Chile is one of the best places in the world for astronomy. Unfortunately we weren't able to do it in San Pedro due to it being a full moon and cloudy sky. Not ideal. However the Elqui Valley north of Santiago is also home to several observatories and is world renowned. The weather forecast looked perfect and so we decided to make the trip. First leg was a 7 hour bus up to the town of La Serena on the coast. A very popular holiday town, inexplicably 2km from th...

(Repost, I screwed up and got confused about what we did this evening!) First things first, off to the local hospital to get Fabrice's chest looked at. The pesky cough was still very much with us. Having made an appointment the day before he was seen very quickly, and one x-ray later prescribed some super strong antibiotics. No injection in a store cupboard this time unfortunately! The hospital was excellent, brand new and state of the art. Very impressed. That...

I'm not sure why, but Santiago was one of the places I was most looking forward to visiting on the trip. It didn't disappoint. We arrived on the Sunday evening and checked into a funky boutique hostel in Bellavista, which is the place to be in Santiago. Home to (at least) one of the many universities in the city, it is primarily a student area but full of bars, restaurants and clubs which cater for everything from $1 beer to top end restaurants. Even on a Sunday...

My brother Tim's birthday. We were getting a mid-afternoon bus to Santiago and so spent the morning visiting the upmarket coastal resort of Viña del Mar. We caught the Valparaiso metro there, about half an hour's journey, and then as ever struggled to find our way around. After baffling a few locals with our apparently simple question "donde es el mar?" we eventually stumbled upon the seafront. It looks like an upmarket seaside resort, hard to describe it any...

And so to where everything kicked off on 9/11. That's Valparaiso, Chile of course. 11 September 1973 and the military coup that brought Pinochet to power. Ha, we only learned that after we left but hey, we're picking up some local history! Most of Nov 9 was spent on a bus crossing the Andes again, back into Chile and to the port town of Valparaiso. We arrived mid-afternoon, checked into a delightful B&B and headed into town. What a dump. We wandered around...