We arrived in La Serena mid afternoon following a scenic bus journey six hours north from Santiago along the coast. La Serena is Chile’s second oldest town, built as connection town between Chile and Peru. As a northern coastal town it draws a lot of people in the summer, but is also where a lot of the miners and vineyard workers live from the local valleys. That afternoon we had a few hours free, so went to a “coffee with legs” place. Santiago has many of these places, a concept born in the eighties to make drinking coffee more popular. They are coffee bars with blacked out windows with scantily dressed waitresses. We had meant to check one out in Santiago were they have some pretty well established chains, but they had not been open at Christmas. The one we went to in La Serena was much more like a brothel with coffee definitely being the second thing on the agenda. Tony the only chap in our group had been to one in Santiago and said the places were like chalk and cheese, and the standard of “waitresses” in La Serena definitely quite a bit lower! We drank our very average cappuccinos quickly and got out pretty quick!

After an early supper in one of the fish restaurants on the market plaza we headed out to an observatory up in the mountains. The northern mountain area of Chile is renowned for its amazingly clear skies and has the most powerful telescopes in the world for astronomic research (all though the telescopes are actually owned by the EU, and the states.) We were just at a tourist observatory, and were lucky in one respect with a nearly full moon and cloudless sky, but the same very bright moon then limited the stars we could see. We got to see through the telescope Jupiter, the moon and a nebula (were stars are formed). We were also able to take photos of the moon with our cameras through the telescope. They informed us about the Inca’s interpretation of the stars and how they were used to decide when to plant and harvest. All in all really interesting and I’ve never seen any stars or planets through telescope before so another first!

Our second day in La Serena we took a tour to the Elqui Valley, which is the main area Pisco grapes are grown and Pisco is distilled. Pisco is a spirit made from distilling grapes, but tastes nothing like wine. Two of the most popular ways to drink Pisco is either in a Pisco Sour, a cocktail made with sugar, lemon and egg white or Piscola (just with coke). There is an argument between Peru and Chile as to which country really invented Pisco, but the general consensus is Peru! We stopped at a couple of small villages, a vin yard, a huge Pisco cooperative and had lunch at a restaurant which cooked all its food in outdoor solar boxes. It’s a beautiful valley which is lush and green, and then abruptly stops at certain level leaving an arid mountain scape. Two of us bought some decent Pisco, and our plan was when we got back to the hotel was to have a siesta between 7-9pm and then regroup for some drinks and maybe hit the town. The following morning there was vague pretence from a few of us that we came out of rooms to meet everyone but everyone else was asleep. Infact all of us were totally shattered and slept straight through to the following morning, all very rock n roll!

Saturday we had a free day with a late start to get some things done before we headed north into the Atacama desert. A few of us hit the hairdressers, odd items purchased etc. One girl unfortunately had her camera pick pocketed, which was not great of course, but luckily it happened in La Serena and not any further north and she was able to buy a decent replacement. We then took a seventeen hour night bus north to the small town of San Pedro de Atacama arriving at ten the following morning.

Once merely a stop on the Andean cattle drive, San Pedro de Atacama (2440 metres) is now a small adobe town crammed with hostels, hotels, pricey restaurants, cafes and a zillion tour operators! The surrounding desert area is full of options from Horseriding, mountain biking, trekking and sand boarding. We all went sand boarding in death valley on our first afternoon, and it was AWESOME DUDES! I say that, and yes the sand boarding itself was great, but walking up the sand dunes to the top was an absolute killer in 30+ degrees! The landscape made up for it, and considering it was a first for us all think we did pretty good. We collectively agreed that we don’t particularly enjoy the taste of sand though. We then headed to the “Valley of the moons” to watch the sunset with a Pisco Sour. It was beautiful, but we were far from the only ones there….seemed like half the town was on the cliff with us! We picked up some empanadas for dinner and sank a bottle of the Pisco, mixed with soda, lemonade and fresh limes. We all slept well following the night bus, sand boarding and Pisco!

Sunday we hired mountain bikes for a nice easy 20km cycle out to the desert to some salt lakes. It all started off pretty easy until one of our party had a flat! Four of us had cycled off not realising, when we saw our guide and the one girl were no where to be seen we cycled back to find they had successfully changed the tyre and just needed to pump up the new tyre. Fifty minutes later with six of us trying and failing to get the thing inflated we were about to let her walk back to town when another cyclist helped us out with a pump that actually worked and we were back on the road again! We arrived at the lakes, and parked our bikes up at which point I didn’t fully acknowledge a small jagged rock wall, fell and quite badly scraped my leg leaving a nice raw area bleeding. Perfect for getting into 40% salt concentrated water!! owwwwwwwwww!!! The lake was very cool, and it was hilarious trying to swim breast stroke as your feet would keep being floated above the water as you tried to kick, which made for some fairly ungraceful swimming! With my leg stinging just a tad I didn’t stay in for too long. The cycle back in the full heat of the day was really hard work, and seemed twice as far. And the poor girl who’d had a flat on the way got another on the way back two km shy from town!! Luckily we had time for a siesta that evening before heading out for a great dinner and a few bottles of wine in preparation of the following three days desert crossing in 4×4 and some serious altitude!