Elqui Valley

La Serena is a nice enough place but there isn't a lot to do in the city itself except go to the beach. Most people I've met here come here to do some combination of the following three tours: Humboldt penguins, Elqui Valley, and Observatory (this part of Chile is prime territory for astronomy). Well, I went with the first two (Bill, if you're reading this, I know, shame on me).

The Elqui Valley is an agricultural area east if La Serena. I took the tour with the same company that took me to see the penguins, thus getting a 2000 peso discount. My tour group consisted of me and eight others, six from Chile and two from Peru. So most of the explanations again were in Spanish, but our guide, Marcelino, was a Chilean who had lived in Alberta for 13 years and worked as a Greyhound bus driver, and hence spoke excellent English, so I got recaps. This time the van and guide belonged to the tour company itself instead of being subcontracted, and the problems of the previous tour (including the lack of seat belts) weren't an issue.

All along the way we got commentary on the crops growing along the road (90% of which were grapes) and some interesting tidbits of information such as how to tell whether vines are growing table grapes or pisco grapes (the latter are higher since they need sun, not humidity).


(These look like table grapes to me.)

Another disheartening fact is that almost all of the agricultural land in the valley is owned by multinationals such as United Fruit Company and Del Monte.

There were a number of stops along the way, including the towns of Vicuña and Pisco Elqui. We also got a free 15 minute stop at the Gabriela Mistral (Chilean Nobel Literature Prize Winner) museum. The most notable display there was a tree in the back yard that introduced me to a fruit I had never heard of before, the nispero (loquat in English). It's about the size of a large grape and has 3-4 large seeds that comprise about half of its volume.


In other fruity news, at one point we stopped in front of someone's house to admire a fruit tree growing there and suddenly a woman (a confederate of the guide?) came up to us and gave us a box of these:


They're called lúcumas. This article in Wikipedia has a picture of a somewhat bigger fruit (these are about the size of eggs) but otherwise describes accurately the taste and appearance. As suggested, I think it would make a good flavouring for ice cream. Perhaps I'll find it in Peru.

For lunch we were taken to a restaurant that cooks its food using the sun's energy--not solar cells, but ovens such as shown below. Apparently they can cook everything except French fries this way.


Here's another one showing how to boil water using the sun's rays.


The final stop on our tour was a pisco distillery. Here's our guide demonstrating one of the machines (used to separate the grapes from the stems and other gunk) that is no longer in use: