The crossing from Bolivia to Chile is fairly dramatic, you move from a dirt road to a fantastic surfaced road, in the space of an hour I moved from freezing cold weather where it was actually snowing to sweating like a pig in a desert and the changes in the price of food/accommodation almost floored me! San Pedro de Atacama is an oasis in the driest desert in the world! There are many cool things to do around it which is why I decided to visit - my first day was wasted however hanging around at the Bolivian border. One of the trips I really wanted to do was to go stargazing in the desert - however on arriving in San Pedro I found out that the trip hadn't run in almost 3 weeks because of clouds. I signed up for my first night hopeful the clouds wouldn't appear - they did, so I just got an early night!

The following day I just chilled in the morning and visited Vale de la Luna in the afternoon. It was an amazing trip to vale de la Luna, the scenery gives you the feeling of being on the moon (hence the name). At the first stop to see a huge canyon surrounded my fantastic mountain ranges disaster struck - my trusty camera died. He had only had a very short life but had seen and done so much!!Luckily there were two very nice Japanese girls there who offered me one of their cameras so I was able to continue to take photos. After the canyon we stopped at a massive sand dune and went for a walk - this was called the valley of the dead and again the scenery was awesome! From there we went to the Vale de la Luna where we saw some cool structures that had been created by erosion in the desert, we visited a salt mine and then the valley itself where we watched the sunset. As the sun was setting the surrounding mountains took on the most amazing colour - it really was a treat to see. On returning to the town I rushed to the stargazing office as it wasn't particularly cloudy, I had had to book onto the Spanish trip as there was no room on the English trip. When I got to the office I was in luck becaude the trip was running - I was even more fortunate as there was a woman (English speaking) there cancelling her place so I was able to join the English speaking tour!

The stargazing tour was simply stunning, the stars from the desert where there is no light pollution were amazing. It was approaching the full moon so some of the constellations were difficult to see but the rest were amazing. After looking at the sky and being taught about the stars we got to look through some telescopes, we saw the moon, Saturn, some brightly coloured stars (called the jewellery box I think) inside the southern cross, we saw lots of other stars - it was a really spectacular trip - I really enjoyed it!

The following day I tried (in vain) to get my camera fixed, I ended up buying a really poor quality digital camera to tide me over - I shouldn't have bothered as it's a terrible camera and my camera phone is actually better so I changed to using that! In the afternoon I went on a visit to Laguna Cejar, this trip included a stop at a small salt flat which was nice, a small pool where I had a swim and then Laguna Cejar, a lake with a really high (40%) salt content so you float (like the dead sea). We watched the sunset here while drinking Pisco sours (Chilean not Peruvian which is very different). The following day I returned to Uyuni in what was one of the most uncomfortable journeys of the trip!