Penguins again
Trip Start
Dec 30, 2007
1
22
50
Trip End
Jun 22, 2008
Coquimbo,
Chile
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Coquimbo is about six hours north of Santiago, just across the bay from more fashionable La Serena. It is a nice town I think, with the best waterfront of any that we have seen for a while - a fish market, restaurants crammed with locals at lunch time, and pelicans and seals cruising around just off shore looking for easy fish.
The attractions of this region are said to be numerous. Essentially, they boil down to pisco factories, observatories and two national parks - Penguino Humboldt and the cloud-forest-in-a-desert Fray Jorge.
Reluctantly, we decided against Fray Jorge, although we have both seen it on TV and it sounds amazing. The tours sound very lame. Unfortunately, the tours to Penguino Humboldt ARE very lame, as well as expensive. I think it counts as the worst value trip of the entire five months (vying with the Panama City tour). We did see penguins, dolphins and sea lions, but were in the area I would say for less than half an hour. It was very disappointing.
But that all lay in the future.
We arrived in Coquimbo at night. The town is dominated by an enormous concrete cross, apparently 83m high. It is quite pretty at night, but an ugly industrial looking eyesore during the day. After spending the some time wandering around a decidedly dodgy looking neighbourhood for our hostel we finally settled into a place with an attention-starved dog intent on biting everything in a playful way. We were warned not to leave our shoes outside the tent.
The next day we took a short cruise out to an island not far from Coquimbo, to get a better view of the town. You see plenty of sea lions on this trip but, more interestingly, pass abandoned ships covered in pelicans and cormorants, and the local 'fort' (evidently reconstructed recently, but perhaps on the site of an original one? La Serena was pillaged by pirates, including Drake, and would have needed fortifications).
The next day was the ill-fated trip to see the penguins etc. The less said the better. Only do this trip if you have never seen penguins and dolphins before, and don't care to get a good long look at them. But it was interesting to see vultures hanging out with the sea lions (the guide insisted on calling them condores marinos, but they looked like ordinary turkey vultures to me). (And to be fair we later met one of the others on the trip and he said he thought it was very good. He's wrong though.)
From Coquimbo, we took a bus to Vicuņa to take advantage of the best star viewing conditions in the world, at least according to local publicity.
