Wednesday, 23 May 2018

#VLTJupiter 2: Journey to Paranal

Chaotic.  That's probably the best way to describe my second-ever trip to South America.  We were late boarding the flight from Heathrow having gotten confused between A and C terminals and having to run through the tunnels beneath the runway.  We were almost late boarding the flight from Madrid because the "transfer" signs weren't obvious and we ended going through the immigration counters twice.  And arrival in Santiago, at around 7.30am, was a nonsense - no idea where to collect baggage, enormous immigration queues, and even larger customs queues.  It took us a good couple of hours to escape the airport, find the TransVIP desk and get our cab out to the ESO Guest House in Las Condas, on the east side of Santiago.

Some of this was ameliorated by a very comfortable, modern airliner with LATAM - no window shades, but buttons used to change the opacity of the windows themselves!  And the view over the Andes at sunrise, as we came into land, was nothing short of spectacular:



I'm travelling with my 2nd-year PhD student, Padraig Donnelly, whose job it'll be to analyse the Jupiter data we acquire from the VLT.  We'll get to that, but for now, we had a whole Sunday to explore the beautiful city of Santiago.  The taxi to the guesthouse cruised along modern, broad freeways into a residential district west of Santiago, and we were immediately struck by the autumnal look of the place - orange and red leaves on the trees, quite the contrast to the springtime Britain that we'd left behind.  The guesthouse was a very laid-back affair:  three low-level wings of bedrooms, surrounding a central courtyard and fountain, with an unused swimming pool out the back.  There was a lounge with coffee machines, books, and a stereo, and a dining room where breakfast, lunch and dinner were served by the very friendly staff.

Exploring Santiago

After breakfast and a shower, we walked 15 minutes to the Escuela Militar underground station, purchasing a "BIP" card with enough credit for a return trip (about $3000 pesos) and travelling to Santa Lucia station.  From there we took a walking tour of the Centro district, half-remembered from the last time I visited Santiago in 2015.   We climbed the Santa Lucia hill, a landscaped region of gardens and statues, to reach the red-brick Torre Mirador at the summit, with its excellent panoramic views of the city and the Andes in the distance.  We found our way to the Mercado Central fish market, dined in the central "Agusto" restaurant on Sea Bass and prawns, fresh from the market stalls, and then wandered the shopping streets of the Centro district to do some people-watching near the Plaza de Armas and Catedral Metropolitana, right in the heart of the city.   Other than tourists, it was notable how peaceful the city was - almost all of the shops and businesses were closed, and it was great to see a country respecting Sunday as a day off work!


We returned to the Guesthouse via a bar near Escuela Militar, then wandered back in time for Pisco Sours at 18:45 (a time so regular that it was advertised on the wall of the guesthouse, next to the meal times).  We had a delicious 3-course meal in the dining room, meeting three other astronomers - two that had just returned from La Silla, and one who was about to travel to that observatory for the first time, and was excited as Padraig and I.

To Antofagasta!

 Monday morning started at 5am, with a quick breakfast and shower, a taxi back to the airport, and an 8am flight north to Antofagasta.  This city, right on the Pacific coast and next to the Tropic of Capricorn at 23S, was previously part of Bolivia until the War of the Pacific in 1879-83, after which it was transferred to Chile.  In fact, we later discovered that today (May 21st) was "Navy Day", a national holiday in Chile, which explained why the city was quiet.  The landscape was dry and arid, as befitting a city in the Atacama desert, the driest place on Earth. An air-conditioned ESO coach picked us up at the airport and drove us into the city along the sea front, past the infrastructure of the port and the copper mining on which the economy was founded.   There we collected a few more people, and headed south into the desert and the mountains, along a smooth paved road through a desolate and dry landscape.  It was hard to escape the feeling that breaking down out here would be a VERY bad idea.

The coach continued south for a couple of hours, with very limited signs of any civilisation along the way.  Mountains were on either side of us, but the road followed a broad valley between them, before we branched off to the west and back towards the ocean.  The road climbed higher, along various switchbacks, until we finally caught a glimpse of what we'd been waiting for - in the distance, the gleam of four silver monsters sat upon the top of Cerro Paranal, the 2635-m high home to ESO's Very Large Telescope.  We stopped at the security lodge to collect our Visiting Astronomers badges, before descending into a tunnel under the desert soil - the entrance to ESO's astonishing Residencia building. 



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