San Pedro de Atacama offers dozens of tours of the astounding Chilean scenery round about – volcano climbs, sandboarding, marathon hikes, visits to salt flats and lakes – but what I wanted to do was explore it by bike. For just over £3 I hired a decent mountain bike for the day, and spent a blissful few hours on the dirt roads in the countryside around town (pic). Obviously, being very safety-conscious, I made sure my head was well protected. I wore a sunhat.
Up in the hills, I needed lots of water in my backpack. But no rainproofs. It's so dry here (rainclouds are usually blocked by the huge encircling mountains) that you don't even need a towel after a shower. By the time you've brushed your teeth, you're completely dried off.
I also nosed around some farming villages south of town, such as Solor (pic), where traffic congestion is evidently a problem. 
In the evening I went on an astronomy 'tour', looking through a telescope with an astronomer guide at northern Chile's amazingly clear skies, probably the world's best for stargazing. We saw Mars's ice caps, nebulae, galaxies, clusters, two shooting stars, a satellite, and the Magellanic Clouds (pic, nicked from Wikipedia: obviously not taken with my point-and-shoot, but that's pretty much what we saw through the 'scope). I made two wishes on the shooting stars, and though I can't tell you what the wishes were, believe me, if either comes true, you'll know about it.
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