Thought I would give my input on the blog for once as Tania has been doing all the writing up untill now, though expect she will check this before I press post! We are leaving South America after 3 months and after traveling overland for about 10,000 km, it will be sad to leave, although it will be nice to get to a country where you can speak a languge that they actually understand - hopefully! After our time here we still can't speak spanish fluently but we can...

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 ...

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 ...

We drove from Uyuni, again all on unsurfaced roads, nearly having our teeth shook out of our heads. We stopped at Villamar simply because the distance was too far to go in one day to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. We stayed in basic dormitory accomodation and got up at an unearthly hour the next day (4.30am!) to continue the journey and get to Chile through the desert in the light. The next day didn´t exactly go to plan. We had a local guide to direct us throug...

After an 11 hour drive from La Paz to Potosi we were pleased to get to a resturant until we saw the menu. There was a poor English translation (it meant more to read the spanish!) and some of the things on offer were:´Dad´s cream and sausage` and 'Steak of bad beast with attacked vegetables`! One thing we noticed in Bolivia is that many people drive about without lights on at night and we found out that they do it because they think it saves petrol!! Potosi i...