La Serena was our next stop just a mere 7 hour journey up the coast from Valparaiso! God we are going to be doing a lot of long distance travelling out here. We arrived and made the short walk to our hostel which i had booked the previous day. However when we got there they were baffled and didnt have our reservation which was a bit strange! Anyway they took us down the road to their friends house who had room too so it all worked out well. The woman who we are staying with is so cute...she´s well old but insists on running around for us. We didnt do much on the day we arrived as we were really tired from the journey. The next day was sunday so everything was shut and it was really difficult to find anywhere to eat. Down the road from us though was a big shopping centre - they LOVE malls here - so we managed to get a MacDonalds!! How bad is that! I swear that there is more fast food in Chile than decent restaurants. They are mad for it. America´s influence - tut tut! Anyway we spent the day walking around the town which is really pretty and has a total of 29 churches! Like my interesting fact! Oh yer and the guy from the original hostel i had booked, who claimed never to have taken our booking, came a knocking at our hostel a few times with more people! I reckon he takes bookings and then gives them to the old lady - sweet but he lied to us!! We tried to book a trip to an observatory for the evening but it was too cloudy...boo! On our last day we had to check out of our room and then hang around until 10pm when we were getting a night bus up to the Atacama desert, our last stop in Chile. I thought it was going to be hell but to be honest it wasn´t that bad. We went to local town Coquimbo to try and soak up some local culture but it was pretty rubbish and just full of shops and malls! We had a great set 3 course lunch, which they call a menu del dia, all for a quid! These places are gold mines but they are few and far between. Then we eneded up at the beach for a bit but that too was full of rubbish so we ended up at the mall down the road again window shopping. Its terrible but honestly if there was something better for us to have done we would have done it! There were a few trips places like Valle de Elqui, which is a valley basically! But they were all too expensive for what they were and there was no way we could have got public transport to it. Listen to me trying to justify our trip to the mall! We eventually got our 10pm bus and had a LONG 16 hour bus journey ahead of us!