Day 3 - San Pedro de Atacama

This morning we got pancakes for breakfast, how amazing is that! They were nice thick American style pancakes which the lady was cooking as we walked in for breakfast. I think I may stay here forever just for the breakfast. This isn't doing much for my waistline and since we've been away I have started eating an obscene amount of food for breakfast. I do like to take advantage of a free meal AND breakfast alsto involves a lot of cake. My will power isn't the best first thing in the morning so I find it hard to resist. I think I have developed a cake addiction.

We had a very lazy morning, catching up on the blog, reading and generally just milling around before our Valle de la Luna tour started at 3pm. We headed in a bit earlier to get our daily empanada and these ones were HUGE, only to discover that our tour was cancelled due to the wind.

We rebooked the tour for tomorrow and moved tomorrow's Tour Astronómico to tonight instead. The tour didn't start until 10:30pm so that gave us a lot more time for milling around which I'm getting used to!

It's also bloomin freezing in the desert at night so wearing pretty much every item of clothing we own, we headed off to the meeting point for our astronomy tour. We were taken to this couples house not far outside of the main town where 4 very huge telescopes were
set up. Before we got to play with the telescopes we were shown some of the famous constellations with a giant laser pen. The sky is so clear here the number of stars you can see is incredible. We had an amazing view of Orions arm which contained so many stars clustered together they looked like a cloud. This is what you can see in the picture. The picture was taken by the astronomer. The stars look amazing but you can't really make out me or Simon. You can see my bright hat at the back and then Simon is the ghostly figure next to me! Being in the Southern Hemisphere we cannot see some of the usual constellations that we see back at home and the ones that you can are upside down. You definitely need to use your imagination for the some of the constellations. To name a couple we saw a few of the star signs; Scorpio, Sagittarius and Virgo. We did learn a very interesting fact about the star sign constellations. You can only see your star sign in the sky 6 months after your birthday. This is why we could see Simons, Sagittarius and not mine, Taurus, as I have only just had my birthday.

After that we went inside for a hot drink / wine and some snacks before heading over to the telescopes. We were shown a number of star clusters as well as some stars that looked blue in colour. The most impressive of all though was Saturn. You could actually see the rings around the planet!

Despite not being able to feel our toes we did really enjoy the tour. We feel like our roommate may have lucked out with the different tour he went on where there was live space music (I'm imagining something from A Clockwork Orange) and he got to wear a poncho! I'm a little bit sad we didn't get to experience that.

Having been in South America for just over 6 weeks now, it wasn't until today that we noticed the moon is the wrong way round. Instead of the crescent going from left to right it goes from top to bottom! Mind blowing!Read more