A Day Of Rest

The drive back to the campground on Friday was a brief taste of the new smooth shifting I can look forward to I hope.  $4100 for a new transmission, $650 for the code reader to unlock the computer and about $750 for assorted tows. Plus $250 for eight nights in a room at the campground. 

Rusty liked having a courtyard outside room 14. The staff pet him and play with him and even the house painters take time to greet him when they arrive each morning to  refresh the hotel decor. He really liked having a room with a king sized bed, but it’s back to van life. 

Happily we are back aboard though Saturday was a long day of hauling crap out of the room and filling GANNET2 and sorting where everything went.  It’s weird how no matter how much you dump stuff more arrives to take its place. 

We have found it hard yo buy decent sheets in South America oddly enough so Layne brought back a sheet to cover our bed as a dust sheet to keep our bedding clean. We use an RV Superbag which we had on our boat 30 years ago and they are still in production. It’s a king sized comforter with a sheet velcroed inside. 

One side up is thinner for warmer weather and the other is for cooler temperatures. We needed a new sheet liner after five years and the one Layne brought back from the States feels luxurious.  But it took time to get our bedroom reorganized.  Then the kitchen, then the odds and sods and half the day went by. Layne got my cough and mine had t finished so we ate a chorus of dry hacking coughs all day long. But slowly we restored order. 

Vans have been coming and going. Everyone has an issue. I directed a young French couple in a Chinese van they bought in Chile to Renzo’s shop where he diagnosed the need for a new engine as theirs has no compression.  A Dutch couple came in with a Volkswagen that needs an oil filter so far unobtainable and a Spanish family in a Ford Transit is looking for a mechanic to repair a timing chain failure.  It feels pretty good to be getting ready to take a drive in our restored Promaster. 

Tomorrow I’m gone all day flying to Cusco to pick up my new passport then Tuesday and Wednesday we have dental appointments to finish our crowns and I’m hoping Thursday we can take a drive to the coast for a few days camping on the beach. It’s winter so it won’t be swimming weather but some fresh scenery will be a break. 

I’m hoping after we get back we can complete our suspension replacement as Renzo heard the clunking on our test drive that I’ve been hearing on rough roads. The CV joints seem fine now after a one time clunk but we’ll get them inspected  when the suspension is out and make sure they are solid. They are aftermarket beefed up units so I was surprised to hear a clunk.  

I also dropped off the ethanol kit Layne brought from the States and hopefully Renzo can install it. Then we should be ready for Brazil. It’s still raining in the jungle so we don’t want to get there too early and August is the start of rainy season so our timing may be just right. 

I walked across town from my last dental appointment and took a few street photos of Arequipa.  We have been here altogether too long but it has been useful place to get stuff done.  

It’s rather odd to find myself familiar with the streets, used to dodging pedestrians in this oddly aggressive town where people walking two or three abreast will force you aside if you look intimidated but will yield if you don’t.  So I’ve learned to play the sidewalk game and try not to yield…learning to walk like a Peruvian. We have our favorite eateries, our mechanic, our dentist, our doctor… I really need to get back on the road. Rusty would be happy not to, he liked having a room of his own.

GANNET2 Lives

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. 

Transmission Fixed

Renzo called last night and said the transmission is fixed. Apparently it took some electronic magic  but he’s happy with it and we are delighted. I have a dental appointment in the morning but we will be picking up GANNET2 today in the afternoon and we will finally see the bill which I will of course record here. A complete fully reconditioned 62TE transmission in the States costs up to $5,000 for reference. 

I spent six hours at the very clean modern dentist office Thursday getting four teeth prepared for new crowns. I had old ones that had worn out so they cleaned the stumps and set me up with a temporary arrangement. The entire business to be completed next week is costing $1800 which is about half the cost of one crown in the US as I recall. Weird isn’t it? I explained how much dentistry costs at home and they fell out of their chairs.

Well now, what next? We are thinking Brazil is back on the agenda. Chile is undergoing a horrendous cold snap with the passes through the Andes to Argentina closed by unusually heavy snowfalls. The GMC van in the photo below is for sale in Chile if you feel like imitating us. They got it unstuck after four days and backed out of Paso De Jama (15,900 feet) where we were this summer. 

It’s still raining in Brazil so we are in no hurry to go east this month and we have some mechanical work on the front suspension to get done next. We’ll be using Peugeot Jumper parts, as you do when you have a Promaster in Peru. But the transmission is working and I can’t wait for my test drive. Cheers. 

Stuck

GANNET2 is having a hard time giving up its code secrets to the electronic guy. We’ve got ourselves a repaired transmission but the problem is the computer onboard doesn’t know, and the access to the computer is blocked. 

I have suggested a visit to the dealer to unlock the code but that suggestion has been rejected on the grounds the dealer isn’t interested in repairs. I don’t think asking would hurt but so far I get the feeling our problem is an interesting challenge, possibly a learning experience for these repair guys dealing with the first Promaster. 

Apparently the electronic guy is calling in help from abroad, I’m not clear on the details, and the idea is a collective head scratching amongst them may come up with a solution. Meanwhile we wait. 

When we dropped GANNET2 off at the transmission shop we met the young French couple who’d asked us directions to a good mechanic. Their Chinese van needs a new engine as they have no compression and very little power. How they crossed Bolivia, most of which lies between ten and 14,000 feet with a powerless engine caused some interesting conversation. Renzo figured he can have it fixed by replacing the block with a new one in a week. I doubt it but they believed him. It will take the time it will take. This is Peru.  

We are taking advantage of being stationary by going to the dentist. We’ve been sitting around reading and Layne is trying to learn to curb her impatience. I feel like an old hand at it by now.  I’m just glad to see it’s still raining in Brazil so that’s a no go for a while. I just wish we were stationary with a working van. Soon, maybe. 

Giovanni Giannini 1958-2024

One year ago I took a call from my nephew in Italy with bad news. It wasn’t one of my sisters, ten years older than I, but it was my childhood friend, 66 years old killed by a heart attack in his cardiology office in Italy.

I last saw him in 2023 just before we took off for South America and we always expected to have time to catch up more on the next visit. He came to see me in the Keys in 2007. We talked of what we would do together when we got old. 

Pasta, Mafia, Spaghetti

"How is it that people in this country always associate Italians with the Mafia?" It has to be a longstanding friendship when you get sideswiped by such a complicated question late at night. We were standing on the White Street Pier watching the street lights twinkle along Smathers Beach, and such a watery place would naturally lead to reflection. The fact that Giovanni, a cardiologist, was visiting for just two days on the back of a medical convention on the mainland meant we had a lot of catching up to do in a short while.

We grew up together, Giovanni's family spent most of their time in the city and I spent most of my life in exile at that age, in an English boarding school. After I left Europe Giovanni, who followed the conventional life plan laid out for the son of a doctor remained my tenuous connection with he Old World, a thread threatened by time, distance and commitments, but that has become less frayed as we grow older. We try to meet at least every couple of years alone or with family and ride a motorcycle, laze on a beach always staying up late to set history and the world to rights.

Explaining the Mafia stereotype to a forty-nine year old Italian who has never imagined hanging out with, or being intimidated by Cosa Nostra back home isn't easy. The Mafia is as far from his life as it is for any American, its a subject for the movies; Hollywood is short hand for graven images. "Well, you've seen the Godfather," I start out by saying. "Il Padrino reinforced the image first created when Italian immigrants started coming in large numbers to the US..." And his rebuttal, built around the irritation he feels when he replies, in his broken English, to strangers that he is Italian not Mexican, and they go on and on about the few things they know about Italy,The Mafia, and Italian history followed by a tour of monuments they've seen. Giovanni sighs and leads us to a discussion about the stereotypes of la dolce vita an image of Italy created in turn by Italian filmmakers.

Too often I hear about how Europeans have it easy with long vacations and lots of time off, but I remember well Giovanni's incredulity when we walked one morning into a California Starbucks and he couldn't believe all the lounging around going on during a workday. In France the 35-hour work week stands a good chance of being overturned because people are tired of the financial constraints of a short work week which yes, allows for more time off but it also severely limits incomes. The new French President is currently struggling with that problem and at the same time in Italy, pension plans, those distant rewards for a life time of 51/2 day work weeks, are being pushed back by threats of State bankruptcy.

Giovanni, who lives in a magnificent, high ceiling'ed, apartment in the heart of the Terni envies me my suburban American life. He loved to sprawl in my California backyard smoking and pretending to be house owner for a week or two. In Florida its the wide open deck we hung out on at night, me in my Keys uniform of cargo shorts and a tee shirt while Giovanni, even en deshabille, wore a crisp collared shirt and ironed Dockers, stretched out in our recliners admiring the stars and setting the world to rights.

We don't drink much alcohol together, we usually get drunk on exhaustion, talking about the past, musing about the future, wondering how we got to where we are. Giovanni doesn't see a very rosy future as he has bills to pay and many more years of hospital work and private practice to pay his bills, get his kids through college, help them buy homes, pay off his own mortgage and finally qualify for a his State pension. He drives a nice car, rides a big motorcycle, takes vacations where he likes, and rarely has time to be alone and think. Which he says, is just as well. Even when he is alone he thinks about what gifts to shop for and take home to his family.

"The big difference between us, " he said as he was struck by an epiphany between the eyes as it were." The difference between us is that you don't have children." He's right. I view the future as a series of different choices, variations on the various forks in the road that have led me to this point. It's all speculative but I wonder if perhaps I may or may not allow myself to live some of the time in Italy, riding around in Giovanni's wake... A fantasy rudely shattered by his insistence that these possibilities aren't open to him. La dolce vita promises him a life lived hard at work till the last possible minute. But always fashionably well dressed...

Over the decades I have come to appreciate the reality of Giovanni's daily life in Italy which is, for most Americans, a romantic idyll far removed from reality, a movie set inhabited by cheerfully gesturing lovers divorced from traffic jams, endless bills, and unemployment. Pretty much the same way every Italian in America is probably intimate with the inner workings of the Mafia.

I snapped this picture of Giovanni hanging with my buddy Scott at the Tropic cinema one warm sunset. I too love hanging out with Giovanni, he always makes me appreciate my life all the more.

Monday In Arequipa

Yesterday Layne and I, carefully observed by the chief security officer unloaded the loot brought back from the States by herself, then we stripped our lockers and sorted stuff we didn’t want to keep anymore. Then we replaced it with the new and we hope more useful stuff. 

It’s nice not to be rushed and to be in a comfortable climate and to have lots of room to spread out. Layne brought back a more suitable camping chair by Kilo and we gave away the larger Kilo chair we decided to replace. The young French couple in their tiny camper were grateful for it. 

It’s all the impedimenta of travel and living combined with heavy wood furniture that puts our Promaster at full capacity. But you pays your money and you takes your choice. We’ve been living full time in this van since October 21st 2021 and we neither of us are tired of it (Rusty might disagree), so we must be doing something right. 

By some standards we are loaded with stuff which if you live in a 3,000 square foot home is laughable, but I have discovered there aren’t a lot of open ended travelers like us. Most overlanders are on a journey constrained by time or money so a suitable life on the road fit them is traveling light and basically roughing it in a hard sided tent. 

GANNET2 is our home, so taking some time and money to repair our van after 116,000 of the hardest road miles doesn’t seem too much of a burden. Especially as we have more travels to come on not great roads. Our plan is to be in Pensacola in time to vote in the next election but that may be too fast for us to get back to Florida. Team Lost moves slowly. 

The plan now is to drop off GANNET2 at Renzo’s shop on Tuesday before lunch. I hope by Wednesday evening the scanner dude will have some insight into the locked transmission code. Either way I hope we will be back aboard living in our home by Thursday. 

When I suggested a visit to the RAM dealer to clear the codes I got one of those classic evasive Latin American noes, and I’m not sure why. Drivemotor Peru does not have much standing in this town apparently as I have been directed away from them more than once. Renzo gets his Mopar parts shipped direct from Lima which says something I suppose. 

Then there is the new problem of clicking CV joints in the front wheels. Remember when I said our van is at full load capacity (9400 pounds)? The CV joints are like your knees so I’m actually pleased we can get them replaced while we are stopped here. Peugeot Jumper vans are another Promaster variant and chassis parts are interchangeable. We have Fiat/Renault/Peugeot bushings bearings tie rods brakes and so forth, already from our repairs in Panama, and a new Peugeot windshield from our rock encounter in Ecuador. 

Thus because I prefer preventative maintenance to roadside repairs - the joys of my impecunious youth when I broke down all over Europe on my motorcycles - I want to check and replace our suspension components. To you it might be a waste of money but to us it is one of peace of mind. 

I tried to pay Renzo for their done but he refused. He said he only likes to get paid when the job is finished properly. Okay then. Layne and I will be drawing soles from the ATM in days ahead in preparation for an unknown bill. A bit weird but here we are. Besides all that we have driven away from Renzo’s shop owing him I don’t know how much money. 

It’s a lesson in cultural adaptation all this mechanical annoyance. Our van is broken but we get to camp aboard and are welcome in the campground. When we broke down in the middle of nowhere we were welcomed by the local community which helped us organize a tow to Arequipa. The mechanic took us in immediately and stripped our gearbox. We got to sleep in his shop unattended and he encouraged me to hang around and watch the work. 

Sometimes I catch myself thinking: “we’ll do that when we get home…”but I’m actually finding South America in general is so much easier to deal with than the rigid liability mindset in the States. 

One thing we have learned on this journey is if you have time and money and patience it will all work out. And as retirees with no obligations and an open ended schedule and monthly miraculous checks we have that privilege. 

The main reason I record this journey is to have a reminder when I’m older and home bound that I did live. The journeys of my youth before the digital age are locked away only in my memories, and I have always wanted to see places and things for myself, so every chance I got I went whether I had a camera or not. 

The other more quixotic reason is to show it’s not dangerous or stupid to get in a car and drive south. I’m not a travel agent and I would never encourage anyone to do something they don’t want to do but I hope it’s enough to open a curtain on the world outside so that others may see how unthreatening and utterly normal life is in places not often visited. I remind myself daily I first came to South America at age 67. I first took my motorcycle to North Africa at age 19, so It took me a while to get here and I’ve traveled all over the place.

The world I grew up in is fading away and the assumptions I have about how the world should work are being replaced by new realities and because I’m human I understand but I resist the changes. I don’t like this new world order of anger and revenge that is replacing the brief interregnum of peace that I grew up in but it’s the reality. 

We have talked about going to Europe and driving East through Turkey to Central Asia but we meet Europeans who had formed similar plans but felt they couldn’t go at the moment so South America was the peaceful alternative. Thats a lesson for us. 

And we are finding inexpensive medical care, available mechanical parts and welcoming locals. What’s not to like? 90 days her and 90 days there and pretty soon you are too old to keep driving.

So what if we are stuck here for a month? After that our stories from the road will resume and whatever problems show up will be a fresh opportunity to problem solve. That’s life on the road or off.