La Serena is a beach town but unfortunately the wind was a little chilly for sunbathing. We were supposed to visit an observatory in San Pedro de Atacama which has the largest telescope in the world but it was full moon while we were there so we couldn´t go. So while in La Serena we visited a smaller observatory near Vicuña. The way telescopes are classified seems almost childish. The Vicuña observatory only has a VLT (Very large telescope) rather than an ELT (Extreemly large telescope) or OWLT (Overwhelmingly large telescope)! We saw Venus, Jupiter and a number of constellations and satelites.

Our final drive on this trip was to Santiago which compleated a journey of over 7000 kilometers from Quito seven and a half weeks ago. The landscape gradually got greener as we left the desert behind. Santiago is a modern city, so much different to Lima and La Paz. It is very westernised and no one wears old traditional costume. The driving is not crazy and there are fast food resturants everywhere which may account for the number of obese people you see. It´s a novelty to find toilet paper in public toilets and to have a hot shower at all never mind one that stays hot! They speak a lot faster in Chile and tend to run their words together and miss bits out so what little spanish we did learn was almost useless. We saw the usual protests several days in the streets, it seemed to be public service workers wanting a pay rise but there was no violence this time, just whistle blowing, drum banging and shouting.

Many people had said Santiago was a smog filled city, but we found clear skies and sunshine the whole time. It´s odd to see Christmas decorations in the shops as you walk by in summer clothes eating a ice cream! We spent a lot of time wandering around Santiago on foot. There are grassy plazas and impressive buildings and the city generally has a nice feel to it, but it could be anywhere in Europe rather than South America. We walked half way accross the city one day to the cable car which takes you up to get a view over the city with the Andes in the distance, only to find it was closed for maintenance! We ate out in a Chinese resturaunt one night with some others from our group and as we had seen lots of homeless people in the plaza outside, decided to take our leftovers for them. Most of them has dissappeared but there was one lady who waved us away, it seems they are a little choosy!

We took our camera to a repair shop and it worked for about half a day afterwards before it stopped working again, we´ll have to buy a new one once we get to New Zealand. Luckily we´ve copied photos from some of the others in our group so it´s not been too much of a problem and we´ve added some on here. We waved goodbye to the Dragoman group we´ve been travelling with as the truck continues it´s journey right around South America. It would have been good to continue on to Ushuaia or furthur but we´ve already made plans. We tried to contact John Anderson to meet up with him and friends in Santiago at the weekend but were unsucessful so just spent some time by ourselves.