La Serena, the City by the Ocean!

From Santiago I moved up the coast to La Serena, an ocean-side town some six hours away by bus. Up the Panamericana I went, through mainly scrubby semi-desert with occasional breathtaking vistas of the coast. I opted to go with Tur-Bus, one of the two giant national chains (the other being Pullman) instead of one of the possibly cheaper myriad local options because I bought my ticket onward from La Serena to San Pedro at the same time and didn’t want to have to deal with the hassle of two language-barrier-impeded transactions, let alone two lines and two differing definitions of what certain classes of travel constitute (there are a variety of options, and though their names are used by all the companies their implementation can differ dramatically). And so, I opted for semi-cama to La Serena, which on Tur-Bus meant a kind of glorified reclining greyhound seat with an extra leg support section, to allow you to get into the position that a stick figure on an economy airline seat numbering system might take: reclining somewhat, legs kicked out a bit. All in all quite comfy if sleeping is not a priority. For San Pedro, I went all out with Super Premium Cama or Cama Ejecutivo or whatever they actually call their top-0f-the-line offering that literally (seriously, though, really literally) gives you a bed on the bus. It was absolutely worth the extra cost; but details will have to wait for a future post.
And so: La Serena. The resort town is in fact comically distant from the actual ocean. There is La Serena, the city, and there is a godawful row of hotels on a nice if unexceptional beach, and there is a walk that takes no less than thirty minutes to get from one to the other.  Why the former even bothers to stake a claim to the latter is a mystery to me, though I understand Chilean tourists pack the place in summer. Not a mystery at all was why, despite being dimly aware of the distances involved (my sources pegged it as a twenty-minute walk, which I defy anyone to achieve), I elected to visit the ocean anyway. I blame Toronto. No, that’s not fair. I blame all land-locked cities. Surely it is not just me among their denizens who is unable to resist the siren call of the ocean when it beckons from so close at hand. Waves! Vastness! Salty air! When it requires just walking straight for twenty minutes to reach the confluence of all these and more, how could I resist? How could anyone who doesn’t live daily in their presence? Of course I made my way down that car-dealership-lined avenue, past construction sites, junk lots and (weirdly) a university. Of course, after twenty minutes, with the buildings at the shore still looking dishearteningly hazy, I stubbornly marched on. Having come so close, I was going to see that ocean, dammit; so help me I was going to bury my toes in that beach’s sand. At last I prevailed, and sat down heavily in the sand, and drank it all in, and gathered my strength, and got right back up and marched all the way back to the city proper so as not to miss my bus out of town. Long story short: not worth the trouble, but really, it’s not like I had a choice.