Are you going to San ... tiago!

Day 97 - Thursday 17 April 2008

The tranquility of La Serena's Plaza de Armas ...














And La Serena liked it's European styled, stylish, sexy statues ...














Mamalluca's tools of the trade ... their smallest one!














This guy adorned the top of Cerra Santa Lucia and I think he was a local, indigenous Mapuche ...











I also adorned Cerro Santa Lucia ... me and the smog haze!














And the wonderful Hotel Plaza Londres is at about 2100 hours ... downtown Santiago!











And here I am holed up in (according to Lonely Planet) South America's least intimidating capital

How right they are compared to my experiences of Lima and La Paz (that keep you on your toes and your hand on your crown jewels) - this is a very relaxing place to stay and while away a week!

I arrived here a couple of days ago having completed a simple day on the bus from La Serena to here - La Serena did it's thing for me but in the end was just tooooo safe and tiresome - for those who might have seen the latest poll on the blog the truth was I found Iquique (and beach life in general) all of the above including a bit boring - although the Chilean girls are stunning!

I think I've hit the travel phenomenon at full tilt now and need new and regular stimuli to keep me happy! - lounging around's alright but when you travel you become a bit of an expert at it (how else do you use up time on a bus?) - lying horizontal on a beach feels like just more of the same

But I did get in the Mamalluca Observatorio visit which was just great - I never realised that the Valle de Elqui and the northern part of Chile is Observatorio Centrale for the world - the Atacama Desert clearly suits star gazing and the European Southern Observatory have many places here - in fact just around Antofagasta - where the latest James Bond movie is currently being filmed and I passed through on the bus - a rough end, old port that's doubling for Bond's Bolivia and causing some political strife 'cos Chile/Bolivia don't see eye to eye after Chile nicked Bolivia's sea linking land!

But back to Moore-ing! - Mamalluca sits at about 1200m above sea level in the foothills of the Andes and a bowl of mountains - the location's stunning and amplified when they turn all the lights out (barring a few green ones) and the moon becomes your light source - we got the chance to use a 30cm diameter telescope and saw Saturn (including it's rings), the Moon and it's craters and the Orion's knife nebula (the middle of 3 stars next to Orion's belt only the middle one's not a star it's a nebula where stars are born)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula

I also learned a whole load of new stuff including how the nerds (sorry, geniuses!) label their telescopes things like the VLT (Very Large Telescope) - I kid you not!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLT

And there was the Milky Way in all it's glory again, the Southern Cross (I'm getting an expert southern hemisphere observer which is weird) and the Magellanic Clouds - these were new to me and sit just under the Milky Way - they're irregular dwarf galaxies (cool!) that are not part of the Milky Way but in our local group of galaxies - they're named in Europe after Ferdinand Magellan who saw them during his circumnavigatiopn from 1519-1522 although ancient Middle Eastern people had clocked them for years

I just love space photography and wish my Sony Cybershot had a bit more kick to it!

http://www.eso.org/public/archives/index.html

But before I knew it I had landed in Santiago and route marched (Lonely Planet said 1 mile - my backside!) from the bus station to, maybe, the best hotel of South America - by the way I've just done a quick calculation and guessed that on this contintent alone I have slept in 19 different beds - no wonder I wake up every night about 3am with a sore back - it's been happening since Cuzco although Ibuprofen did the trick last night!

Hotel Plaza Londres could be in a quiet, cobbled back street of London and sits just between the heart of Santiago's commercial district and it's residential district - I'm not quite sure what Barrio Paris Londres does aside from provide travellers with superb, cheap accomodation (10 quid a night for a private room with cable TV, wi-fi and Mrs Miggins breakfast - bliss!)

And so I'm just chillin' here in Santiago - I spent the first day on the Metro (that is clean, efficient and a sight for sore eyes after 5 weeks in less developed areas of South America) tracking down a book store to swap my Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

HARRY POTTER SPOILER ALERT! - don't read on if you don't want to know the ending! - I'm really glad I know what happened and I've finished the story - I enjoyed the last book especially 'cos it got away from the boring structure of the others (as did the Half Blood Prince to some extent) - I thought Rowling played around with some interesting concepts of life and death/the hero being an anti-hero - but eventually came up short of me really liking them 'cos in the end it's very Hollywood and twee - everyone survives, the bad guy gets killed, they couple up and all live happily ever after - I reckon her links to Warner Brothers and the movie deal influenced the writing - but fare enough I suppose - it's a kids book after all and I'd rather my godsons read a glossy version of life rather than a grittier one! - OK SPOILER OVER!

And now I'm onto Digital Fortress by Dan Brown (slim pickings in the book shop) which is just awful - it's making Spain out to have a corrupt police force and crap hospitals - which is bloody outrageous (having travelled and been treated in South America I feel I can have an opinion here!) - doesn't he know Spain makes parts of the USA look undeveloped!

I did a walking tour of Santiago yesterday and hiked up the Cerro Santa Lucia which is a rocky pinnacle that overlooks downtown and has splendid views - providing you can see past the smog which is very thick and obscures beautiful views of the Andes (we're in another bowl here!) -it's been a hermitage, convent, military bastion and now tourist/lovers haven! - everyone's snogging up there - except me sadly!

I also saw the Palacio de la Moneda that's the Presidential palace and scene of the bloody 1973 coup d'etat that saw General Pinochet get into power (and not leave for ages!) - Pinochet closed down the Palacio to the public so when it re-opened once he had been removed from power it became a new symbol for a new Chile - consequently, to visit you now have to book a month in advance! - needless to say I hadn't ...

And that leaves me feeling strange about the whole Pinochet era and needing to do some research into the subject - for he ruled as a dictator and disappeared political opponents in a style that, to me, is totally crazy in the modern world - yet when you've travelled through Peru and Bolivia you reach Chile and see better standards of living that must have been developed, at least partly, during Pinochet's time - I guess it wasn't him but Chileans as a whole who are responsible for their development and preparedness to be South America's first first-world country - I'll check it out and hope these comments aren't naive ...

Bang up to date again then late on Thursday afternoon in the swankiest internet cafe of the entire trip (USA included) - I'm in an underground labyrinth of pool halls, multiplex cinemas and restaurants - the highlands of the Andes are now, literally, miles away

I'll blog one last time from here and give my perspective on South America hoping that photos are uploadable - I've now worked out the problem isn't Firefox or Tossnet Explorer but blogspot - if you need a blog site I can't overly recommend them!