The miner’s strike in Peru, the best way to use Starlink, and touring southern Chile were the main subjects of conversation last night at the overlander campground in Las Mercedes.
Andres from Viña Del Mar in Chile was annoyed his Starlink gets shut down two months after he leaves Chile. It happened last year when they were touring Brazil in their motorhome and it’s going to happen this year he figured as they escape winter by driving to Colombia and the far north. Some other travelers from Spain and Argentina (names and WhatsApp numbers are recorded by Layne) were making the case for the Starlink mini which is the most popular tool for travelers. We have a big clunky Starlink 2 which we bought in Mexico and it requires setting up each time we want to use it, costs us $80 a month and which we use uninterrupted across the Americas (this post comes to you courtesy of Elon Musk’s engineers). It uses a ton of electricity but our service has been uninterrupted and we are loath to change it with all the new restrictions being talk about on new accounts.
We brought rum and the conversation flowed in the cool night air, in Spanish which required concentration to defeat the Bacardi. Then the conversation turned to the blockades as the Spanish overlander wants to park her van in Lima while she goes home to the Canary Islands for summer. The road to Lima is blocked but ever hopeful she repeated a rumor the roads will open in two days. I said nothing but I read the papers online and at the news stands around Arequipa.
A 13 year old girl is among 14 people injured by police in violent confrontations trying to open the PanAmerican Highway in the south. Two people have been shot to death by police.
They don’t hold back from showing blood covered bodies on the front page. Traffic in Arequipa is very light as the city is running out of liquid propane gas which cars use.
The miners want the government to legalize their status, 50,000 of them working illegal mines but mining corporations don’t want the competition. At the moment the road from Arequipa to Cusco and the road to the Chilean border are open but it’s impossible to drive to Lima the capital. Some road blocks are reporting 30 miles of stalled traffic. My gauge of the status of the roads is bananas and we haven’t seen them in the supermarket for more than a week. But the Spaniards who want to reach Lima are sure the roads will open next week. The government is insisting there will be no talks until order is restored. Impasse.
Life goes on in Arequipa though slower, as we live quite comfortably for now but aside from shortages of bananas and long wait times for Ubers we are doing fine. Layne discovered some credit card fraud because she is always online checking our banking (thank you Starlink). Someone in the Netherlands was using our card for minor purchases over the past days. One phone call sorted that out.
Normally this street leading into downtown from the campground is packed and crossing it means taking your life into your hands. Not now.
We went downtown to pick up our repaired clothes but we got Peru’ed. They are not ready but will be on Monday. They had better be as we are getting Rusty’s exit papers on Monday to drive to Chile, not expected and not planned but we need to do some front end work on the van and we can’t get the parts in isolated Arequipa. We hope to be in Iquique late next week. Layne remembered to buy online car insurance for GANNET2; she’s brilliant at that stuff.
We have another month on our permit to stay in Peru but we want to get our front end checked and brought up to snuff to take on the roads in Brazil and if we leave now we can get the work done at a mechanic we know in Chile and then still have a month we can use later to cross Peru to get to Porto Velho in Brazil.
Rice and potato soup for lunch as we stumbled around town getting stuff done.
Layne has long wanted stickers to exchange with other overlanders so for $8 this guy designed and printed 90 of them for us. We used a watercolor a friend had made of GANNET2 for our template.
It’s a very modern thing to have stickers instead of visiting cards which we used to exchange on our travels when we sailed to Key West from California in distant 1998.
I noticed the paper is Chinese. Peru is developing strong trade ties with China and their new port at Chancay which we saw last year, is to be the Pacific hub of a new railroad being built across Brazil to the Atlantic Ocean. What Panama Canal?
Would you give this man a visa to visit Brazil? Nor will they yet. I’m on my third attempt to get a photo of me accepted. They couldn’t see my shoulders, then my ears, then my head was tilted and on and on.
There are still lots of pedestrians in Arequipa and they keep getting into my pictures of this peculiarly ugly town.
Contrast and compare architecture:
Here’s another attempt at a visa photo for Brazil. It was good enough for my US passport but not for them. Theoretically you get an $80 dollar electronic visa to enter Brazil for as long as your passport is valid and this caper is required for US, Canadian and Australian passport holders. The visa is processed in Miami (!) but the photo requirements are hellish.
This is my third attempt. I surely look empty headed enough to qualify? Head straight, showing shoulders and ears, and a gormless expression…NO SMILING.
And here is another piece of crap. Guyana a former British colony north of Brazil is the only country in South America that requires an International Driving Permit. I got one from Triple A in Miami but that has long since expired and I can’t fudge the date anymore so I found an online scam that sells you a three year permit which you can keep on your phone if anybody ever asks for it, but just to be safe I printed out the sixteen pages and stapled them together into a crude book in case of need.
You need some weird crap to drive around the world. I think maybe Webb Chiles is right when he says it’s easier by boat.
Here we are all lined up at the campground. Our clunky old very functional Starlink is sitting on the roof in the photo below. Before we leave I put it away, a job of five minutes.
People come from Chile and drive to Cusco. What they do after that I don’t know but probably they are waiting at 12,000 feet for the strike to end just like us at 7500 feet in a campground much closer to everything you need in a city campground.
One bored European traveler took their four wheel drive Toyota Land Cruiser camper up the volcano on a cinder track and fell over onto their side and had to be rescued like a stuck turtle according to a WhatsApp group which published this photo. No injuries to people or vehicle apparently. You can see Arequipa in the background.
Back down here on Earth things continue as normal.
