Exploration of central Chile
It takes some twenty-five hours from Iquique to reach Santiago by bus, and so we took an advantage of quite inexpensive internal flights and hopped on the plane. We had an awesome view from the window of the Andes and could see, if traveling by bus, we would have been going for hours and hours through the brownness of Atacama Desert. Our first destination was Valparaiso, only 120 km from Santiago. It's a charming city, with many hills (42 of them!), a maze of steep streets, stairways piled high with colorful, often crumbling mansions, covered with graffiti, that the locals are quite proud of, as they are of the fondness Pablo Neruda, the poet, had of this place. (By-the-way, Pablo Neruda took his name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda, not because he admired his poetry, but because he took fancy to that name!) To explore the wine routes, one either has to take very expensive tours, or rent a car, which we did and headed for the best established wine region called Colchagua Valley. We drove through a beautiful autumn scenery, low hills lined with row upon row of vines, the sun shinning through falling leaves, colors of nature indescribable. This is the time of harvest and so the best time to visit and taste some wine. We took a fancy to Carmenere red, one of the wines produced here and recommended by Chileans. On the first day of Easter weekend, and that was the only day we had some rain, we drove to the coast to visit unofficial surf capital Pichilemu. That was also the only place where it was quite chilly and we couldn't but admire the brave surfers in the freezing ocean, and although they wore wetsuits, they had no gloves or hoods and, many of them bare foot, while the watching Chileans, or tourists were shivering in winter jackets and boots. After two days we turned around and headed to the mountains, to one of the favorite weekends destination for Santiaguinos, to Cajon (canyon) Maipu, where we spent the rest of the week in a beautiful, private nature reserve, where we could easily hike on their property, which included some water falls as well. The last week we toured Santiago and felt for the first time, this is a town we could live in. Modern, creative, green, less hectic than other big South American cities we had seen so far - we were sorry to finish our stay there. Now we are back in Iquique, where the whole town is getting spruced up for May 21, celebrating the Battle of Iquique of 1879 and Naval glories in Chilean military history. Workers are washing windows, painting flag posts, polishing bronze plaques, cleaning bird shit from statues, practicing marches and decorating the city in general. We'll be part of this celebration, as they asked us to sail with Nikan out of the harbour (at 6:30 AM!) to welcome with other local sailboats Esmeralda, the 113 m long brigantine of four masts, the training ship for Chilean Navy. Should be fun!
