Day 33 continued

And so... We arrived in San Pedro de Atatcama a funny little town right on the border in Chile and on the edge of the Atacama desert. We booked into our hotel where Tom and I received what can only be described as a shed on legs, but a very nice cosy shed. We spent the remainder of the day relaxing and having a look around the town, which it must be said was very touristy and built around this purpose.

Day 34

Today was spent exploring the town and relaxing as we had booked our main activity for the day for the evening. A tour of the night sky out in the desert. At 7pm we headed out of town and arrived at a house with a platform outside mounted with around 12 huge telescopes. Tom was very excited. We were welcomed into the house of the very nice French couple who were running the tour. The french man was very charasmatic and had a Monty Python-like outrageous accent! We went outside and he pointed at the various star formations and spoke at length about them using a truly amazing laser pointer which did look as though it was pointing at the stars. I learnt more about stars in the hour than I ever had before but Tom in his typical snobbish ways said `it was a bit basic`. We then had a go on his telescopes and it was truly brilliant seeing nebulae, star clusters and the highlight was looking at jupiter seeing the rings and four of its moons. Tom mercifully was a bit more impressed by this and we all went home happy.

Day 35

A bit of a nothing day, Tom spent most of his day on his bloody iPhone and playing football. We then went on the internet for a while and that was just about it. We then went to the bus station and got on a bus headed for La Serena. It was a better bus than Bolivia but still a bus...and 16 hours on any bus is never good.