La Serena is a town close to the sea. So I was looking forward to eat some good seafood, well it wasn't great. I had a better hotdog off the roadside, than the fish they served me here and the Fajitas at a Mexican place we went to one day. I don't understand how you can make Fajitas that badly! Maybe it's because the Mexican woman was making the terribly sweet cocktails and the Chilean man was cooking the Mexican food!

Anyhow, that hotdog was actually quite special, because it comes in a great crispy bread roll (not the gooey ones you get in England) and is covered with guacamole. It's amazing - so tasty. It's called a Completo!

Well, Chile is famous for their Pisco schnapps and of course I had to do a tour to a distillery. It was brilliant! It was only a very small factory, but the schnapps is great. Pisco is made of Moscatell grapes, a specific one that is especially sweet. We even went to the vineyards and could taste the grapes from the grape-wine. They are divine! After they explained the whole process, which I will not repeat now, we could try some of their purest stuff that has 60‰ in alcohol content. It's basically burning your stomach out. So any bugs I may have had, they definitely got killed in an instant! Well, this is however not the final product because they aren't allowed to sell it over 40‰ (note they have laws in this country), they need to water it down first before it got bottled. I bought two bottles for our trip in New Zealand to keep us warm if it gets cold in the camper van!

During the same day, we also had a tour of Elqui valley which is a place where they make wine and many different kinds of fruit grow. At the end of the day we visited an old house in Vicuna that used to be the place where Gabriela Mistral grew up. She is the only Chilean woman who won a Nobel Prize - it was for literature. So there are many buildings, schools and roads in Chile called like her. Shame I don't have any pictures of that because my camera broke down during the trip because it got sandy when I went sand boarding and now it rattles like a toy. Lucky there is such thing called guarantee!

Ah, another thing worth noting is the visit to an observatory at night. They showed us Saturn (that one with a ring around it) and Mars through a VLT (very large telescope). Saturn was impressively well visible. They also explained how stars are formed (through Nebulas which are dustparticles) and showed us different constellations such as Orion and some star signs. As we didn't have a moon that night we could see the complete Milky Way - just incredible. They also taught us about the brightest star, which is Sirius and can seriously be seen from anywhere. :-) Apparently they are now working on an OWEL-T Project (Overwhelmingly large telescope). It shall be 11m in width and complete in 19 years! There is also a VLT in South Africa worth seeing apparently.