The first place we stayed in in Chile was San Pedro de Atacama which is basically an oasis town in the middle of the Atacama desert. It has typical desert weather with hot temperatures in the day and cold temperatures at night, we were camping so thermals were required! We visited the Valle de la Luna (moon Valley) named because of the similarity in the landscape to that on the Moon. We climbed up a sand dune and walked along a ridge to watch the sunset over the valley. As we turned around to walk back we actually saw the full moon rising from behind the mountains the other side of the valley. We could see it moving and it only took about 5 minutes to totally appear. We´ve seen a few sunrises before but never a moon rise!! We have no photos sorry as the camera is broken!! Hopefully we can get some copies from some of the others in our group sometime.

We then spent several days travelling through the Atacama Desert. First we visited a supermarket for supplies which believe it or not was quite exciting after all the tiny corner shops we had to use recently in Bolivia. They usually have no prices and very little choice and being a ´gringo` you get charged twice as much as the locals do in places like that too.

The distances are huge here so it doesn´t really sound like we did much over these few days. Unlike travelling through the desert in Bolivia though we had tarmac roads all the way which seemed quite a luxury to us! The first night was a bush camp (i.e no toilets or showers!) by the giant sculpture of the ´hand of the desert`. We all huddled around a campfire after dark with toasted marshmallows. The second night we camped in the Pan de Azúcar National Park by the sea, we had toilets, cold showers and another campfire.