A long way to Chile

At university I was taught a concept called situated planning. Loosely it says all plans are made to be broken. In each situation a plan is changed and adapted to the circumstances. Nothing could be more true than our trip to Chile.

It started all good, we arrived at the airport plenty on time only to be told that our flight to Madrid had been delayed. By the time we landed in Madrid we saw our plane to Santiago leave the airport gate. Doh! Luckily we got rescheduled for the next flight the following night.

After a bit of replanning and rebooking of our travel plans in Chile we got to explore Madrid for a day. And have tapas and nice wine :-)

So a day late we finally arrived to the Elqui valley. Our main reason for coming here is its clear night skies.

So Pedro took us up the mountains along a very wiggly dirt track to observatorio de Pangue where we met Eric. He showed us exploding nebulas, black nebula, a broken star, galaxies and as the finale the glorious Saturn! It was amazing! It is incredible how many more stars you can see in the southern hemisphere. And with an 12 inch telescope.

The prettiest were the millions stars of the Omega centuri. You look at the sky with your naked eye and all you see is a bright star. Next you zoom in on this star and you see millions of tiny bright dots in a weblike formation. It does put things in perspective.

After finishing our breakfast we will slowly drive back to the airport and start our trip down south to Torres del Paine.




Our hotel Elqui domos, well tent really...