Hello all,

After Peru we headed south to San Pedro de Atacama in Northern Chile, on the edge of the driest desert in the world! We stayed in a really weird hostel where the owners, who were very easily in their 60s, sat smoking weed with one of their guests at 9am, in the kitchen. There was a mad grandmother there who sporadically screamed and the female owner had a rather unhealthy relationship to her cats. Rhys got called into another bedroom to admire the cats sleeping together.

San Pedro had more to offer than insanity and we made the most of the surrounding area by hiring bikes and cycling into the national park of "Valle de la Luna" which true to its name was a moonlike landscape created by volcanic activity. That evening we went on an astronomy tour which San Pedro is famous for and is renowned to be one of the best places in the world for star gazing. It was bloody freezing but the stars were incredible and I saw a shooting star for the first time ever!! We were given a little lesson in Astrology and how to read the stars, which wasn´t particularly useful as we live in a completely different hemisphere and the stars are very different in the North and South but it was truly beautiful. We looked at the stars both with the naked eye and through a variety of telescopes. We even saw Jupiter, rings and all!!!!

Although we thoroughly enjoyed San Pedro, Chile doesn´t really appeal to us partly because it is very expensive, so we are going to shoot down to Santiago and then straight across the border into Mendoza Argentina as we did not have a chance to go there on our last visit!We´re very excited for some good steak and wine!

Only 2weeks until New Zealand!Lots of love xxxxx