First, why Chile? When we had a circumnavigation in the planning for Yohelah and crew, Patagonia was always one of the most anticipated destinations. We had seen glaciers and fjords in SE Alaska, and knew those didn’t begin to compare to the beauty and also the challenge of Patagonia. We had friends on two other boats that had cruised the area extensively and heard their stories, which made me want to check that off the list long before we were even putting things in our bucket.
Once we knew Yohelah was not going offshore again, it started feeling like this may never happen. There are no boats to charter in that part of the world. But, there are small cruise ships that transit the route I wanted to see. We are clearly not interested in a 5,000 passenger Disney cruise, but my friend Kelly had been on a cruise in the Galapagos recently with the Norweigan company Hurtigruten. They sail small(ish) boats in remote locations. Her sister Kim works for Hurtigruten and that means a friends and family discount. Kelly said last year “It’s time to go”, so who am I to question that? Let the planning begin!
Once you officially join the over 65 club, you know every day is a gift. And the bucket list likely still holds more places than time. South America is beautiful, and the people are genuinely delightful, but it’s doubtful a second trip to Chile fits into the bucket, so the planning needs to include all of the highlights. On my list were three things; 1) star sighting in the Atacama Desert, 2) learning about Chilean wines, and 3) the Patagonia cruise.
Why star sighting here? When we transited the South Pacific on Yohelah, I was absolutely stunned by how many stars were visible to the naked eye when you are in an area complete devoid of any light polution. I had hoped to see that again last winter when sailing Complexity across the Atlantic, but soon found that the dust from the Sahara never gave us that same clarity to see what I always though was far more stars than the sky could possibly hold. The Atacama Desert offers as close of an opportunity as I could get to recreating those feelings from that Pacific sail. Did the desert deliver? Absolutely yes!
However, this required us to get off a 9 hour flight south from Miami, then onto a 2 hour flight back north. We went to literally the driest desert on earth. As we were flying in, Rob noticed some interesting ponds out the window and we did some research. Turns out this desert is rich in minerals and one of them is lithium.
Chile is currently one of the world’s biggest producers of lithium. Also in the Atacama are copper mines. I was surprised when we flew into Calama to see a real city in this remote desert. But the mining brings opportunities and investments. We hopped into a shuttle van for a 90 minute ride to San Pedro de Atacama and never saw any of Calama. But we had already been traveling for well over a day and were ready to get to our first destination. Sadly, we had our star watching planned for that night, so no time to rest yet.
Reserching the options for star sighting, an easy choice was a French astronomer who had come to the Atacama decades earlier to see stars and had never left. He married a local and started building telescopes and giving tours and lectures. I was happy we found this far enough in advance to get a booking and our souvenir photo. She shot this with a long 30 second exposure to get all the stars, then in about 15 seconds in did a quick flash to get us lit up below the increble shot of the Milky Way.
San Pedro de Atacama is a nice little tourist town with shops and restaurants and hotels. Two days there was enough to see and do all we needed.
I booked a bicycling trip and we had a lovely guide from Argentina name Juli. She took us into the National Park and up a canyon called Devil’s Throat.
It was a perfect spring day and the weather was just right for a ride. The canyon was mostly a good ride up and back, but narrow enough in places we had to stop and hand off the bikes through a tiny space.
I do have to admit, though, that the ride was a good challenge and we were happy to have the rest of the day to chill and play some cards and recover! Early the next morning it was back onto the 90 minute shuttle to Calama, a flight back south to Santiago, then a rental car south into the Colchagua Valley to learn about Chilean wines.
