Ben --- > Chile

Now that I have a weekend to relax a little bit, it's time I reported on my trip to Chile a couple of weeks ago.

I went to meeting of about 60 astronomers and astrophysicists in La Serena, Chile. On my three hour walking tour, I took a few random pictures of the town below:

It's about a 1/2 hour plane ride, or a six hour bus ride north of Santiago, Chile, the capital of Chile. Why were in Chile? Good question. We're all part of an international collaboration, the Dark Energy Survey, building a telescope on Cerro Tololo, a mountain in the Chilean Andes.

The 4-day meeting was interesting, but it was too interesting because now to me, Chile is the inside of hotel conference room. I was in Chile 5 days total.

Getting there was the craziest part. On the map at the right, I show the flight path (in red) we took to get from Atlanta, USA, to Santiago, Chile. Notice that theres's a big black "1" and "2" circled on the map -- it took us two tries to get to Santiago from Atlanta. That's right. We flew out of Atlanta at 11 pm, and landed back in Atlanta at 7 am. Apparently during the night, the plane's weather radar died over Colombia or Ecuador (halfway to Santiago), so we turned around and flew all the way back!! An 8 hour flight all for nothing.

I remember waking up on the plane about 6 am and seeing the sun rising in the East. Since, I was on the right side of the plane, and we were flying South, I didn't expect to see this and I asked the flight attendant if I was crazy.
Me: "Shouldn't the sun be rising on the other side of the plane?"
Flight Attendant: "No we turned around over Colombia in the middle of the night and we're flying back.", she answered.
Me: "Bummer. Why can't we land in Panama or Colombia and switch planes?"
Flight Att: "They don't have a plane we can switch to".
Me: "Can I parachute out right now?"

So we landed in Atlanta at 7am, got another plane, and took off at 8am. We finally got to Santiago about 5 pm. It's 5000 miles (8500 km) from Atlanta to Santiago, but for me, it was 10,000. Delta Airlines later compensated me with 10,000 frequent flyer miles and $100. I missed my flight to from Santiago to La Serena, so I just took a bus. 6 hours in the dark. Nobody spoke English on the bus, so I had to rely on my Sesame Street spanish to figure out when to get off the bus.

Besides walking around town when we weren't meeting, I ran up and down the beach quite a bit, as our hotel and conference center were right on the Pacific Ocean:


On left is the view to north out of my hotel room, with the Andes in the background running right up to the Ocean. The middle is the view to the south along the beach, toward the city of Coquimbo, and the right is the view looking north up the beach. The weather was cool and cloudy like this all week.

The trip home was a lot easier. I was regaled for several hours by the drunk guy next to me about life on an oil platform and battles on Hill 365 in Vietnam. I have more little tidbits to say about Chile but I'll save them for another time. In the end, I guess I wouldn't recommend flying to Chile to go a meeting.