today i drove around the valle del elqui — a small region that seems to mimic the napa valley (or at least try). the region is predominately covered with grape trees for making pisco. although there are now health restaurants, retreats, etc. on the way to pisco elqui (a small town at the end), i stopped by the capel pisco manufacturing plant. most of the equipment was down for maintenance, although we did get to see them packaging some bottles and sampled some pisco at the end. apparently pisco is a liquor in between wine and cognac. failed the samples ‘test’ in drowning colors. i though the first sample taste a bit like lychee (it was pineapple and guayaba), the second like rum/absinthe (it was their top shelf, and apparently tastes quite different) and the third like whiskey (it supposedly tastes like rum).
i also saw my first loquot (nispero/nespera) tree in latin america! unfortunately, the fruit was still a bit green. i’m getting closer to my dream of swimming in a pool of loquots, much like scrooge mcduck did in his vault of gold in the opening song for the tv cartoon duck tales.
later, at night, i almost went up to another observatory — unfortunately, it was closed because of the clouds. apparently chile is big on astronomy….i guess in the countryside there’s little pollution (light/smog) and a relatively stable/cloudless climate.
internet is surprisingly fast and good in chile (compared with the rest of latin america). most days i take about 1 gigabyte of images on the time-lapse camera. although i have an external hard drive, i had some issues with it…so instead try to upload the pictures to my server back in the us. so far, the internet has been good enough throughout most of the trip for me to do so without a problem: some nights i’ll upload nothing…but other nights i might upload two or three days worth. excluding the hotel in flores, guatemala (which according to my ftp program uploaded at a speed of 90 KB/s), the average upload speed in latin america is about 20 KB/s with a maximum of 40ish KB/s. In Chile, almost all places have internet (even remote desert towns), and the average upload speed is around 50ish KB/s (with a narrow standard deviation). also, the internet and power haven’t cut-out in the middle of the night (yet). it’s nice…since before entering chile i was backed up by almost two weeks worth of pictures….and now i’m only about a week behind. hopefully i can be back down to zero before leaving for argentina.
lastly, i’m gonna fix my muffler again tomorrow. not sure whether i’ll go with the patch ($15) or a new muffler ($40). having a dirty car can be useful sometimes…like for drawing on when talking to an exhaust repairman in a foreign country.
