In roughly an hour I board an overnight bus to Arica, the northern most city in Chile which is on the coast!! Really hoping for some hot weather. There are beaches there so hopefully it is hot enuf for some beaching. Have just been wandering about mindlessly in San Pedro for the past 3 days. San Pedro is a very small desert town with lotsa cafes and hostals as it is a popular tourist spot for both foreigners and Chileans. Went on two tours, which I both enjoyed! I did the sunset watching in the Moon Valley national park just 12 km from San Pedro, the landscape was gorgeous and exotic, felt like being in the movie Star Trek. The pinnacles of the nearby mountain resemble tips of lemon meringues in the color orange, so really quite cool!

The second tour was a more scientific tour, basically a three hour astronomy class outdoors where we learned to read constellations in the sky (not necessarily zodiacal but I did see the sigs of Scorpio, Sagitarrius, Libra and Capricorn and the planet Jupiter). I learned to read the southern axis so that I can tell about where in the world I am by looking at the sky. Unfortunately this only applies when I´m in the Southern Hemisphere so have to relearn when I return to HK. First I need to buy myself a red flashlight if I wanna do this again, which will allow me to point at the nightsky! I also learned that astronomists nowadays actually use advanced digital cameras to view stars (instead of telescopes) because you can basically record stars from the night sky that no naked eye or telescope can see with a digital camera set on a very long exposure time (like two weeks!) and you´ll be able to see galaxies from 5 billion light years away or something, really incredible!! Another really interesting finding is that apparently all astronomists in the world concur that there have to be lifeforms outside of Earth (apparently some planet was discovered in 1995..) and this is inferred from a very basic rationale which says that if our Sun is a star, then all the stars in the sky must also be somehow serving as the suns of other solar systems, whether like ours or not! So this is all really interesting for me!

Alright, enough for now. Need to run to get some water and snacks before I board my bus. Bye bye.