La Serena

Saturday morning dawned foggy and cool as is usual around here but we had all decided it was to be a day of rest so Layne naturally organized an Uber expedition for lunch. 

The campsite is really quite pleasant Uber the sun shade which is not strictly necessary at the moment. They rent cabins here and those upper class could get the use of WiFi and the swimming pool. 

They are welcome to it as it’s too cold even for me to swim and my Starlink serves both us and Florian and Cora next door in their VW Eurovan.  

Rusty and I enjoy the beach first thing walking in the sand and watching other dogs running around. This is a very middle class neighborhood.  You can easily imagine yourself in Northern California.

La Serena is the that includes the high rises but we are in upper class Coquimbo. 

It’s all the same to Rusty. 

The local fishing fleet. 

I imagine this is all there was before tourism took off: 

We had lunch at a parillada which is a grilling restaurant. We saw our neighbors with shared platters so we did the same. We got ribs steaks chops and sausages, orange chorizos and black blood puddings. The Chilean flag was stuck into grilled intestine and decided I was not going to let my brain defeat my curiosity and I cut a piece before I could stop myself. Believe it or not it was delicious just like crispy pig skin or crackling. I don’t like blood sausage much and I left that for the Germans. 

It was a memorable lunch with a big bucket of left overs as you might imagine.  I like Chile. 

I wished we had time to go back to have Crab Choclo which is a corn pudding with cheese and crab, a well known Chilean dish. The owner chatted with us telling us about raising his kids in Princeton while his brother ran this place. His kids still live in New Jersey and he was really enjoying talking to us. I find Chileans very friendly. 

The campground is home to a paddling club and there are groups of men and groups of women walking through at all hours in wetsuits. They pick up their proas, skiffs with an outrigger, and walk them down to the beach. 

It is apparently a very fashionable sport in Coquimbo. 

The Chilean Federation of Polynesian Canoeing. And the shield of Coquimbo has the British Union Flag on it. I wonder what the connection is or was. 

For some reason I left my camera behind and was forced to use my phone which does not produce high quality zoom photos. 

But you get the idea: 

Back to the campground: 

We took an Uber downtown to a museum Layne found in Lonely Planet, but the guidebook was wrong. At least in low season the museum is closed on Sundays and Mondays so it was an almost wasted trip.

We wandered the empty shuttered streets of this someday uninspired town until our fearless leader got us to the Sunday market, a modest affair. 

Street dogs do pretty well in Chile:

This dog was hanging out with his owner who runs a stall at the market. Cora fell in love with him. 

Yes it’s sugar (and dried fruit) but we had to try some of it. 

Rusty was sleeping aboard back at the campground as we weren’t sure how welcome he would be in a taxi or in a museum in strait laced Chile. 

And do back to the campground. 

Past La Serena’s tourist attraction, a lighthouse.

And some waterfront folkloric action. 

Back to base and my sleeping hound. 

Cora decided Florian needed a haircut. 

She first straightened his hair which he hated so I had to lean over the wall to mock him. 

So then I had to explain who Prince  Valiant was just to make him feel better. 

Monday night we hope to be in Valparaiso meeting some other overlanders we’ve been following online and have never yet met.