The Atacama desert, 40,600 square miles of baked sand and rock that sits between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains. Considered the driest place on earth, to put it into perspective the Sahara in Africa is twice as wet as here. In fact some areas of the desert have never ever seen rain. So as you might expect we were looking forward to nice sunny, non-wet fun!

The town we arrived in is called San Pedro De Atacama and this location hasn't had a drop of rain for 9 years, of course when we turned up it was tipping down!

The roads were underwater and the buildings were struggling to keep out the little know element called water! The locals were somewhat mystified why this very rare occurrence had happened. But luckily for us life was back to normal after a day and it was 30 degrees of scorching heat. Sun cream, sun glasses and sunhats came back out to play.

The town is a very trendy little place, consisting of lots of adobe buildings, trendy restaurants and lots of overly cool locals that seem to wear big bright sunglasses and hats with feathers in (soooo coooool)

After our 3 day trip from Bolivia to Chile we were not so keen on doing anymore tours so we just kicked back, relaxed and explored the town. Some nice food, nice Chilean wine and enjoying a great museum about the history of people in the Atacama.

Our new hostel is very nice; however we had decided to do the travelers thing and book into a dorm room rather than the many months of chickening out with a private room.

This was a mistake as Dave quickly remembered that he cannot stand sleeping in a dorm! Sharing with 5 others and having to tip toe around to not wake anyone up, and not even being able to talk to Emily without annoying others... We lasted one night and then switched back to a private room, much more like it !!

We enjoyed our first taste of the Chilean culinary favorite, the hotdog! In fact we had it for breakfast. These hotdogs are rather large and consist of such delights as avocado, mayonnaise, tomato and of course a nice big dog (yum yum)

Speaking of dogs. This town has a reputation for lots of dogs wandering around, the locals call this place ´San Perro De Atacama´ (Perro meaning dog in Spanish) and we enjoyed this delight when we went to a meal the first night as many dogs appeared wanting our food, and then broke out into a playfight under our chairs...which was quite distracting while eating dinner.

Chilean money here is quite crazy, we are spending about $45000 pesos a day, which sound like a lot but it is in fact about 50 pounds. It takes some getting used to when someone charges you $1000 pesos for a bottle of water (which actually equates to about 1 pound 30) We have worked out that we will spend about 1.2millions pesos in this country, so for a month a least we will be millionaires!!

Tomorrow we jump on a long overnight bus to head further south and into a famous valley region, and the best place of earth to observe the night sky, our observatory tour which includes looking through a professional telescope is booked for the 10th....and we cannot wait for that.

So off south we go exploring this amazing part of the world. The nice thing about this country is that you cannot wander too far east or west as its such an unusually thin country!