truckin´.

san pedro de atacama is a toursit trap, with a side of roasted chicken, served up in a hellish dust bowl that gets sand in hard to reaches places youd didnt even know you had theyre so hard to reach. so, impressive as the suspiciously martian landscape is, the place´s unfriendliness to the debitcardless left both chris and i happy to to admire it from the window of a bus on our way the hell out of there.

now armed once again with the company of an old santa cruz friend (and one equally neglegent with wallet sized pieces of plastic) i hit the road with my pack on my back and my thumb in the air, but only for about 5 minutes until a sweet middle aged couple picked us up and drove us 700 km south to the charming beach town of la serena. i would have like to have stayed, but poor chistopher is not so lucky as to have the luxury of a one way ticket. and so, after a stroll to the beach and a rough night of poor man´s pisco sours, it was back to thumbin´it.

this time we maybe waited a whole of twenty minutes and were starting to get antsy when a mac truck pulled over and ushered us aboard. for the next 8 odd hours with christian the crazy chilean camionero there was hardly ever a dull moment between sing alongs to his eclectic music selection, which spanned from evanescence to ac/dc to the backstreet boys (and back again), jokes that im pretty sure were all bad even through his thick chilean accent, and pit stops for dulce de leche smuthered sweets and horse jerky. when we fianally parted ways with dear christian in valparaiso, we trudged like a couple of somnambulists to the cheapest hospedaje we could find and hardly even noticed the hole in the floor and cigarette burns inthe sheets before falling asleep with all of our clothes on.

buuuut, janky hotel aside, valpo is a neat little port town with a kind of san fransisco feeling, what with the fog and hills packed with colorful houses, and i may even venture to say that it one ups sf in the trolly department because homies got elevators, yo! theyre cool rickity old things from the turn of the century that carry passengers (aka tourists thesedays) up and down the steepest slpoes. once again, we would have liked to have stayed, but we had things to do and cheaper lands to get to and we were gone again within a matter of days.