La Serena

Travelling across the border from Bolivia into Chile was a bit of a culture shock. Like passing through some sort of time warp (not that I´ve been through one before). All of a sudden we had great roads, with everything looking, smelling and sounding familiar, but my word are things expensive. My wallet must have sprung a leak. We spent some time in the coastal city of La Serena, where we joined an evening excursion to the observatory of Cerro Mamalluca. Freezing cold but really worth the trip, we even got to see jupiter and 3 of it´s moons and learnt about the new super earth they recently discovered. The best thing about the city was the volunteer tour guides that follow you around day and night. A thousand optomistic dogs that seem to adopt tourists in a very ordered fashion. We named ours Benji.