After enjoying rather too much wine Matt and I crossed back into Chile and went to the driest place on earth. There are parts of this desert that have never had rain and it is the best place in the world to see the stars as there are only an average of 40 cloudy days a year.
We spent a couple of days in this village/town which had no street lights and seemed to exist solely for tourists. We made use of the many tourist opportunities and went on an excursion to the Valle de la Luna (moon valley). This area is used by NASA for research and stuff so its pretty cool. We also had to crawl/climb/scramble through parts of the Valley on part of the trip, luckily out of a group of 8, one person had a torch. I very proudly pulled out our head torch turned it on and discovered that the batteries were dead, no fear, I tried using it anyway and only bashed into the ceiling a few times. We stayed long enough in the Valle for Matt to get another hundred sunset photos and watch the colour of mountains change to pink as the sun disappeared.
We also went on a star gazing tour which was very cool, I can now identify several constellations, including Leo. Only issue was the freezing cold of the desert and the fact that we took the SLR camera along and we were told that' point and shot cameras' work better on the telescopes, imagine Matt's face if you please.
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