Chile - San Pedro de Atacama

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San Pedro de Atacama looks like a scene from a Hollywood cowboy movie. It's a small town with restaurants, bar and tour operators - so incredibly touristy, and with a price tag to match. It's considered by Chileans to be the most desired place to visit in all of Chile. It also happens to be in the driest desert in the world hence how they try to justify the costs. A dingy little room, with cold showers costs more per night than a pad in Oz!

Being out in the middle of the dessert, with nothing around for miles and rarely a cloud in the sky, San Pedro de Atacama is ideal for star gazing. Astronomers from all over the world come here to study the sky. We actually met a guy earlier in our trip who was working in Atacama as part of his Doctorate searching for evidence of potential life on other planets that we do not yet know about. Very cool. We took the star gazing tour at 11pm until 2am and had a fab time looking close up at the moon and being shown other galaxies and stars forming. We even saw a shooting star!

In addition to this we did a second trip sand boarding, and this time we had much better gear and much bigger sand dunes to play on. It's slower than on snow and needs a bit more effort but it's such good fun and head planting in the sand is very soft, if you don't mind the mouthful of sand you get as part of it!

We met up both evenings with our french pals and enjoyed some great food and red wine. I've not said before but not for the first time on our travels Ben was asked, in jest, for his autograph due to his likeness to Sting (in his younger days). More amusing was that our waiter was a dead ringer for Antonio Banderas and seemed to enjoy trading the look.

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