The Great Big Trip Part 2

Serene Serena

DAYS 4-5

Half-heartedly, I leave my poolside spot to a large German family and we get back on the windy road that takes us back down to the coast, at the city of La Serena.
Built on top of a small hill that overlooks the ocean, La Serena’s large avenues have recently been remodelled to allow wide sidewalks where cafés and restaurants have their terraces and its early 20th century Spanish-style buildings have been restored to give the city a very pleasant atmosphere. Stopping over to eat in one of these cafés and stroll on its Plaza de Armas, we also took the time to visit its oldest church, a simple yet compelling Dominican church always with one of these horrific Jesuses (as opposed to our Jesuses, always represented almost as sleeping on the cross with a sad but resigned expression, these Chilean Christs, with their eyes wide-opened, their mouths and faces distorted by pain and agony, their bloody limbs –we regularly see the bones coming out of the knees- and their real human hair, are simply hair-raising!), and a monument to the ones who disappeared or were killed during the Pinochet regime.

Talking about this friendly old man who died last December, it’s weird to see him being mocked by humour magazine (with an ice-cream on is head) or discredited by graffiti artists while thousands apparently queued for hours to pay their respects to the dictator when he died.
That’s just one of the many issues on which the Chilean society is deeply divided. As I just read in the papers, I see another heated debate going on over the adoption of a law that would allow women of 14 years and older to have access to oral contraceptives in a country where the President is a single mother yet where divorce was made legal only in 2004…

The fact that 70% of Chileans call themselves Catholics probably has something to do with that. But if the vast majority of its city dwellers is Christian, the exentric mayor of Coquimbo (La Serena's twin city) who erected a gigantic cross at the top of the city's main hill decided other religions should also be honoured. That why the other landmark of the city is a mosque!!! Don't ask the angered Muslim community of Santiago for what reasons the royal family of Morocco decided to finance the construction of that deserted mosque in Coquimbo rather than in the capital, but the fact is that you cannot call the city un-politically correct!

But apart from old churches, monuments and funky religious landmarks, what makes Coquimbo and La Serena so great is the 6km long beach they share. While it's not as upscale as Zapallar, La Serena is still the domain of the well-off, many of them Argentinians who find it cheaper to cross the Andes (they really do, at like 5000m there's a pass where they drive through during the summer...unbelieveable!) to party on the Chilean sand than to go all the way down to their own expensive resorts. But happily, in Chile, the access to the sea cannot be lawfully monopolized by big hotels and thus, its balnearios are still available to all...





And another beautiful day wouldn't be complete without a walk on the beach and our traditional sunset Pisco Sour.

Once again, all together: LIFE IS...HARD!!!