Chile

We flew from Santiago to San Pedro de Atacama which is the desert in the North of Chile. The transfer from the airport to the town took an hour. It felt like we were in a film driving on a straight dirt road with no other vehicles surrounded by desert. During the drive the vehicle got one of the tires blew out and we were lucky to not have a bad crash. However I was impressed by how quickly the driver changed the tyre so he must be used to punctures on these dirt roads. The town itself was amazing as all of the buildings were made from sand. It was very different to anything I have seen before in a good way.

We did a tour of Valle de la Luna which resembles the moons landscape. We saw rocks made from salt (and we did make sure it was salt by licking our fingers after holding the rocks), black sand dunes and held hollow volcanic rocks. We learned about salt and minerals development in the desert to form the colourful volcanic mountains. As the sun started to set we saw beautiful reflections over the Moon Valley. It was quite pretty and the closest that I will ever be to stepping foot on the Moon.

That night we went to on an astronomy tour. As we were in the desert we were able to visibly see hundreds of stars with the naked eye without reflections from surrounding street lights. Our Dutch guide Hank gave us a brilliant lecture on the development on space and the stars. It was very interesting learning about the big bang happened and how galaxies are developed. We then started looking at the stars through telescopes. We saw a white, blue, yellow and red star and learned that they are different in appearance in our eyes due to the distance light waves have to travel to reach Earth. We also saw a tiny cluster of stars which forms a galaxy. Lastly we looked within our own galazy and looked at Jupiter (seeing three of it moons), Saturn (seeing the planets rings) and our own Moon. The Moon was my favourite astroid to look at as it was so bright and big in the telescope making it easy to see it's craters. All four of us loved doing looking at the stars and astroids in space as we've never looked at them in as much detail. It was a brilliant tour and very informative.Read more