South America by RV: Chile, Peru, and Argentina
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About this ebook
My latest trip to South America resulted from a collision between my schedule and the timing of my friend Silvio’s latest project. I flew to Santiago, Chile to travel in the RV he has spent two years building on the frame of a Mercedes truck.
Perhaps because we didn’t have a firm destination in mind, we ended up waiting for a ghost in an abandoned saltpeter town in the Atacama Desert, visiting hospitable strangers in their homes on the Chilean coast, crossing into the high altitude ranges of Peru to Machu Picchu where we helped the Argentinian government search for a missing Argentine national, and finally daring the snow-choked Paso de Jama into gaucho country in Northern Argentina. We crashed country fairs, clambered through the ruins with tourists high on selfies, salvaged goods from a truck that had gone over a bridge, and negotiated for prices with village people.
On the entire trip we were conscious that the motorhome was never far away, with its shower and bathroom, water tanks and refrigerator, and cooking stove and furnace. This is not so much about the hardships of traveling as it is a report from the hidden corners of countries that are only accessible when you travel by RV.
Barry Pomeroy
Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.
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South America by RV - Barry Pomeroy
South America by RV
Chile, Peru, and Argentina
by
Barry Pomeroy
© 2017 by Barry Pomeroy
All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author, although people generally do what they please.
For more information about my books, go to barrypomeroy.com
ISBN 13: 978-1987922509
ISBN 10: 1987922509
My latest trip to South America resulted from a collision between my schedule and the timing of my friend Silvio’s latest project. I flew to Santiago, Chile to travel in the RV he has spent two years building on the frame of a Mercedes truck.
Perhaps because we didn’t have a firm destination in mind, we ended up waiting for a ghost in an abandoned saltpeter town in the Atacama Desert, visiting hospitable strangers in their homes on the Chilean coast, crossing into the high altitude ranges of Peru to Machu Picchu where we helped the Argentinian government search for a missing Argentine national, and finally daring the snow-choked Paso de Jama into gaucho country in Northern Argentina. We crashed country fairs, clambered through the ruins with tourists high on selfies, salvaged goods from a truck that had gone over a bridge, and negotiated for prices with village people.
On the entire trip we were conscious that the motorhome was never far away, with its shower and bathroom, water tanks and refrigerator, and cooking stove and furnace. This is not so much about the hardships of traveling as it is a report from the hidden corners of countries that are only accessible when you travel by RV.
Table of Contents
Introduction
A Record of Events
May 16 ~ The Mexico City Airport
May 17 ~ The Arrival
May 18 ~ Driving North to Socos
May 19 ~ Lunch in La Serena with Argentines
May 20 ~ The Guard Dog
May 21 ~ Lunch with some Chileans
May 22 ~ A Day with Maria Fernanda
May 23 ~ Ghost Town of the Atacama
May 24 ~ A Corpse Carrying Dog
May 25 ~ Hacking the Chilean and Peruvian Border
May 26 ~ Altitude Sickness
May 27 ~ Going to Machu Picchu
May 28 ~ Machu Picchu
May 29 ~ Looking for a Body in the River
May 30 ~ Searching the Urubamba River
May 31 ~ Leaving Cusco
June 1 ~ The Land of No Smiles
June 2 ~ Negotiating the Border
June 3 ~ The Remote Café and its Stories
June 4 ~ Crossing Paso de Jama
June 5 ~ Visiting an Argentine Family
June 6 ~ A Long Leave-taking before Catamarca
June 7 ~ The Soundtrack of our Lives
June 8 ~ Small Visitors
June 9 ~ Aconcagua, the Highest Peak in the Americas
June 10 ~ A Truck Over the Bridge
June 11 ~ The Tunuyán Fair
June 12 ~ Tunuyán after the Festival was Over
June 13 ~ Meeting Argentinians and Making Promises
June 14 ~ Despedida Triste
June 15 ~ Flights to Waiting Rooms
June 16 ~ Back in Canada
Appendix I
Appendix II
Appendix III
Glossary
Introduction
I last visited South America twelve years ago, and although at the time I mostly stayed with Silvio’s family—now scattered over separate homes—and involved myself with their internecine struggles, that other visit coloured my way of thinking about my latest venture to the continent, rather like dark clouds suggest but don’t guarantee a downpour. The most significant moments in Argentina and Chile from my first trip were fleeting and mostly overwritten by an attempt to grapple with a culture that could be very isolating. I laughed with Silvio over strange people we met on our trip across the Andes to Chile, grimaced with him through the awkward confrontation with his cousin, marvelled at the way in which people in the coastal city of Mar de Plata dealt with organ trade child abductions in the past and the mark that had left on the culture, and ran with him when the rabid cousin pursued us for over four hundred kilometres.
Necessarily, more negative impressions from that first trip fed a reluctance to return, but I hadn’t seen Silvio since his short visit to my cabin, and the circumstances of our latest trip promised to be very different. He had urged me to visit ever since my last trip south, and I had put him off, but he had spent both time and money ensuring that we could travel for thousands of kilometres in a way that he would be comfortable—and thus happy—and I would be assured of a method of traveling that at least in part suited both my temperament and inclinations. There only remained the question of what we might want to see.
I went to Portugal several years ago, and once my friend there had spent part of his weekend taking me to various tourist spots, he finally, with puzzlement if not frustration, asked me what I wanted to see in the country. I didn’t have an easy answer for him, and I felt that what I said left him unsatisfied, and ultimately fell short in terms of what a country might contain. I said I wanted to see people interact in the market, watch a couple fight in the street, see what litterers throw in the ditch, observe local wild animals, eat in a café with villagers, walk along the shore and in the mountains, and struggle to make myself understood. I passed the weekends with him and his wife in Olhão and spent the rest of the time driving the small roads north from the Algarve toward the capital, looking vaguely for Roman ruins and picking up hitchhikers walking on remote village roads.
I actually didn’t know what I was looking for, and even after a few weeks, I was no closer to an answer for my friend. The images that stay with me were impossible to predict: driving my friends into a huge roundabout in rush-hour Seville, renting a car from my friend’s cousin who soon became my friend, sleeping in the car and being woken by police at four in the morning and trying two other languages before he asked, embarrassingly, his English perfect, What language do you speak?
since it was obvious I didn’t speak either Spanish or French passably. I remember crossing a high mountain pass that was closed to traffic, and unaware, dropping down through the snowstorm and seeing huge boulders rise out of the mist on the other side as I drove past abandoned trucks. I looked in people’s faces for a hint of recognition, and despite my lack of Portuguese, I saw it more than once.
I was approaching South America a second time with the same directionless gaze. The trip promised to offer more than a hard chair at a noisy confusing table, and although Silvio and I had shared road trips before, he had organized the venture to take into account our changing circumstance.
We had driven to western Canada a few times in my old car, but that way of traveling suited me more than him. Camping in a tent does not represent privation for me, and cooking over a fire is a relatively familiar procedure. Silvio likes the clamour of crowds and meeting different people, and endures lack of comfort with little grace. His latest project promised to satisfy both of our requirements, and he was more than a little excited to show me what he had accomplished.
Silvio has spent the last two years building a recreational vehicle, although that label does not do his achievement justice. He used a common Canadian RV as his model, but improved on that enough that the result is not easily recognized as a similar project. He bought a Mercedes Sprinter truck chassis, and with the help of a man who has been buildings RVs in Argentina for years, gradually constructed the walls and roof, filled the truck interior with tasteful and carefully designed furniture, and wired the truck with a dozen kilometres of cables for Direct TV, 200 VAC and both 12 and 24 VDC. As well, the entire vehicle is networked. Three flat screen TVs allow viewing from either of the two bunks and the kitchen, and USB ports are available an arm’s length from nearly anywhere one might be sitting. Four hundred watts of solar panels run the electrical equipment, and the gas powered oven, two burner stove, water heater for the shower, refrigerator, and diesel powered furnace ensure comfort, ease and, perhaps equally importantly, a transparent familiarity that allows the user to ignore their surroundings so they can focus on their trip.
Like any of either my or Silvio’s projects, I wasn’t sure how long it would hold his attention, and that thought—as well as the knowledge that I am changing my personal circumstances so that traveling might soon become more difficult—made Silvio’s offer of the trip even more inviting. The RV promised to give him the comfort he requires to travel happily, and meant that I might be able to touch the leaves in the Peruvian jungle, or feel the heat of the Atacama Desert; otherwise I would have to be satisfied with merely glimpsing them from a speeding bus. With those constraints and enticements in mind, I booked a ticket and promised Silvio I would meet him in Santiago, Chile on May 17th.
A Record of Events
Without over thinking the decision, I determined to keep a written record of our journey. Partially this is because I have learned not to trust my sometimes negligent memory, or, perhaps worse, I suspect that my recall contains only a chaos of fleeting images. Other more significant events, I fear, are almost immediately dispensed with, although at the time they disrupt what I accept as normal, or strange. Across time or distance, what is significant becomes difficult to distinguish. The chronicler finds themselves reaching for the arbitrary detail like a drowning man might grab for a soup spoon, so entranced in the urgency of the moment by its metaphorical connection to liquid that he loses sight of the main goal. Only with a more sober evaluation, as his feet desperately plunge for a solid bottom, will he understand that not everything in the hand is necessary to the page.
A diary or journal externalizes the process of memory until it almost seems to be the trip of another; even within a few months the writer finds themselves excavating the entries as if an archaeologist in a collapsed cave. The half-forgotten bone knife is examined anew, the ashes from the long extinct fire are sampled and tested, and the emotions of the time can be set aside to be spaded into moments of introspection at some later point. The book takes on a life of its own as it moves beyond the confines of hazy memory, retrospective reinvention, and outright fabulation. It exists to answer the infrequent questions that greet the traveler freshly back from a trip and, with the drift of the seasons, to give meaning to a slice of time that otherwise fades.
During my first trip to South America we were mainly confined to Argentina, although we ducked into tropical Chile long enough for Silvio’s allergies to drive us back to the desert of Patagonia. I have fading memories of the trip, the confusing visit in the mountains at Villa de Angostura, the van ride over the Andes, snapshots of children playing in the street in Pucón, Chile while a massive volcano steamed passively overhead, and the long drive back to Neuquén. Without a journal, these memories are trapped in my head, although many of them have seeped out and hopefully enjoy a life of their own far from where I write about them. I returned mentally to Mar de Plata years later and tried to evoke the feeling of that dingy city—for all the world like a run-down Miami—the laughing crowds and desperate street performers, but I only held a handful of cinders of what had been a bright flame.
Partly, the attempt to put an earlier trip into context becomes problematic because of the elapsed time. Retrospective narration can only do so much. The logic of the circumstance might perhaps be clearer to the editor whose eye turns to improving on the half-forgotten moment, but the multitudinous detail that the daily record captures is gone. The rich tapestry of pine and birch and maple becomes in the faded memories only a sprawl of green uneasily captured by the diminutive word forest.
The daily record suffers from its own problems with accurate recall, of course. The journal is necessarily written at the end of a sometimes long day, and often this means late at night once the thrill of the day’s events are over. The writer is not necessarily in the most reflective state of mind, since he or she is labouring while exhausted, hungry, rushed before sleeping, or with the constant interruptions of a fellow traveler. As well, important incidents that make up a day on the road duck below ground, only to reappear as a mundane grocery list of events. The richness of an interaction might well be lost as the yawning traveler tries to cite events in the order of occurrence, and the significance of a singular moment, the meaning in a tiny lift of a hand or a raised eyebrow might, in the rush of recording, be lost because the writer does not have enough perspective on the trip to realize the importance of the gesture.
I went to South America this time—in some ways retracing the trip I had taken twelve years earlier with Silvio—determined to capture the dry desert air, the ashy smell of asado, the garish purple of the jungle flowers, soft voices and those raised with shouting, and the thousand other details that the mind is too tired to make note of, or which are lost to time once a decade passes and the minutiae of daily life intervenes.
May 16 ~ The Mexico City Airport
It occurs to me, waiting out my seven hour layover in the Mexico City Airport, that my tendency to avoid researching a trip before leaving might be working against me. When I first went overseas—to the Cook Islands—I was traveling with another Canadian volunteer who avidly read what westerners had said about the islands until he had some very strange ideas about local culture. He told me I couldn’t wear black, for instance, and even had the temerity to say it in front of some local high school students wearing black t-shirts. Others of my friends even, in my terms, over-prepare. My friend Nancy went to France on a trip of her own design and packed every day with more activities than she would have had even if she had relinquished her creativity to an organized tour. The effect of that was that she visited many sites that I still have scarcely heard of and came back sated with France and French culture. By comparison, I stupidly stood outside a cathedral in Bruge, Belgium, pondering whether to pay the entrance fee for a glimpse of Michelangelo’s Mother and Son. Only later did I find out that if I walked another several steps I could have entered for free.
I’m sure there’s a happy medium somewhere between these two extremes. Today I have been wandering around the Mexico City Airport on a seven hour layover on my way to Chile. Since I didn’t have internet at home before I left, and was busy painting my new house, I didn’t look up Chile, or the airport I’m flying into. Now that I have airport Wi-Fi, as well as too much time on my hands, I have belatedly discovered that Chile has import restrictions on all kinds of food items. Even packaged goods are sometimes taken away and destroyed.
I knew I would be in transit for some thirty hours, and would likely not have a vegetarian meal on the plane, so I brought too much dried fruit and nuts. Likely I will have to discard my two packages of figs, and I have already thrown away my peanuts and prunes. The rest of the