High and Dry
On Tuesday night, we lodged at the driest hotel in the world. It was a building made entirely of salt, perched at 3400m. above sea level on the windy side of a hill facing a salt plain. The clothes that got wet in our backpacks (the water bottles strapped to the roof of our vehicle had leaked) were dry within a couple of hours.
The walls, beds and tables are made of bricks of crystallized salt and the floors are just loose, grainy salt. I had the idea that if I buried Marc’s 3-day-old socks in the sand, they might lose some of their moisture and, therefore, their “aroma”. I think it might’ve worked. 
For a novelty thing, it was pretty interesting, and the view of the stars and the milky was exceptional, if freezing cold.
On a different topic, we went for a really enjoyable observatory night excursion while in San Pedro de Atacama. A French-Chilean couple has set up an operation just outside the town where they have several telescopes set up and offer a two-hour tour of the night skies of the south. We saw the true Southern Cross (not the one we thought we had seen in Patagonia), a view of Saturn up close and, most interesting, a couple of Magellan clouds, which are actually other galaxies. They are named after Magellan because he was the first European to sail far enough south to see one. I had never heard of them before. I had also never heard of melting a chocolate bar in hot milk to make hot chocolate, which we got at the end of the tour. I’ll be experiencing one of them again when we get home.