The Atacama Again

From foggy La Serena to the driest desert in the world we spent Wednesday on the road. 

It started with a dog walk and ended with a dog walk, with a few in between. 

We free camped in a quarry off the PanAmerican Highway, had ramen for dinner and passed out. 10 hours on the road will do that to you. 

We got to within 120 miles of Antofagasta where we seek a Bolivian visa at the consulate. We impose a visa on Bolivians so American tourists have to have a visa for Bolivia. Same story for Brazil.

The cold pacific marine inversion was heavy. It’s the same as the  US west coast where cold ocean air rolls up against warmer inland air and produces low lying  cloudiness. 

And here we have the same rocky coast with Pacific rollers crashing in the rocky coastline.  

Top quality pavement all the way allowing us to cruise at 60 miles an hour. Except on the hilly bits where I don’t push GANNET2. 

The freeway looks very European in its signage 

Tourist signs in brown and the classic European exit countdown showing 200 meters to the next exit. 

Emergency phones with pull outs. All very reassuring. 

Public art. It looks like kelp to me but I don’t know what it is. It’s memorable as I remember seeing it on our way south last November. 

Truck stops and rest areas. 

Many have free or low cost (75 cent) hot showers for men and women with an attendant to keep the showers clean. There is also an ambulance on stand by at many truck stops ready to respond to car accidents.  Chile is very organized and I love it.  

Heavy truck traffic up and down Highway 5, the PanAmerican. 

The Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth. 

Nicely landscaped gas stations, also with free showers, convenience stores and fast food restaurants.  And the cleanest toilets you’ve seen at a gas station. Travel here is easy and civilized. It’s not what you think of when you think of Latin American chaos and color. 

Lots of overnight parking and completely safe if you are worried. We prefer wild camping but you can stay here overnight no problems. 

We are going to come back to this area if fascinating black volcanic rock next year, after the summer travel season ends and wild camping on the coast here. 

The problem with Totoralillo is it’s on the road to other places but this area is riddled with tracks through the rocks with hundreds of places to park within hearing of the waves crashing on shore and it’s worth a stop. We will next year I keep promising  myself. 

And then the inland driest of the dry places. 

Keeping Rusty hydrated he gets water every stop. 

iOverlander led us to a quarry off Highway 5 overlooking the desert. 

We arrived just before dark, snapped a couple of pictures while Rusty stretched his legs. 

And we slept in the darkest night under the most brilliant stars with occasional trucks rumbling by in the highway below. 

It was a long day. Antofagasta is next. And bureaucracy. Oh joy. 

Last Day In La Serena

I made a mess yesterday morning programming my post to appear May 1st, not April 1st and I hadn’t  noticed before Bruce sent me a note complaining.  So I put that right and I wasn’t even too annoyed at myself as we had had a great morning.  I hate messing up my planned publishing times on this page. Apologies. 

Rusty and I went for a walk on the beach and left Layne putting groceries away back at home and organizing things so when we get to Bolivia we will be able to live our normal middle class on the road life. 

Then we went looking for a transmission shop to change the fluid in the Promaster’s automatic transmission. The factory says the 62TE gearbox should get five and a half quarts of fresh fluid every 60,000 miles. We last had it done in Ohio 30,000 miles ago but I was thinking we had stressed the gears quite a bit despite my careful driving coming down the Andes. 

We had the new filter from the Jeep dealer but dealing with an automatic gearbox was perplexing to local mechanics. 

We drove to a couple and then we hunted in iOverlander and found a recommendation in the app. 

When in doubt ask iOverlander. And as noted it’s an out of town mechanic’s shop.

From a distance it looks more like a farm building. 

I explained what I needed to Giorgio and his two mechs it’s and they were fascinated by my Fiat Ducato van with a sideways V6 Jeep engine. Pull it in because we’ll check it out but I have lots of work today. Oh well we thought bracing ourselves to come back the next day.

They had it all buttoned up by noon. $300 for oil and labor and we were delighted. Giorgio and I chatted (in Spanish) about his Italian grandmother who emigrated from Trento in Northern Italy. My Italian accented Spanish gives me away. 

So, we now have new tires and a fresh load of lubricant in the transmission… now what? Go to the beach of course and catch our breaths. 

We parked by the lighthouse, more a monument than an aid to navigation. It’s built on a street corner that reminds me of South Roosevelt and Bertha on the south side of Key West. The coast road just ends and turns inland here. 

It was built in 1950, decommissioned in 1985 and serves as a tourist attraction. 

And we are tourists. 

What a beach all to ourselves. 

It seemed like a good time to test our gearbox and the overlanders we had met the day before had recommended a waterfront eatery 45 minutes up the coast. The perfect test drive.

This is Highway 5 the PanAmerican which we will be driving up to Antofagasta on Wednesday. For now we were bowling along at 60 mph toward lunch. 

The gearbox felt smoother and less noticeable now we had changed the fluid but that could have been my imagination. The back road to the restaurant put our new tires to the test and I love my KO2s. 

I took a wrong turn to explore the village and we found ourselves scrabbling across ditches and dips. 

It looked good. 

They are pet friendly on the terrace but we left Rusty napping aboard. There were a number of local dogs around and he wasn’t happy. 

Our waitress was a moron. Or possibly she was just scared of foreigners. We received our first course, a bowl of shrimp and cheese to share. 

Delicious but nothing else appeared. And that includes our imbecile waitress so Layne went looking to find her crab and my cod. “Oh” she said, “did you want another course?”

We paid and left. 

Layne made a chicken salad sandwich at the campground and that was that. It was the worst experience we’ve had in a restaurant and we never have trouble making ourselves understood. Who knows what the glitch was but even the view couldn’t hold us. 

The plan now is to take a couple of days to drive north to Antofagasta and see what it takes to get a visa at the Bolivian consulate there. We can get a visa at the border but they charge $320 to two Americans, so we will check in with consulates on the way and see if we can get one ahead of time.

Our route more or less via Antofagasta, San Pedro de Atacama and the Jama Pass (15,900 feet on asphalt) into Argentina. Then from Salta east and north into Bolivia near the border with Paraguay. Our friends plan to enter Bolivia from Paraguay and together we travel the country for a couple of weeks. Bolivia is a mess so the company will be welcome. 

Drive And Wait

If I were to tell you it took all day to change the tires on our Promaster van you would rightfully wonder what the hell we were doing all day, and the answer would be driving or waiting and mostly waiting. 

The tire shop on Balmaceda Avenue opens at nine am so we got up yesterday at 7:20. We left at a few minutes after nine from the campground and I only missed one turn so we got there at nine twenty. At 9:31 an employee showed up, opened the garage went to talk to the other customer waiting for service. Eventually another employee showed and by ten am we were inside the shop getting our new BF Goodrich KO2s installed. Slowly. 

They ordered the tires from the warehouse in the capital on Friday and they were here by Saturday but we had planned to get them installed Monday in case there was a delay in delivery. This is Chile: so everything went like clockwork. But a slow clock in this case. 

The tires cost $300 apiece including an alignment. I like these gnarly all terrain tires even though they wear fast and make noise. With them on the Promaster our heavy van goes anywhere reasonable, steep hills, gravel, wet dirt, and it’s performance on sketchy South American roads has been transformed. 

And then of course they look good, brand spanking new. 

They did their job well and hand tightened  the lug nuts and asked about the correct tire pressure and so forth. Then they did a careful alignment 

The process took three hours and we had nowhere else to be. Oh wait. We had passport photos to get. We’d done the waiting so now it was time to drive. 

I wanted a quick trim to look neat for my passport photo but I got an hour cut. And the all important beard trim. Layne sat and waited for an hour. 

So now we had out photos for our Bolivian visa and I had my picture for my passport renewal which we are now planning to get at the US Consulate in Cusco Perú.  Then it was time for lunch. Here’s the thing, having a hamburger in a food court in a mall is something we wouldn’t do in the US because we have our favorites of other places to eat. Here, a burger and fries felt a bit like home, not a daily thing but we enjoyed it. And yes it was a bit salty. 

Then we split and Layne went to Lider which is what they call Walmart in Chile. I went to Sodimac which is a Home Depot with all sorts of interesting things in a store that looks just like Home Depot. I bought a bottle of Meguilar plastic cleaner while Layne was buying anything she could see that we might  possibly need in Bolivia a place where middle class groceries are not much in evidence apparently. Not like this relatively small shopping mall in Chile: 

It looks too hot but this is the Pacific Coast so the air was cool and fresh and the sun was pleasant not burning. Rusty was snoring aboard GANNET2 with the roof fan and back windows letting in a breeze. He did far too much waiting all during the day. He got roast chicken for dinner though. And check out the parking. We parked in an empty quarter of the lot away from the store entrance. In five minutes a car came and parked right next to us. Why? Obviously it’s my irresistible  magnetic personality. 

He is a great companion, patient and always happy to see me. 

A Volkswagen bus came in and the occupants waved do I went over to talk to them. Bjorn is German and his partner Alessandra is from Milan so we talked Italian for fun. They looked in their 40s and work on the road. They are going north to Argentina like us so I hope we get to see them again because they were fun and I stupidly forgot to photograph them. Oh and they have two twelve year old grumpy rescue dogs about Rusty’s size. 

Layne was waiting for me inside the store so I had to go. We got $200 of groceries so it took a while. Then we had to find the pay station to get out of the parking lot. You pay to park in these malls. Fun isn’t it? 

Supermarkets tend to refrigerate their produce but Layne likes fruit stands when she can find them and here was this one outside Lider. How convenient. I sat and waited. 

After Lider we went around the corner and Layne waited while I ran into the Jeep dealer and picked up the transmission filter I had ordered. We then went looking for a transmission shop that would change our transmission fluid. That was when we got stuck in the most monumental traffic jam. It was one of those that had traffic lights backing each other up. We both waited. 

Then went to pick up our laundry and that was weird. She said it was ready but Layne found  the top layer was damp so she was not happy. But guess what there was a van from Switzerland dropping off laundry.

We last saw them in Nicaragua and because they are from the Italian speaking part of Switzerland I found myself speaking my mother tongue for the second time yesterday. The photos are from their Instagram. 

Giorgio…

…and Flavia retired and slowly driving south to Ushuaia. They will be in Switzerland for the summer and then back driving south in September. 

Their van is a Fiat Ducato the European version of our Promaster only it has a diesel engine, which is normal around here. We are the odd ones out. I_gracchi_i_van on Instagram. 

The transmission shop has moved unbeknownst to Google Maps and so we drove to the old shop and drove around looking, a perfect waste of time. Then they got back to us after we WhatsApp’ed them and sent their new address. 

Tuesday we will pursue the transmission maintenance plan. At least we will be riding on new tires.