even though our star observitory date got rained out.