FINAL DESTINATION: SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA, CHILE. DAY 2

The next morning, Agustín leaves us on the route and once again we surrender ourselves at random. I tell Damien: "I want you to brake a truck with bed, breakfast, movies and music". Today it gives me a bit of confidence to hitchhike, but we're already at the dance. A half-hour slows down a truck that goes straight to Antofagasta (and halfway it tells us that, since it does not have to return to Copiapó, it will continue to Calama). We could not have done better: Calama is 768 km from Copiapó and 100 km from San Pedro de Atacama. Daniel, the driver, leaves me in charge of the music, so we are listening to everything. At first I play music in Spanish, but when he tells me that he also likes music in English we listen to Guns 'n' Roses, Audioslave, The Beatles and sing in unison. We stopped to have lunch on the road with his companions: two Chilean truck drivers and a Paraguayan truck driver. The Paraguayan wants to take pictures in the desert hand so we deviate a bit from the route and go in a caravan of trucks to take pictures with the sculpture.

The road is desert. Total aridity. There is nothing at all. Nobody (almost nobody) can live in such a dry place. Daniel tells us stories during the whole trip: "They went ahead in the desert, they say there's a couple who hitchhike at night and when you slow down, they never go up ... You look in the mirror and it's gone ... There is also a little girl who always makes a finger in the curve that we have just passed, she gets up, she sits forward, she talks and after ten minutes if you look, she is not there anymore, there is a cemetery of babies, it is full of little children who died and at night they punish and move the truck. " It never happened to him, but he did, he did not dare to stay to sleep in those areas.

This was the last we saw of the sea

After, total desert

After, total desert
It also tells us about the characters on the route. There is a doctor who lives in the desert, on the edge of the road: "Several years ago he fell asleep while driving and crashed. His whole family died and he went crazy and stayed to live right there at the scene of the accident. He built mud houses and lives there. He always asks us to give him water or he stops us to talk. " Said and done, a few kilometers later, a man with a very white beard and a suit like white beckons us with a drum in his hand. He is a little angry because the trucks that went ahead kept going. We give him water and he returns to his refuge (white too). "There are days when we stayed talking, but today he is upset," Daniel tells us.

After about 10 hours of music and talks, Daniel arrives in Calama and leaves us at the crossing to San Pedro: we are only 100 km away (next to everything we did, it seems nothing). It's night, it's 9 and it's already very dark, but we decided to try the same. We stand under a lantern, we make a sign that says San Pedro de Atacama and each time a car passes we self-light with the cell phone so they can see us from afar, we smile and move the sign. Nobody slows down, obviously. We must look like the two ghosts on the route. So at 10 we give up and end up sleeping in Calama (we still do not dare to camp next to the route so close to a city).

The next day we went to San Pedro by bus. We are too tired to keep hitchhiking after two days of so much travel. Finally we arrived in San Pedro de Atacama and there I corroborate that the important thing is not to reach destination, but to live everything that happens between them. San Pedro (or at least its center) is so touristy that it does not inspire me to write anything or take pictures. The landscapes that surround it seem very nice, but we debated and decided to know the Bolivian side. One day before leaving Chile we do a bubble show in one of the schools in the town: if we could do them in the driest place in the world, we can do them anywhere else.