Where Next?

 When Rusty is happy he comes up to me and licks my face and I have been getting a lot of face time with my dog lately. He is profoundly happy living in a house as we wait for our 110 volt 3,000 watt Victron inverter/ charger to arrive.

He follows me like my shadow and always wants to know where I am. Apparently old dogs need the reassurance of knowing where you are and I’ve seen this behavior before but I was surprised to see Rusty start acting dependent after a lifetime of ignoring me as often as he felt like.

I remember one notable October 31st at sunset standing on Blimp Road on Cudjoe Key cursing Rusty who declined to appear when I called and made me late for my own birthday dinner, a rare event that happened to coincide with a night off so I could be home. I could have strangled him as eventually he stood on the back seat of the car panting fit to burst covered in swamp water happy as a clam long after Layne’s special efforts in the kitchen were congealing. These days he hardly lets me out of his sight. Bloody dog.

Some day soon I hope I am going to have to put his collar round his neck and leash him and encourage him to climb aboard the Devil machine and leave this tranquil cottage with its thick lush grasses and interesting smells and sounds of life in the woods around  and he will hate me for it.  He is done with traveling thanks but we have to keep moving as we are nomads and get limited time in each country we visit. We have a deadline to be in Arequipa Peru by September as friends are flying down to go on a Brazilian nature safari with Layne (I will stay home to guard the dog) to look for cheetahs in the Pantanal in southern Brazil.

In a straight line it’s about 2200 miles from the blue dot to the red dot which are separated by a 15,000 foot pass in the Andes, Paso de Jama which is paved and is kept open by snow plows all winter long.  After much cogitation we have decided that as soon as we can leave Uruguay we will go west and wait for a weather window to cross the mountains to get to Chile.

If you are like us the advent of winter encourages you the nomad to look for warm weather  so in an ideal world we would drive up the coast of Brazil towards the equator to explore magnificent beaches of which I have been told by Webb Chiles the pelagic who says Salvador is worth a visit. However we have used up our time in Brazil and can’t go back for several months so that’s out.

Our next plan was to go to Paraguay a country that was too hot to enjoy when last we were there but which would be at least a bit further north and thus warmer than where we are  and there’s stuff we want to explore there. We also know of a nice little cottage for rent that our dog would love to hang out in for a while. But…

…we’ve been monitoring the situation in Bolivia and our plan to go north to Paraguay then go west through Bolivia has hit a snag. With the ejection six months ago of a Trump friendly right wing president Bolivia dropped its requirement for US passport holders to get a visa, a permit we tried to obtain last year and were denied in consulates in Chile and Argentina. Now we don’t need a visa but Bolivia is not ready for overlanders at the moment. 

Bolivia is in riot mode these days as miners and farmers and teachers protest cost of living increases brought on by the new government cutting fuel subsidies.  At last report in the newspaper El Deber (the duty) the capital of La Paz is cut off by blockades so food and fuel supplies are running out and the streets erupting in battles between police and miners armed with TNT (!) from their jobs and firearms from who knows where. Three are reported dead and more than 79 injured in the fighting.  

I could go on but you get the picture so in short we aren’t going to drive through Paraguay and Bolivia to reach Arequipa, our goal in southern Peru. So now what? 

This is where things get tricky and we need to think things through. We can’t go to Brazil or Bolivia so we have to cross the Andes from Argentina to Chile and then turn north to Arequipa but crossing the Andes in winter is arduous and can be unpleasant especially if like us snow ice wind and altitude are not your favorite combination  of driving conditions.

We could go south for a couple of thousand miles and cross into Chile at around 5,000 feet near Pucón which, aside from the massive drive with gas at nearly seven bucks a gallon in Argentina, would put us in a pretty part of southern Chile ready for a long hike north…

Or we could cross at the main route to Santiago from Mendoza which is an all weather route through a tunnel. However it is also a training ground for Chilean customs inspectors and the entry procedures take hours and your vehicle usually goes through a microscopic inspection entering Chile. 

We have medications for us and Rusty which we would likely lose if they notice them, not to mention fruits nuts honey meat and so forth all of which can be replaced but our first aid kit would be hard to rebuild. So if we want to cross the Paso de Jama we need to get on with it as winter, proper winter is approaching. We crossed the pass (pronounced “haa-ma”) in the Fall, April last year and it was bleak and crisp with the customs post at 14,300 feet. God knows what it will look like in winter  with snow and less than 32 degrees and us shivering.

Plus the approaches to this border crossing are pretty gnarly, high passes, hairpins and narrow canyons which whistle with wind. We stopped here last April to cool our brakes on the way down from the pass: imagine this in a snowstorm on the way up. 

I’m thinking we may just have to take the road to Santiago and suffer a proctological exam at the border.  But these are the considerations when you are planning a route, retired with time to spare limited only by weather and politics.

As to when we might leave that is still in the hands of the TerraVentura people who say our inverter should be released by customs on Monday. We shall see but we have now paid for it through Western Union and we are hoping it really is in the customs shed at Montevideo airport soon to be released.  Once Adrián gets it he will be able to install it in a matter of a morning. Our plan then is to your Uruguay for a week or ten days testing our new systems and making sure we can use them before crossing the border back to Argentina.  Rusty will be mad but those are the breaks.

Meanwhile life at Luzetti Motorhomes outside Colonia Valdense continues serene and chilly, lots of logs burning in the fireplace even in sunny days with highs near 60 and lows at night around 40.  Winter is closing in.