La Serena

As you travel north from Santiago you see some truly parched countryside. This isn’t surprising as there are some areas of northern Chile where no rain has EVER been recorded – the Atacama Desert. We’ll be travelling right through the length of the driest desert on the planet as we gradually make our way to Peru. But despite seeing loads of barren rocky mountains and spiky cacti en route to La Serena, the town is well south of the Atacama Desert. The town actually has a few nice gardens to prove this.

Weirdly enough, our favourite garden here was Japanese! We visited it on New Years Day, when La Serena turned into a ghost town – shuttered buildings, deserted streets - totally dead. The Japanese garden we stumbled across as we walked towards the (incredibly deserted) sea-side area was practically the only place open. And whoever designed the place had clearly gone to a reasonable amount of trouble to make it as authentic as possible – including stone pagodas, water features, coi carp, and even a quaint little Japanese bridge. Very pretty!

La Serena itself is a very pretty little town. Cobbled streets, shady tree-filled squares, loads of dainty churches… a reasonably slow pace of life. The main town centre is about 2km from the coast: the ‘Aveneda del Mar’. Here a long stretch of sandy beach reaches around a wide bay to the neighbouring town of Coquimbo. It’s probably very pretty on a fine day, but unfortunately when we wandered over on New Years Day the coast was enveloped in a hazy fog, and most people seemed to have stayed home to eat their family lunch. Considering it’s the height of summer here the beach really was scarily empty.
Anyway, we’ve had a quiet time here but are now moving on to the dry, desolate north. Where we hopefully won’t frizzle too much in the desert, but hope to see salt planes, volcanoes, lagoons, and flocks of flamingos. Assuming we can muster enough Spanish to get by that is!