In the morning we booked a tour with our hostel to go sandboarding in the afternoon and also booked a stargazing tour for the evening. As the sandboarding tour wasn't due to start til 2pm we went for a wonder into town. First we went to exchange our leftover bolivianos and to take some money out of the bank. Eddy managed to forget both her bank card and her bolivianos! We went for a long walk to the bus station so that we could buy our bus ticket to Santiago the next day before finding out that the company had an office in town! We also revisited the market stalls so that Eddy could finish picking up some souvenir presents. On our way back to the hostel we stopped at a stall and got some nice fresh fruit and I also got a coconut to drink out of. We got back with about 15 minutes to spare before our sandboarding but we were really disappointed to be told it was cancelled as there weren't enough people. The receptionist advised that we go into town to book with another tour agency. First we decided to do a bit of lying around in the hammocks, it was really hot! Eddy ended up with a funny tanline across her stomach and a burnt inner thigh as we didn't realise the rays were so strong. In the late afternoon we headed back into town (this time with Eddy's card and money) and booked a sandboarding tour for the morning. Neither of us were really hungry so we both ended up buying a packet of crisps for dinner on our way back to the hostel.
We headed out again into town, this time to go on our stargazing tour. The Irish girls we had met in Uyuni ended up being on the tour too and we also met a lovely English lady called Julie who was living in Santiago. The tour was fantastic! The guide was very knowledgeable and very funny, giving us all a good laugh in amongst the facts. The sky was so clear it was amazing and the guide pointed out planets, galaxies and different constellations such as each of our starsigns. We were able to see a few shooting stars too throughout the night. After a couple of hours we then got to look through some very powerful telescopes. Our favourite spot that one of the telescopes focused on was Saturn as you could even make out the rings of ice around it. As the night went on it got very cold and we were glad to be get inside with a hot chocolate for a question and answer session. The building had a really nice viewing gap in the ceiling. Unfortunately despite Eddy's hot chocolate being made with water it didn't agree with her and she had to go off and be sick. We got back on the bus back to the centre of town and although we were told the bus would drop us close to our hostel the driver still dropped us about 15 minutes walk away insisting that we were very close. We walked back very quickly as it was so cold! Our room was nice and warm when we got back though thankfully. By the time we got back it was after 11pm so after again disapointingly being told that the tour agency had called and cancelled our sandboarding for the same reason as the hostel agency, we went straight to sleep.