Our lovely hotel in San Pedro – a small town of a few streets in the middle of the desert:

 

We took a morning trip to the ALMA base station – the antennae themselves are at 5000m altitude so they don’t take visitors there…

By luck there was an antenna ‘in the workshop’ so we got an up-close view of it being put through its paces, spinning etc:

Inspired by our visit and particularly by out guide Les, we decided to take the astronomy tour into the desert that night – obviously no photos, but 10 fixed telescopes of various range (one so large you had to climb a stepladder to peer into it!) gave us views of galaxies, nebulae and other exciting things, all after Les’s excellent ‘introduction to astronomy’ talk. Really great night!

We also took a visit out to the salt flats:

Next up – the Ojos de Salar, so named because apparently they look like eyes…

Some people jumped in, we did not!

The final stop was another salt flat where we watched the sun go down while drinking pisco sours made by our lovely guide.