The driest place on earth

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Finally found an internet stop after drying through some of the most barren land I´ve ever seen! We left Santiago on Saturday and have been travelling North through Chile.

We initially headed through a tiny little fishing village (which happily had an artisan chocolate maker with a stall!) and ended up in the Elqui valley. We went to the observatory which was absolutely incredible. Apparently it´s the best place in the world for looking at the stars because of the low humidity, low rainfall and lack of cloud. For this reason the Europeans and Americans are funding a range of large telescopes - currently the largest is the VLT (very large telescope ingeniously enough!). Anyway, the one that we went to was for tourists so was a mere 45cm telescope. We got to see some pretty cool stuff though - saturn looked so perfect I was convinced it was a sticker over the end! The guide quite clearly loved astronomy and had worked at the observatory for over 20 years so managed to make the whole evening fascinating - I (almost) didn´t realise how cold it was there! Try looking up stellarium (a downloadable programme) to see what we saw...

The next day was due to be penguin day. The Humboldt Current travels up the coast of Chile, bringing very cold waters...and it´s namesake penguin! Needless to say I was very very excited. Unfortunately, the normally calm waters were anything but and the fishermen wouldn´t take their pretty little wooden boats out onto the rocks. Fair enough...but I still think that the penguins would have liked to see me :o(

We stayed in Bahia Anglasia for two nights in very cute little cabins on the beach. Had a superb barbeque cooked for us last night by our guides - have never seen such large pieces of steak on a BBQ before!

Today we have travelled through the driest part of the Atacama desert. We thought it was pretty desolate previously - just a few rocks and cacti (and the odd Llama sooo cute!). However, the area we went through today hasn´t recorded rain in over 50 years (and I think that´s when they started the recording). There was just sand...and sand...and sand...looked fairly cool with all the (sand) mountains. Needless to say, I needed to wash off a lot of sand in the shower today!

Tomorrow we arrive in San Pedro de Atacama - think that flamingos should be on offer and some warm lagoons. I´m still watching out for those penguins though...

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