We spend a couple of days around Vicuña, watching the Milky Way, finding petroglyphs, and getting our pisco tasting technique up to snuff.
After our visit to Valparaíso, we took a bus to La Serena. While the town looked nice enough, the main reason we were here was because it had a couple of car rental agencies, and because it’s near to the Valley del Elqui and Reserva Nacional Pingüino de Humboldt.
We left La Serena – with its right-of-way free-for-all due to a distinct lack of traffic lights and signs – under cloud cover in our small rental car, and headed east on Ruta 41. About 30 minutes into the drive, we left the clouds behind and continued under a blue sky, in a seemingly dry and barren environment. However, it is only the hills and mountains that are dry, the valleys are actually quite fertile. We started going past vast stretches of vineyards, mainly growing muscatel varieties. This was not another visit to a wine region though. This area’s claim to fame is pisco, which happens to be made from grapes as well. As we would learn later on, it is essentially a white wine that is distilled into something with a little more oomph.
The hostal
Our first destination was the hostel we’d booked though. We had wanted something within the centre of Vicuña, and with parking included, since parking in town centres is rarely free in Chile. Hostal El Colibri fit this bill perfectly, and more than that. It is owned by a Lebanese man whose holiday in Chile – after a tour in Iraq as an interpreter to the US forces – became rather permanent. He’s fluent in a number of languages, Spanish and English being the ones most useful to us here, as he explained what to do in the region, and helped us book a stargazing ‘tour’ with a couple living somewhere up the slope of a nearby mountain.
Pisco tasting
First things first though – there was a drink to be sampled. We made our way to AbA Pisquera, which was conveniently located very close to our guest house, and – more conveniently – has a free tour. Slightly less convenient was that this tour is only available in Spanish, and spoken at a rather fast pace, but we got the gist of it: grow grapes, ferment them, distil twice (both times only keeping the drinkable alcohol), water it down to somewhere between 35 and 45%. The watering down is done because the Chilean appellation of origin for pisco stipulates a minimum and maximum percentage. The tasting afterwards included 2 samples of their premixed cocktails, very similar to breezers or alcopops but hitting a bit harder at 12% ABV. We didn’t think much of them and headed for the bar, where you can get tasters of pisco pura, the real stuff. That was a step in the right direction, but we figured we might as well go visit another pisco place, and headed for Pisco Capel.
The tour at Capel isn’t free, but at 4000 CLP for the tour and 2 tasters, you’re not exactly paying through the nose. The good thing is that these tours are available in English, and we lucked out on being the only two on the next one going. It starts with some pisco history in the small museum they have on site, then explains the naming and terminology used on Chilean pisco labels (especial – 35%, reservado – 40%, gran pisco – 43%, de guarda – barrel-aged), and finally discusses Capel itself.
Capel is actually not a single brand, but a cooperativa of over a thousand members, each with their own vineyards, bringing multiple brands to market. Instead of each of them having to set up their own production line, they each own equal parts in a central pisco factory, where the grapes of all plots are processed collectively.
The result is an impressive building, with tons of barrels (for pisco de guarda) and stainless steel vats (for pisco transparente), and rows upon rows of copper distillation installations. It is amongst these copper contraptions that the tasting is done, and it is a bit more involved than your average one. We were first thought how to properly taste a pisco:
- check the colour
- tilt the glass and test the viscosity
- hold the glass against your chest and slowly raise it until you can smell the aroma
- swirl the glass to release more aromas and smell it from up close
- bring the glass to your lips but only wet your lips, do not drink any
- swirl the glass, take a sip while inhaling and swallow while exhaling
We then got to apply this technique on two samples: one pisco reservado transparante, and one pisco reservado de guarda. So the strength of both was the same, but one was barrel-aged and other not. Apart from affecting the colour (amber instead of clear), barrel-aging also seems to make it a smoother drink, despite having the same alcohol content. The tasting concluded the tour, and we went back to the hostel to wait for our stargazing activity.
Stargazing
After dark, and right on time, our pickup – which happened to be a pickup – arrived and brought us and a few others to a house in a secluded area only accessible by dirt track. There were a couple of big telescopes set up in the garden, and we all received a pair of binoculars. It wasn’t exactly what I had imagined by ‘observatory’, but Astronomia Desde El Jardin worked out rather well. Despite the moon being in the last quarter and very bright, we could still see more stars with the naked eye than we would on a moonless night back home. While the lady of the house explained (Spanish only, mind) a few things about the constellations that were visible, she outlined them with a laser pointer so we could follow what she was talking about with the binoculars. Meanwhile, the man of the house set up the large telescopes on several things of interest which we could then all gaze at in turn. These included the Orion Nebula, the southern cross (Crux), Omega Centauri, and Sirius. This is why I think that this is actually a better experience than the average observatory visit – there you get a tour of the observatory and at the end typically only get to look through the telescope once. It’s also worth knowing that many of the observatories in this area are only there for tourists – they conduct no scientific research. Additionally, if you want to visit this area and want to see the night sky under the best circumstances, try to time it so that you visit as close to new moon as possible.
Petroglyphs and cacti
The next day, we decided to go look at a big boulder with petroglyphs on it. After a bit of searching, we found it and it did indeed have petroglyphs on it, and is a sacred spot for the indigenous people. A French tourist also said that the stone radiates a lot of energy, but we didn’t notice anything. Maybe someone forgot to charge it overnight. We initially wanted to walk to this place but ended up going in the car and were happy that we did so. The boulder is right next to a dirt road, and it wouldn’t have made for a particular nice walk, even only from the nearest village.
The surroundings here are more exciting than the boulder though. You’re in an almost completely deserted valley, strewn with cacti, and so quiet it made my ears ring.
Having found the boulder, our next target was the village of Pisco Elqui, which claims to be the namesake of the drink. Peruvians will disagree. Whatever the case, just the drive up there is worth the effort, the road meandering along the slopes of the valley and producing some amazing vistas.
Back at the hostel, we left the car and went to follow one of the many trails around the village of Vicuña. We had just eaten a big and very tasty lunch at Raiz Del Elqui Restobar though, and didn’t venture too far. On the way down, we’d spotted a place we figured would be good to watch sunset from, and a dirtroad that seemed feasible in our rental car, so we went and did that later in the day.
While we were up there, we also saw that this spot is quite popular with dirtbikers:
We said our goodbyes at Hostal El Colibri the next morning, and drove back in the direction of La Serena but headed north before reaching it, towards Punto de Chorros – the gateway to Reserva Nacional Pingüino de Humboldt.