Stu and Anna's travels

After our last cold night on the Bolivian altiplano, it was a relief to get down into Chile and below 3000m. We arrived in San Pedro de Atacama at lunchtime and promptly signed up for a star-gazing trip into the desert that evening. The tour was led by a French astronomer who was funny, which helped make some of the technical science stuff more interesting. Although it was nearly the full moon, he showed us stars you can only see with a telescope and how to identify constellations with the naked eye. It was like being at a planatarium but without the comfy seats. We also saw Jupiter through a telescope which was pretty cool in a geeky kind of way.

We spent one day in San Pedro doing nothing (well… laundry, sleeping, buying bus tickets, etc.) before deciding that we could not miss the once in a lifetime opportunity to try sandboarding. On the Friday, therefore, we rented bikes and boards and headed off into the Atacama Desert. Sandboarding proved to be very hard work, mostly because you have to walk up a sanddune for each run, but we both managed to get on to our feet for a few seconds at least!

Chile – tick – the next day we were off to Argentina.