San Pedro de Atacama

Next stop was San Pedro de Atacama, a sleepy little town in the far north of Chile.  I was very excited to get there, as had some great memories of it from before, the town is made up of a few dusty and cobbled streets, with a wild dog population almost as large as the people population! It is just about the most chilled out place on earth, a base for travels to other places, with some unique features of its own.

We checked into our beautiful hotel (Rachel, Tom, Marigold, Stuart, Jane, Richard & Sab, if you happen to be reading this - thank you very much!!!) and then went about relaxing in the desert sunshine.  This was our first time at altitude, San Pedro is at 2,400m above sea level, which was a little different.

Beautiful hotel - perfect for relaxing in the sunshine!

One of our first stops was the *amazing* ice cream shop that I was hoping was still there from when I visited 9 years ago.  To my delight it hadn't moved, and the ice cream was still delicious :)

That night we headed out further into the desert to go stargazing, the views of the night sky are unrivalled in South America from the Atacama desert.  We started by looking up at the sky, which even without magnification was pretty incredible, seeing the Milky Way and shooting stars that clearly is quite awe inspiring.  We then moved onto the telescopes, where we looked deeper into constellations seeing colours and clusters that we wouldn't have known were there.  A couple of highlights were being shown a particular star that is around 33 light years away, Pollux; knowing that the light that I was seeing had started out at around the time that I was born was pretty amazing!  We also saw Jupiter through the telescopes, making out 4 of its moons as well as the rings of colour around the planet - it is so awesome to see planets as actual discs rather than stars!  Mars also made an appearance just as we were about to leave.  Thank you Peter & Evelyn - this was a fantastic thing to get to see, we loved it!

Would have been clearer if we'd stopped talking!

Shooting star!

The next day we went on a Chilean cooking course, to learn how to cook Chilean style.  This is run by two great guys called Daniel and Rodrigo, and is a relaxed way of learning to cook, make piano sours, and enjoy an evening.  We made 2 different types of pisco sours each, ceviche (which Andy enjoyed a lot!), empanadas, pastel de chocolate and alfajores for desert.  Our empanadas could use some work, the shapes of ours were not quite up to Chilean (or anyone else's) standards, but they were a lot of fun to make.  The pastel de choclo was delicious, a mixture of beef and chicken topped with a creamed corn mixture, looking forward to giving that a go when we get home. 

Andy took this very seriously...

Andy's top left, mine top right - the shame...

Masterchef!

The large amounts of alcohol provided throughout the evening definitely added to the enjoyment, and we had a great evening - Chris, Cassie, Al & Rachel if you are reading, pisco sours at ours this summer, thank you! 

San Pedro was such a lovely place to spend a couple of days, it is such a cool and quirky little town.  We loved our hotel, and by the end of our time there had even decided on a favourite dog - he was super cute, and so well behaved!