Chile, San Pedro de Atacama

This small town was filled with backpackers, heading to all kinds of adventures. Our adventure group had really really good food hear, theres´s many nice restaurants, not for shoestring travelers though…the visit to the world´s driest desert Atacama was great, but I really wished I had more time to e.g. explore the area by rental bike and one thing I wanted to do was to go sand boarding. Anyway, just walking around this huge area and hearing about the strange nature with huge sand storms, winds, warmt and freezing coldness was extremely interesting. Local guide can give so much more to the experience and sure it helps if you´ve done some reading back home..it make the travelling much bigger experiece, because you understand better what you are seeing and the context.

So we went to meet a real astronomer, showing in complete darkness with a strange laser light all the star formation, explaining how people have always in our history been using stars for navigations and developing strategies for harvesting…There we were, amazed, shivering in coldness, looking at the thousands shining starts - even shooting starts, suddenly feeling so very small…magic!

...And hot chocolate has never tasted as good as after looking the stars with different telescopes for guite a while in the freezing weather…I mean I could hardly feel my toes when I entered the reasearchers building. Still, this was one of the coolest things during the 6 week adventures I made in South America.