We set off for our mammoth journey to San Pedro De Atacama in Chile early, we first travelled 6 hours to The Peruvian-Chilean Border to a small town called Tacna, and we then jumped in a car with 3 other people to cross the border to Arica. We just made it onto another bus to San Pedro which was another 12 hours. The 12 hour bus was pretty comfy to it wasn't to bad, we managed to get plenty of sleep and arrived in San Pedro around 8 in the morning. They are really strict about bringing in fruits to Chile at the borders and the guy who was working on the border in Arica was a total tool. Our Spanish wasn't great and he said something weird to us, not knowing what he said we said we didn't understand what he said and he replied "oh Jesus, more English people coming to Chile that cant speak Spanish" I don't think he realized we understood that bit and after checking to see if he spoke English he got a torrent of abuse from both of us about how he was a ****. His friend came over and told Brid to calm down so think his English wasn't that bad.

San Pedro is a tiny wee town in the middle of the desert, but there seems to be heaps of touristy things to do here. I fancied going sand boarding and Brid wanted to go to a star gazing thing. We checked into the hostel Vilacoya which seemed really nice. We wandered into town to find the bank machine, turned out both the bank machines in town were broken and had been for 5 days, we didn't take much Chilean Peso's with us so we had to change all our dollars we had and some Argentinean Peso's also. We headed down to the star gazing place and booked it for later that night. We messed around till 8pm then headed down to the shop to be taken into the desert and a small house in the middle of nowhere. We firstly got a talk on the stuff we'd see, the guy was French but he was actually pretty funny. We went outside and looked through all the telescopes they had previously set up, all looking at different things. Half way through he took everyone's cameras and took some pretty cool pictures of Jupiter through one of the telescopes. We headed back inside and got some hot chocolate. The guide had an amazing green laser pen that could point out the stars, I'm determent find one for myself.

Next day and we didn't really do anything exciting. Still trying to find a bank that works, still no joy, we have enough money to last a while but not that long. Finally near the end of the day the bank started working and we withdrew tons of money incase it happened again. We went and booked the sand boarding for the next day and then headed for some supper, I had a small pizza but it turned out to be massive and could only eat half.

Next day and we were up early to go sand boarding, the guy picked us up from the hostel and we drove about 30mins outside of town to a big dune. I had imagined it to be similar to snowboarding but it was nothing like it. You could only really go in a straight line, and pretty fast which usually meant you fell on your butt and got covered with sand.

We did that for a couple of hours until we were totally filled with sand, headed back to the hostel and booked our bus to Santiago. It was gonna take us 24hours to reach Santiago so we decided to book the expensive bus seats which fully reclined. The cost a fortune but we figured we deserved it. Headed off for some food before the bus. Walked over to the bus station and after waiting around for a wee bit we finally got on. The seats actually went right back into a bed, no one had lied to us for once. The guy even came around with another mattress and blankets. We got a really good sleep all the way there and for once it didn't feel as if we were sitting on a bus for a day.