La Serena - Day 32 - 31/10/2012 (Wednesday)
After almost 7 hours on the bus we arrived into La Serena in the early evening. As the next 2 days were a Chilean national holiday everything was really bus. It took us almost 30 minutes to flag down the 5 taxis we needed. Sarah went in a taxi before me and when I got to the hotel she hadn't arrived. Slinky worried we all waited but they finally arrived.
We threw our bags into the room and headed out to get some food from around the market but given the following holiday everything was shutting early. We walked for ages and finally found an open restaurant. We had a really nice BBQ platter.
After dinner we went to this real local bar with about 5 old men in it. The girls ordered 6 of the local cocktail and it took them almost 30 minutes for them to make it. It was so slow. Following that a few of us went onto this karaoke bar where they were singing Latin American love songs. It was so cheesy. We now have a guy in the group who can speak Spanish so he was translating some of the songs for us. The lyrics where truly terrible and as this is a family blogging site I cannot repeat 99% of them!!

La Serena - Day 33 - 01/11/2012 (Thursday)
We decided to get bikes and head down to the beach. First we picked up some food from the supermarket but being 10 of us this takes some people longer than our weekly shop. We picked up the bikes which were far better than the ones we had in Montevideo as the brakes worked for starters. It was slow going through town as there were so many of us and we kept getting stuck at red lights. Once down on the seafront we stopped to look at this light house castle thing and set off along the coast. It was rather hunting seeing Tsunami warning signs all along the front of the beach but they have at least one a year here with the earth quakes. We didn't go far and found a patch of empty beach to eat our lunch. A few people were crazy enough to go in the sea. It was freezing so I just paddled although I got soaked when a huge wave hit me!
About 2pm we got back on the bikes and rode for about 2 hours along the coast until we reached another town which had hundreds of pelicans just sitting on the beach. They are huge birds!
We rode back and handed back our bikes then went for a shower. Sarah's was freezing and when it was my turn the hot water had returned so I had to wind her up about that!
About 7 we all jumped into a mini bus and headed up the valley to a space observatory. Chile has some of the clearest and driest skies and as such had most of the worlds observatories. It took almost an hour climbing up through the valley and then up a mountain when we got there. We had this guide who was really passionate about space and he gave us a brilliant tour. We started in a dome with a huge telescope. He explained so much and we took turns to look at Mars and other clusters of suns. We also got to see the nearest star to us (apart for the sun) which we cannot see from the Northern hemisphere. We also got to see massive clusters with millions of stars in that to the naked eye look like 1 star. He then took us outside to show us stuff from outside. I've never seen so many stars in all my life. We could also see the centre of the Milky Way and the 2 closest galaxies to ours. I'm really passionate about astrometry so ill shut up now because I could go on for pages and pages.
The bus journey on the way back was interesting. It was already midnight but everyone wanted to go to this nit club for some unknown reason so everyone started drinking. I partook in a view but had no intention of going to a cheesy club!

La Serena - Day 34 - 02/11/2012 (Friday)
Today turned out to be one of those wasted days. There isn't a lot in La Serena and our bus was at 4 so we couldn't do a day trip. I wanted to go to the Llama petting zoo but no one else was bothered. So instead we went to the supermarket to buy dinner and once the group surfaced went out for a larger lunch. We then sat around in the hotel for a bit before getting our transfer to the bus station. This was going to be our 2nd longest night bus of the trip. In excess of 17 hours. What made it worse was that because its a public holiday we couldn't upgrade to the nicer and more comfortable buses and everyone was spread out and not together.