I´m really trying to catch up before all these memories vanish to the recesses of my mind.  (o, and i added a lot to the previous blog post, so check the updated version)

I think I just had the wildest experience of my life.  We left San Pedro de Atacama for Antofogasta, a port city, early in the morning.  Upon arriving there, we took just long enough to get ourselves collected and began to try hitch-hiking.  Eventually, we figured out where we needed to be in order to get picked up.  We somehow ended up with another Brazilian girl, Claudia, who was hitch-hikin as well.  The three of us packed into two front seats of a truck to get to the crossroads, where we´d be able to find more traffic going south.  We somehow managed to time this venture during a nation wide trucker strike, which means that the majority of the traffic we had planned on soliciting for rides was stopped on the side of the road forming blockades.  Did I mention we were trying to hitch-hike through the driest desert in the world?  Fortunately we only ended up walking a few miles through that barren landscape before a rogue trucker had mercy on us.  We both knew it might be unwise to ride with a trucker during this strike, because other truckers get quite angry if they see any truckers actually working during the strike, but we were in no position to be picky.  Our friend Claudia had hitch-hiked with another trucker just that day, and at a blockade a bunch of angry men made the driver get out and beat him up, but she managed to get away…  Anyway, riding in a rig is actually quite nice, since there is so much room, and you have a nice high vantage point to look out (in this case at miles and miles of barren landscape with some mountains here and there).  It was fairly uneventful until we came up to a police checkpoint.  This was when we learned that is was illegal for truckers to carry hitch-hikers, which was a rather interesting surprise.  We had to get up into his sleeping loft and close the curtains so that no one could see we were in the truck!  Peaking out through a crack in the curtains to see if they´d find us, I felt like some sort of fugitive or a person fleeing on the underground railroad.  It was one of the strangest feelings.  Fortunately, the police did not check to closely, and we were eventually able to come out of hiding.  Late in the evening, we arrived at a truck stop.  By truck stop, I mean the only building for miles in the middle of the desert.  There, all the other rogue truckers who had managed to evade the angry blockades were gathered watching a soccer game.  We joined them, looking more out of place than ever, which is saying something.  We grabbed dinner there, and had hoped to continue on our journey, but our driver discovered that the way was completely closed shortly up the road.  Now we had to figure out where to sleep, since we didn´t have our own little bed like all of the truckers there.  We somehow convinced one of the cooks at the truckstop to let us use her bedroom, which had two tiny single beds and a few blankets.  The problem was that we were three (since we were still with Claudia), so we ended up putting the two beds side-by-side and the three of us used those two beds laying perpendicularly across them.  O, and did I mention that she got the flu during the night?  Being in between Jonathan and a not-particularly-small woman with the flu on two single beds all night was rather interesting…  But I suppose it could´ve been worse.  Anyway, in the morning our driver still wasn´t sure if he could go on, and a blockade had sprung up right by our truckstop, so we could watch all the truckers milling about in the road and talking to one another.  Many cars decided to go off-road before reaching the blockade so they wouldn´t have to confront the truckers, so it was a really bad spot to try to pick up another ride.  We walked a ways down the road to the south, and eventually got picked up by a man who offered to carry us for an hour or so.  When he dropped us off, we were in a small town, but there was still virtually no traffic on the road because of all the blockades.  We are both convinced that finding rides would´ve been ridiculously easy had it not been for all the trucker strike business.  We finally gave up after waiting for hours, and got a cheap bus ticket on to the next big city, Copiapó, where we are now. 

We´ve seperated from Claudia now, and we spent a few hours earlier in a monstrous supermarket.  It was awesome!  We just walked through the aisles gazing longingly at almost everything we saw, but eventually we consolidated our desires to an affordable list, which we are now lugging around.  We decided to just purchase a night bus ticket on to La Serena, so we´re about to leave for there.  It´s been pretty crazy these last few days, but hopefully we´ll get a chance to rest once we get there.  Think that´s all for now, and I apologize if some of this doesn´t make sense.  I´ve not really been getting a chance to proof-read anything before posting.