i´m in the desert now getting sunburnt waiting for a bus so i thought i would sit in an internet cafe for a half hour. the past 2 days have mostly just been travelling and not too exciting but i´m two hours away from san pedro de atacama now which should be exciting. it´s a little weird being alone but mostly i feel safe and not that lonely and i´ve just been reading a lot of pablo neruda and drawing and writing down the things i wish i was having conversations with people about. the desert is a little intimidating. i´ve never been to one before. all i could think about as the bus pulled into antofagasta was why did i come north? this is the scariest place i´ve ever been to. no wonder it was easy for the dictatorship to dissappear people. all there is are grayish tan mountains, gray cement factories, giant mines, and an occasional gray brown pine tree that you almost miss because it blends into the landscape so well. then out of nowhere, still in the middle of nowhere, houses begin to be etched into the mountainside. there are no trees though, not even a cactus. it´s far from an oasis but still it exists which is impressive. then suddenly and totally unexpectedly there are millions of houses and the ocean, all the bluer for the lack of any color surrounding it and still engulfed in mountains on all sides, which is striking enough to see that it makes me glad i came. antofagasta is weirdly like santiago in the way it looks, which means kind of ugly. some people drove me up to see part of the escondida mine which i think is the biggest copper mine in the world but it was actually 2 hours away so i didnt see it, just the processing plant where they turn the copper powder into sheets and load it onto ships. it´s interesting to see the part of chile that really fuels the country´s economy and that´s responsible for starting a lot of the major political movements of the past. chile of course has to buy copper at the world market price. but the people who work in the mines seem to have pretty good working conditions now from what i´ve been told.. i´m in calama now and the half hour is almost up so i guess that´s all. i´m looking forward to spending a bunch of days in san pedro although it is frusterating that it´s a totally tourist place and me going there just continues to fuel that and i hate being excited about seeing people with backpacks or light eyes or hearing english because really that´s not what i want. i could have not come to chile if i just was going to hang out with those people but in practice it´s a lot harder and really all i want to do is meet other backpackers and have something in common and hang out with them. etc...