La Serena / Colquimbo

Monday, April 28th – Day 132

I was going to say in Pisco to catch some more stars last night, but it was cloudy, so I drove to La Serena. Colquimbo is a small town a few km to the south, and a nice stretch of beach connects the two cities.

Colquimbo looks kind of like a much smaller version of Valparaiso. They have this odd looking cross that was built to celebrate the year 2000. Not sure if it’s finished or not, but you can go up to the top and walk out into the arms. You get great views, and between each of the widows they have busts of all the important Cardinals from Chile.

The beach was beautiful and fairly deserted as we are past the tourist season.

A Couple I Forgot - Shopping

Wednesday, April 16 – Day 121

Went to the Parque Arauco, shopping mall today. It’s on the east side of town in an area called Las Condes, which looks like any major city in America. This is the wealthy part of town, and it is full of gleaming new hi-rise office buildings and condos. The Harley dealership is nearby, so I picked up a t-shirt, and then stopped by the bar at the Ritz Carlton for a very nice wine tasting and a cigar. After blowing a couple hundred bucks on some fabulous vino that I’ll never be able to get back home and hanging out with the beautiful people, the pisco sour happy hour back at my hostel provided a stark contrast in lifestyles.

I’m staying in pretty cheap places because, well, it’s cheap. There’s always a lot of people coming and going, so its’ easy to meet and exchange information on various places. The downside is that they are all tourists, and most are trying to get by on US$20.00 a day while I’m more like a US$20.00 bottle of wine with dinner sort of guy.

Anyway, pisco is the “national liquor” of Chile, kind of like the Brazilian caschaca or the Argentine fernete. It’s a 35 to 50 proof, and distilled from a particular grape that was imported from Peru a long time ago. The grapes are grown specifically in the Elqui Valley in the north, and there’s even a town there called Pisco. The drink is made with lemon or lime juice, sugar, ice and a small amount of egg white. The whole concoction is blended into a foam, and then topped with cinnamon or bitters. Properly made, they are really pretty good. Lean too heavy on the pisco or the lemon, however, and they taste like crap.

A Couple I Forgot - Plaza de las Armas

Tuesday, April 15, - Day 120

Plaza de las Armas is the central square of Santiago. It used to be an army training ground, and this is where it gets its name.

The Catedral, sits on one corner of the Plaza, and it’s the 4th church built on this site. The first was built in 1541, the year the city was founded, and all three previous buildings were leveled by earthquakes. Construction on this building was started in 1748.

The church is very ornate, but not overdone, and there are a few prominant dead guys inside and a line of people waiting to confess their sins. There is a special alcove dedicated to Pope John Paul's last visit that is absolutely amazing. With actual worshipers inside, I decided against taking any pictures.

Inside the front door and to the left is a separate small sanctuary, and on its altar is a +/- 5 ft. statue of the Virgin Mary holding a baby Jesus. It's called the Virgin of Mount Carmen (the place in France where it came from) and was made in 1823. Mary and Jesus wear very ornate outfits, and crowns that were blessed by the Pope. The Pope then gave the crowns to the city 1936, making this statue the primary religious icon of the city. It's taken out and carried around the city in a procession once every year.

A couple days after I visited the church, a local homeless guy wandered in and set the statue on fire. The outfits and the crowns, were completely destroyed. About 80% of the original paint was burned off the statue, but most of the damage is said to be superficial. I stopped by today, and they now have a flag with a picture of the statue in it's place.

There are other similar statues of Carmen, and this picture came from the church in Pisco.

I wonder if this guy has any chance of getting into Heaven?

A Couple I Forgot - La Moneda

Monday, April 14 – Day 119

Filed for an extension on my taxes today. My estimate is that I’m going to owe Uncle Sam a few grand, and to avoid penalties, you’re supposed to send him a check along with the form. I mailed from here in Chile, using the cheapest international postage available and kept the receipt just in case. I’ll be interested in seeing how long it takes that check to clear. Ha!

Palacio de la Moneda, built in the late 1700’s, is the former mint building. After Chile’s independence, it became the residence of the country’s President. On September 11, 1973, the day of Pinochet’s coup, it was bombed by the air force. President Allende survived, but committed suicide in the palace before he could be arrested by Pinochet’s men. The palace was rebuilt and serves as the office of the President, but is no longer a residence.

Pinochet’s coup took place just a few years before Argentina’s “Dirty War”, which makes me realize that, with “Operation Condor” being a multi-country effort to stamp out subversives throughout South America, this whole Continent had to be pretty a screwed up place.

Pisco

Sunday, April 27 – Day 131

I mentioned before that pisco is the national liquor of Chile. It’s made here in the Elqui Valle, and the city of Pisco is only about 20 miles from Vicuna – how convenient. It’s a tiny little town at the end of a two-lane road that dead-ends into a mountain.

Pisco is made from a grape that has a lot of natural sugar, so if you ferment it all, it makes a wine with a pretty-high alcohol content. It’s further distilled, like brandy, and then aged in oak barrels to give it various taste characteristics.

They make a lot of very cheap pisco, and that’s the stuff that you use to make a pisco sour – add the lemon juice, ice, sugar, a touch of egg-white, and cinnamon. With better pisco, you just use 2 parts pisco and 1 part lemon juice, and shake over ice. The best pisco is taken straight-up, just like brandy.

Cerro Tololo

Saturday, April 26 – Day 130

I’m the only American on the tour today and it’s done entirely in Spanish. That’s OK, my Spanish is getting pretty good and I know enough about telescopes to make it work.

There are numerous observatories atop Cerro Tololo, but we common folk are not allowed anywhere near the really cool stuff. We started with a tour of a 1.5 meter telescope that is housed in one of 5 smaller observatories that are right next to Cerro Tololo. We’re able to walk around and get right up next to this scope, then the tour guide described how it works and moved it around and to show us all the parts.

Inside Cerro Tololo, we are only allowed to stand in one spot, and not even the tour guide gets to be close to the instrument. With a primary mirror of 4 meters (over 12 feet), it is absolutely huge, and just being able to walk in and look at it makes the trip worthwhile. Even though this telescope is a bit of an antique, it costs about US$10,000 per night to use, and every night is booked for the next three years. One of the current projects is, you guessed it, confirming that Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies at redshift 3.1 are the first high-redshift items to be identified as the precursors of typical present–day L* galaxies. For a sense of scale, look at the guy walking at the base of the observatory.

The largest telescope on the mountain is the Gemini South 8.1 meter scope. Its primary mirror is 26 feet across, making it one of the 5 largest telescopes in the world, and it cost US$176 million to build. No wonder they won’t let tourists come in and kick the tires.

One of the more interesting points that the guide made, was that professional astronomers actually spend very little time looking at things through these big telescopes. Almost all of the telescope’s time is devoted to capturing non-visible information. Starlight is diffracted and its spectrum is analyzed reveal the various elements of its composition. Redshifts and blueshifts are analyzed to show if things are coming or going, and all of this is being done by computers that are sometimes on the other side of the world. Pretty crazy stuff.

Vicuna

Friday, April 25 – Day 129

Took an overnight bus to La Serena, which is about 400 km north of Valparaiso. It’s a coastal city of about 125,000 people, and is the second oldest city in Chile. From there, I rented a car and drove 50 km inland to a small town called Vicuna.

Vicuna has a population of about 3,000, and is popular for only two reasons; first, Gabriela Mistral is from here – she’s another Nobel Prize winning poet (1936), and second, the cluster of observatories on top of Cerro Tololo. This is the southern end of the Atacama Desert, which has some of the darkest skies in the world. Most of the world’s leading astronomy organizations have facilities and equipment here.

As city lights began to affect the performance of the telescopes, the scientist worked with the city to convert all the outdoor lights to sodium vapor bulbs because the wavelength of sodium doesn’t interfere as much with the starlight. The sodium bulbs actually produce more light that mercury vapor bulbs and cost less to operate, but they are more expensive. For the city’s cooperation, the scientists built a public observatory for the city and gave them some pretty cool equipment.

The city offers guided tours for $5,000 pesos, so I went up this evening and had a look. We got to view a few planets through their 12 inch Schmitt-Cassiagrain (2.5x larger mirror than my telescope, but 15x more expensive), and then looked at some cool stars through a 14 inch Dobsonian. There were a few too many people on the tour for my taste, and we only got to see 5 or 6 objects over the course of an hour and a half, but just being out under the stars was worth it. I still learned a lot and got to see some Southern Hemisphere stuff that we never get to see from the North.

About a month ago, I got on a list for a day-time tour the namesake Cerro Tololo telescope, which has a primary mirror of 4 meters. It was one of the largest in the world when it was built in 1960’s, and the telescope’s mount alone weighs 50 tons. The tour starts tomorrow at 9:15am, and the front gate to the mountain is about 20 km away. Despite my best intentions to go to bed early, I found myself in a local dance hall at 3:15 am. I really hate it when that happens.