We hastily left Los Vilos and headed straight for the Pan American again, it was a long walk and most of it was up hill so was very tiring, even more so when you have been walking around all day anyway and have a really burnt neck from the freakishly strong sun here, apparently due to there being a hole in the o-zone layer. We were only on the highway a few minutes when a man in a pick up pulled over, I wanted to get in the back but there were free seats so I sat inside, I'm yet to fulfil my dream of riding in the back of a pickup. The man was a mechanic driving some spare fan belts to the nearby town of Pichindagui, it was a short journey but still a good 20km or so, the more the better really. After chatting for a little bit, he asked if we smoked, I said no and Dries said yes so he got out a little rolled up piece of paper and was about to hand Dries a joint then he said he doesn't smoke marijuana, I told him I don't smoke cigarettes but I do occasionally smoke the odd joint here and there. He gave me the joint and a lighter and I lit it up in his car, he opened the windows as he didn't want to smell and was technically at work, we passed it back and forth. It was a pure joint and looked very bizarre, the ones I'm used to are more conical shaped and long, this was a short thin joint with no roach (the filter bit), it smoked very quickly. Every so often he would get a phone call and tell us to be quiet just in case. It was a fun start to the day, from this experience I felt that the rest of the journey was going to be just as good. He dropped us off just before the junction to get to Pichindagui, we walked to the on ramp where the road coming out of Pichindagui met the Pan American. We managed to get another lift really quickly form another pick up, this time it only had a two seater cabin so I took my chances and jumped straight into the back, the driver said no because apparently it is against the law to carry passengers in the back of a pick up on the Pan American. Unfortunately this meant that I would still have to wait for my go in the back and that we would be tightly sandwiched in the front on a single seat. This time the driver took us a little further to a big nearby town, we were still ages away from Santiago but were about another 40km closer than before. Where we were dropped off, we could see the vendors of the sweet pastries we had been bought the day before, it was funny to watch them as they waved a white flag of ribbons to flag down on coming cars to try and entice them in to buy some. There was about five on our side of the road, equally spaced apart and they had sequential flag waving, they met with some success throughout the day. There was another one across the road working solo, she waved down some lorries and in no time had a queue of three lorries all wanting to buy some sweet little pastries, as soon as she had successfully waved down a lorry the ones on our side started doing the same, maybe their luck would change and they would have more success. We must have been waiting for easily over an hour, the sun was starting to set by now and we were nowhere near Santiago, maybe only about 60km closer.