Our first lift came about 3 km outside of Santiago on the start of the Pan American from Santiago. It was a family just going to one of the suburbs but they were willing to give us a lift a few km until their junction. It was a family of four, mother, father., and two sons, of similar ages. They were very friendly and asked a lot of questions, the mother and father spoke a little English so communicating wasn't too difficult, the children spoke the odd word like hello which they kept on saying throughout the five minute car ride. It came to where they were to drop us off and we had to say thankyou and goodbye and got out back on the road. Off they went waving and saying 'adios'.
We were left on the open highway again and were now only a few more km outside of Santiago, not too far but it was a very short and pleasant first experience of hitch hiking for me, as it was my first time I was a little bit sceptical but had heard only good things about South America, especially Chile. We walked until we reached the next junction onto the highway, these are good places to wait as cars generally drive slower and are coming from more than one direction so in theory more chance of getting a lift. Service stations I am told are also very good places to try and hitch hike from as people are usually coming or going on long journeys and are coming from a complete standstill so easy to chat to or ask things. I was in safe hands as Dries always hitch hikes everywhere, from Europe to USA to Canada and South America, he knows what he's doing and has plenty of experience in it. This helped me put my mind at rest but after the first ride it felt absolutely fine like I could easily do this anywhere and everywhere.
We had to wait a long time for our next ride which again only took us a few km but by this time we were nearly 20km outside of Santiago, still 220kms away from Los Vilos but still to me it felt like an accomplishment as I had never done anything like this before. The next ride was with a man in a pick up who was on his own, he had a family but was driving around doing work related chores, he had a German grandmother. He dropped us off before a junction were he was leaving to go to Viña Del Mar. We seemed to be in the middle of nowhere and it was getting very dark, we decided to walk to the next service station that we had been told was 5km away, we walked for over an hour and it was very dark by now, we had walked well over 5km when we finally reached it, just our luck the place was closed, we went up to the door because we saw a man but when we got there he said it was closed and we were chased away by wild ravaged dogs, well not really but they were quite scary when all you could see was five sets of shining eyes and hearing barks coming from everywhere. We walked off but didn't want to stray too far from there as it seemed like a good place to pick up a ride when it was light. We walked about 200metres past the service station and came to a field, on closer inspection it was a place that had recently been burnt to the ground so the whole floor was covered in ash. We didn't have any other option so we settled here. It was the first time I had to pitch my tent and what a pain it was, it was a tunnel tent, meaning that it had two ends with no support in the middle and needed to be pegged down at all the points possible, not very easy when the ground is rock hard and when you do finally get a peg in it pops straight out! I waited for Dries to put his dome tent up, a much more logical solution as it has two poles crossing forming the whole tents support and doesn't necessarily need to be pegged down, only to stop it being blown away. We found some rocks to use as pegs and tied the guy ropes around the rocks and the elasticated bits for the pegs with more rocks. It worked but I had no idea it was going to hold up the whole night. Luckily for me it did, it was the most uncomfortable night in a tent I have ever had, the floor was rock hard, was littered with rocks and everything was covered in ash.
The next day when it was light we could see what a stupid place we had pitched, it wasn't level, full of thorny plants and was black as anything from being burned.
We left the ash field and headed for the road, it was right next to the highway so we didn't have to go very far and next to the service station so even better, even though we were covered in soot we were very optimistic. We got to the highway to a place we thought would be good, it was so early and a Sunday morning so not many cars on the road. We were waiting for about two and a half hours, the longest I have had to wait so far so I was beginning to lose my optimism and start becoming and annoying pessimist. We got picked up by another family, this time in a really run down car, I couldn't even tell what it was, I had never seen it before and if I did it was never in this state. The family was from a very small village of only about eight hundred people, everybody knew each other, to me it looked like a slum but everything seemed in order, they had a bar, a couple of markets, an amusement arcade for the kids. We were taken to their family home, it smelt of poo and was easy to see why, there were dogs everywhere and poo all over the floor. We got out said hello to their eldest daughter, 22, then their son 15, then we drove on past the arcade and their other son 10 had just won £2000 pesos on a games machine. He got in the front with Dries and his father, I was in the back with the mother and their new baby, 1, he unfortunately had down syndrome but seemed very normal, if not a little tiny bit slow but he was fine would grow to be a big strong boy. The kids all seemed well cared for given the circumstances and how poor they actually were, they even bought us a bottle of soda each. They were so nice, they took us on1 a ride through their village, introduced us to their friends and family, on the way we drove past a place called El pied del diablo, the devils foot, it was a series of rocks that had indentations believed to be by the superstitious people to be Lucifer's footprints in the rocks. They took us about 50km to a place called LlaiLlay, their destination.