Pisco Elqui, or, the road not taken

The city of La Serena is not merely known for its proximity to the ocean. It is also known as the base for exploring the Valle d’Elqui, one of Chile’s most fertile regions and its undisputed capital of pisco production. Pisco is, as you might guess from the name, the key ingredient in the pisco sour, Chile’s national drink and source of much alleged friction with Peru, who also claim it as their own. Whether this friction persists today, I have no idea, but once upon a time it was sufficiently urgent for Chile to stake some incontrovertible claim to the name that they summarily renamed some town in the region from whatever it used to be to “Pisco Elqui”, and so it continued to be called today.
Whatever the case, numerous touring outfits in La Serena were offering pricey guided tours of the region, hitting all sorts of highlights for ten minutes apiece. Yours truly thinking himself a savvy independent (and not insignificantly frugal) traveler, decided that he could save a bundle by just taking the bus to the most distant point on the tour and the highlight of the region, the aforementioned Pisco Elqui, wandering around for a bit, and then bussing back. And so it went, just fine and dandy up the first part of the valley, which is incredibly scenic and all the more striking because though the landscape consists of semi-arid, brown scrubby mountains, the floor of the valley and the lower slopes of the hills are all given over to intensive agriculture and are carpeted in lush green vineyards (pisco is, they tell me, a type of grape).

Pisco vineyards near Pisco Elqui.

I got on the bus in La Serena at around 11am, so by the time we hit the towns in the upper part of the valley, it was probably closing on 1pm. This, undoubtedly, explains the sudden influx of school kids onto the bus at that point. At each village probably twenty students would get on, filling any free seats and then cramming into the aisle (I should mention this was a minibus, with maybe 20 seats) . The resulting decrease in visibility, and the corresponding increase in chatter, clatter, and excitement all around me made it impossible – impossible, I tell you! – to determine where we were, and so of course I missed my stop. It was one of those situations where you have a mounting sense of your ship having sailed without you, so to speak, and eventually it becomes unbearable and you swallow your pride and shuffle apologetically through the crowd with your very foreign day-pack and ask the driver in imperfect Spanish to confirm what you already know, and he does, and the bus slows, and stops for an instant to let you out and then rolls on and away, and you are on a dusty road some unknown distance from your one-intersection destination and you take a swig of water and begin.
And it would have been fine – I was only probably half a kilometer out of town, as it turned out – except that, somehow, I managed to miss the town entirely, and walk for another half hour, probably, back down the valley. And it was fine for fifteen minutes – recall, I had no idea of precisely where I was or how for the town should have been – but then it got slightly worrisome, because surely I hadn’t missed it by _that_ much. And then finally the road turned and I looked back and I could see Pisco Elqui nestled snugly into the hillside back _up_ the road, about where I’d started walking, in fact. It was both heartening and very deflating to see my destination for certain and yet to see it so far off, and uphill. With another swig of water, I started back.
It would have been tough going indeed, but luckily after five minutes I came across a gaggle of middle-aged women out of their luxury SUVs ogling the view up the valley; one of them spoke very good English and offered me a lift the rest of the way, which I gratefully accepted. They were from Vina del Mar, near Santiago, and would be spending a few days at one of the numerous very well-apppointed residenciales in Pisco. We made very pleasant small talk, arrived in Pisco in no time at all, and I thanked them profusely before heading off to explore the village and its legendary pisco distillery. It was all very nice, and the ride home was uneventful.

Mistral pisco distillery, Chile's oldest.