Sophie Jones

I made it to San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile just in time for Independence Day. The whole of September is a time for celebration in Chile with the streets being lined with flags, but on September the 18th there are parades, fireworks, and big parties in the street that go on all night! From San Pedro I went on a trip into the Atacama Desert to see Valle de la Luna, or Valley of the Moon. The Valley of the Moon is a part of the Atacama Desert with unusual other worldly landscapes that have been formed by wind and water. We stopped to look at various interesting rocks and landscapes, and then found a beautiful place to watch the sun set while we had some pisco sours and snacks.

With a lot of distance to cover in South America I had to press on, so I jumped on a 14 hour night bus over 1000 km to Vicuña, in Elqui Valley. Thankfully the busses in Chile are really nice. Elqui Valley is an excellent wine region, and claims to be the origin of Pisco, although that's hotly contested by Peru. Either way, I thought it was worth visiting a pisco distillery where I thought I was going to get drunk from the fumes of the warehouse! Then I had a tasting, but I still prefer to drink it as a part of a pisco sour! I then hopped on a bus and went to visit Pisco Elqui, a town deeper in the valley with more vinyards and distilleries around. However, due to the national holiday most things were still closed, so I just made do with wandering around the picturesque town and then found somewhere to drink some of the wine!

Northern Chile is one of the best places in the world to go stargazing because of the clear skies, low humidity and low light pollution. So I headed off to an observatory 40 minutes into the mountains. Even without the telescope the view of the stars was the best I'd seen, I've never seen so many stars in the sky before, and there was a perfect view of the milky way. The astrologers used the 25 inch diameter telescope to show us venus, saturn and its moons, binary star systems millions of light years away, and nebula where stars are formed. They also pointed out features in the sky like constellations, distant galaxies, and the centre of our galaxy.

The rest of my time in Vicuña was spent wandering the streets looking for cool street art! Vicuña was also the place where I experienced my third and strongest earthquake. I could hear it before I could feel it, before I realised what was happening I thought that large trucks were driving down the street, then suddenly it sounded and felt like a freight train was about to drive through the building. Freaked out I went outside to see what was going on just to see one other Chilean women disinterestedly glancing out of the window. After a few seconds the shaking lessened but I could still hear it passing through the valley, followed by every dog in the valley barking their heads off! When I looked it up it was apparently 5.2 on the richter scale, and in Chile anything less than 6 is considered a mere tremor. But it seemed pretty big to me!Läs mer

After an overnight bus I ended up in the town of Uyuni in southern Bolivia. Uyuni is the access point to Salar de Uyuni, the worlds largest salt flat. In Uyuni I met up with 5 other travellers to tour this region of Bolivia for a couple of days in a 4X4. On the first morning we headed off, we stopped at a train graveyard. In the 19th century Uyuni was an important transport hub because of the mining industry, and many trains were imported from Britain. But the collapse of the mining industry in the 1940's led to the trains being abandoned here, where they still lie slowly crumbling away.

Then we continued on into the salt flat. Every year the salt flat floods, which leads to a stunning mirror like effect. Most of the water had evaporated at the time we were there but it was still an incredible site, seeing the glass like effect as far as you could see. Then we kept driving for miles before stopping at a dry section of the salt flat. This part was even more interesting for me, where you could see the distinctive pattern of the dried up lake that stretched as far as you could see. Because the landscape is so flat with no reference points, the area is great for taking trick photos, so of course we spent ages posing for stupid photos that our driver directed us all for!

Every now and then there is a small island in the salt. We climed one which was particularly beautiful because of the cactuses on the island, which appeared to glow in the setting sun. We continued driving before stopping to watch sunset, which was of course beautiful. Then we kept driving until we had exited the other side of the salt flat, where we stayed in a hotel made from salt!Läs mer