North of Cordoba at a small town called Cerro Colorado we visited a site with petroglyphs, including one of a Spanish conquistador on his horse. They were drawn by the Comechinones indigenous tribe between the 10th century and the arrival of the Spanish. There are around 35,000 in the hills around the town.

The night before visiting the petroglyphs we made the mistake of camping at a site next to a livestock farm; goats, pigs, cows and horses. We spent an hour clearing Gerty of flies before we went to bed and then a thunder storm and strong gusts of wind yet again led to the roof being put down and us sleeping on the floor and front seat. All in all camping has been almost impossible the last week because of the soaring temperatures and strong winds. I don't wish to appear to be moaning about the temperature but you must agree 40 degrees is a bit much. A local resident advised us that 46 degrees is not unusual at this time of year. Even by 11.00PM the temperature is still in the 30’s. It is not helped by the fact that Gerty is so hot, when we finally camp, and takes hours to cool down. A couple of times we have given in to the temptation of an air conditioned hotel. Even this is not without problems. At the first hotel the controls for the air conditioning, which in our room was very old and rattling, were located behind the front desk and as the phones didn’t work I had to go down when we needed it switched off so we could go to sleep and then again in the middle of the night to get it turned back on when the heat woke us up.

At this point we headed back to Chile via two parks, Parque Provincial Ischigualasto and Parque Nacional Talampaya, both world heritage sites, in part because they are the only places in the world where all the strata of the Triassic period can be found. Ischigualasto consists of a massive basin once filled by an ancient lake, lying between a range of scarlet red hills on one side and green and black hills on the other. Many of the rocks have been eroded into amazingly weird shapes. The park has 250 million years of strata and where it has been eroded you can see fossils. It was so hot in the park that the glue on one of Peter’s shoes went all soft and the entire sole fell off. Talampaya has the same structure as Ischigualasto, a basin of an ancient lake between two mountain ranges. The sediments in the dry lake have been eroded by water and wind for 200 million years forming a dramatic landscape of pale red cliffs.

From the Parques we took the long road to the border. It was built with regular dips to allow rivers to run across. This works fine as long as the rivers don’t decide to cross somewhere else. Where they do the road is washed away as we found out on a couple of occasions. No problem for Gerty. From the Customs office the road headed through a narrow mountain pass with steep hairpins and dramatic views for about 160Km to the Chilean customs. We reached a height of 4600 metres (a little higher than Royston which sits at about 50 metres!) and both felt a bit light headed. It took us 6 hours to drive with three stops. One for a quick lunch, the second to offer water to a solitary cyclist who turned out to be the biker we met at Xmas in Bariloche and thirdly to help a French family get their motorhome going after it had got air in the fuel line. Peter came to the rescue and got them going- clever clogs.

Back in Chile at Vicuna we booked a trip up to the Mamalluca observatory. Due to the exceptionally clear skies, Northern Chile is home to the largest concentration of observatories in the world. The telescopes are housed in white domes which you can see on the hilltops. One observatory has the gigantic VLT (Very Large Telescope), the worlds most powerful, although this is soon to be eclipsed by an even bigger one called the EELT (European Extremely Large Telescope) that will for the first time enable us to see planets and even black holes. I wonder what they will call the next one? We had a great time and got to look through a telescope to see Orion’s Nebula with lots of baby stars and gases, Jupiter with its rings and moons, a binary star call Castor and other amazing clusters of stars. It was an awesome experience and we thought we might visit another.