La Serena

Our next stop after Valpo was La Serena – a small beach town on the coast of Chile. The bus ride was about seven hours – not too bad –and the town was pretty adorable. La Serena is the second oldest city in Chile and most of downtown is all done in a Spanish Colonial style. Our first night (as we got in pretty close to evening) we stayed in a hostel near the center of town, but it was a little pricey for us so we moved out to a hostel recommended by the book. We only meant to spend three nights max in La Serena, but due to an unfortunate turn of events at the bus station, had to stay four nights, meaning we will spend our Friday night on an overnight bus to San Pedro de Atacama.  Here are the top five memories of La Serena:

Tongoy beach: I’d read about this beach in the book and it said it was way nicer than La Serena’s because of less traffic, buildings and people. But, since it’s not high season anymore, La Serena wasn’t that busy and Tongoy was practically empty. We took a micro down to Tongoy our first day here planning to get some sun. Most everything in Tongoy was empty and the beach was almost private, so we left our bags on the beach and swam a bit in the (pretty dern cold) Pacific ocean. Then we lay out for a while, not realizing how burned we might be getting because there was a constant breeze that never allowed the area to get too hot. Three to four hours later… and we’d turned from white gringas to red gringas. Oops.

Hostal Tamaya – We arrived in La Serena somewhat late in the afternoon our first day and were a bit sketched out by the places the book recommended as cheaper accommodations. We ventured in town and stumbled upon a really nice hostal with lush inner courtyard. It was a bit pricey for us (22,000 a night for a double room), but coming from Evelyn’s in Valpo, we felt we deserved a night of splurge. Before the sun went down we went to check out the beach and then headed to the grocery store and picked up some lomo and veggies for dinner. I made friends with the hostal cat (I may have bribed her with some lomo) and then MB and I enjoyed having a TV in our room that had some channels with English movies. Good breakfast the next morning, and although we really like Tamaya, we decided to go look for a cheaper place for the rest of our time in La Serena.

Casa Maria – One of the recommended cheaper accommodations in the book, we went to Casa Maria after Tamaya and decided almost immediately that the uber-friendly staff and equally cute courtyard was just as good a place as Tamaya and almost half the price. Also, the wifi at Maria’s worked much better than any place we’ve stayed so far. Due to frustrating bus schedules (for our next destination: San Pedro de Atacama) we found we’d have to stay longer than expected in La Serena, but because Maria’s was so enjoyable, that ended up not being such a bad thing. Maria’s was also nice because we finally started to meet other travelers, old and young (and a surprisingly high amount of Swedes). However, while Maria and staff (family) was really friendly we woke up one morning to what we think was Maria yelling “I AM NOT AN ALCOHOLIC” (in Spanish). Not sure, but added some personality to our stay.

Valle de Elqui – Home to the famous poet Gabriela Mistral, and more importantly, home to pisco, the Elqui Valley was pretty high up on things to do in La Serena. The valley is famous for being gorgeous, and it did not disappoint. We started on a bus up to Vicuna (the first town in the valley), which was a quaint town with nice shady central plaza. We got in fairly close to noon and the big pisco distillery (Capel) did tours until 12:30 and then started again at 2:30, but we wanted to catch the one before 12:30. So we ran/power walked out of Vicuna over to the distillery and managed to get the last English tour before lunch. We were the only visitors at the time, so it was a private tour. Capel was started as a cooperative by the grape growers in the valley in the early 20^th century and today is the largest pisco distillery in the country. The tour took us the whole way through the process: grapes, processed and pressed into wine, boiled in copper vats and distilled into an alcohol at about 80 percent, stored in oak barrels for varying lengths of time, depending on the quality of the desired product (from three months to two years), to being diluted down to about 35 or 40 percent alcohol, and finally to being bottled, labeled and packaged to ship to the entire country. At the end of the tour, we got a tasting and since it was just the two of us, we chatted with our guide and tried every flavor they had (from the different labels of pure pisco to all their ready-made mixes including pisco sours, pina coladas, and toffee flavored). All in all, somewhere around 20 different flavors. And again, we tried them all. So, feeling quite pleased and a bit soused, we walked back into the town and found a shady spot in the central plaza for a lunch of palta, gouda and bread. Then we napped.  After a while, we took another bus further up the valley (getting narrower and more picturesque) through Montegrande (Gabriela Mistral’s hometown) and up to Pisco Elqui. The distillery in Pisco Elqui (the oldest in Chile) had tours, but they were a bit overpriced so we just got a couple of pisco sours and sat on the veranda – which had a fantastic view of the valley and was nice and shady and green. The bus ride back down the valley (all the way to La Serena) took forever, but luckily the last round of pisco sours had totally knocked me out and I slept most of the way.

Sandals – On our third day in La Serena (when we’d planned on leaving, but again, crappy bus timing meant we stayed an extra day and a half) we walked around town in the morning looking at churches and the Museo Archeologico (which included a real Moai statue from Easter Island) and then headed back to Marias for lunch and a bottle of pisco sour we’d bought from Capel. After the afternoon pisco, MB went off for a nap and I stayed out in the courtyard for a bit and chatted with Pancho, a local to La Serena and Maria’s hermano. We talked for a while and he told me that here at the casa he used to make leather sandals and shoes to sell to guests, but in the last few years decided he didn’t just want to make the shoes, he would teach people how to make them themselves. Sounded cool, so the next day MB and I signed on for it and spent the morning cutting out leather pieces and using a hammer and metal nails with designs to create patterns on the leather straps. In the afternoon we returned to the workshop to paint the leather with colors of our choosing and then Pancho showed us how to put the shoe together. Just in time for our afternoon bus to San Pedro, we had hand crafted custom designed sandals added to our wardrobes!