4th of July is one of the highlights of the calendar at home. Oddly enough no one in Arequipa cares too much about the holiday. This ancient city celebrated its five hundred and something birthday on August 15th and already the authorities are putting out more flags in anticipation.
No doubt Coca Cola is loading the shelves in anticipation of the holidays, and they make this weird soda called Inca Kola, inspired marketing no doubt. It looks like pee, tastes like cream soda with a hint of pear and is really a bit sickly sweet, but it’s everywhere of course.
Renzo charged $4100 for the rebuild which is roughly what a rebuilt 62TE transmission would cost in the States where you can buy one on line and have it delivered. The electronic guy charged $650 to clear the limp mode code from the van’s computer which seemed a lot to me as we paid $550 for an eight hour tow when we broke down originally, but one can’t argue with success and it took him some work reaching out across South America looking for a code reader to clear a Promaster’s proprietary computer. Modern engineering…
Everything feels back to normal and long may it last. It was great to be back driving even if it was Arequipa’s commuter hour. I gave Renzo’s assistants $50 each and they were overwhelmed so I hope they spend it very unwisely.
We spend today moving out of the hotel room back aboard, picking up laundry, setting up Starlink so I can have a decent connection to upload pictures. Then I fly to Cusco Monday to pick up my new passport. After that we wrap up our crowns at the dentist, where I should point out Layne spent $123 for a root canal and $1450 for three crowns. You could fly to Lima and transfer to Arequipa, stay in a lovely hotel for ten days and have these dentists do your work for the cost of a single crown in the US. Clean modern and filled with lidocaine, and Jaime the husband in the team speaks fluent English.
After all that we are going to take a test ride down to the coast. It’s winter so it won’t be swimming weather but we want to be travelers again, camping in our home walking Rusty on the beach and being nomads. A couple more jobs on GANNET2, suspension and conversion to ethanol flex fuel capability and it should stop raining in Brazil. The desire to explore is growing. And by the way fierce winter weather in Chile is closing highways with mudslides even in the Atacama Desert. Last year we got stuck in a road closure south of Arica after an earthquake closed the PanAmerican Highway for a few days, this year they had rain…
Tropical Brazil looks like a good place to be for us. Actual jungle in a van we hope will run smoothly.
