San Camilo Market Arequipa

Layne took herself off to the covered market in Arequipa Sunday afternoon and brought back fruits and cooked foods. I stayed at the campground sunbathing with Rusty hence just pictures and no words. Today we are at the mechanic getting our ethanol flex fuel system installed in GANNET2 and at the vet getting Rusty’s exit papers for a run to Chile to get done front end parts for GANNET2. But for now, the market. 

Sunday In Arequipa

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. 

Still Here

We are still parked in the Las Mercedes campground in Arequipa.  However there is good news filtering through. The trash collection strike is over with a city offer to pay the workers a one time bonus of $550, and also to purchase protective equipment for them. The newspaper was at pains to point out 728 employees are in the union but all 750 will get the bonus. Already the streets are clean which is lovely. 

But the streets are also empty, even Layne noticed how little traffic there is as supplies of fuel run low. It’s easy to cross streets that are usually bumper car traffic jams and there is very little horn honking for slowpokes. And yes, we still have no bananas at the supermarket. Arequipa is running on minimal tourism and shrinking propane gas supplies for cars as the miners keep the highway to Lima tightly closed. 

Police turned up in force in the town of Ica which is the center closest to the Nasca lines, a huge tourist attraction. 300 cops cleared the blockade which I suspect followed a complaint that tourism was drying up and people with empty planes had no one to fly over the lines in the desert. Money talks. However you still can’t drive to Lima and I heard a rumor blockades are in place in the mountains now which closes a very long slow winding Highway 3 between Cusco and Lima. You can still get decent coffee in Arequipa, happily even if you can’t get a bus out of town. 

A Chilean couple came through the campsite yesterday. They came north from their country through Bolivia and they showed me a dent caused by a protestor in Bolivia throwing a stone at them.  They are young and I suspect they tried to run a blockade to get that kind of attention, but I remain glad we could not get a visa for Bolivia. They left the campground for the Chilean border last night and have not returned so the highway to the south must be open I guess. It’s all rumor and innuendo around here. 

Renzo our mechanic has studied our eflex fuel system from the States that Layne brought in her luggage, he’s watched the video and says first thing Monday he’ll install it. That means GANNET2 will able to digest Brazil’s heavily ethanol tainted gasoline. We have dental appointments Tuesday and Wednesday so I’m hoping we can start thinking about leaving Arequipa next week.

Now we have to hope the road to Lake Titicaca is open so we can get to Puno, see the famous reed islands at last and get Rusty his exit papers for Brazil. The road out of here may be in sight though nothing in Peru is certain at the moment. 

Hunkering

(Hundreds of vehicles stuck in southern Peru in the Arequipa region).

A Dutch couple in a van left the campground yesterday on their way to Cusco. As far as they knew the road inland is open and they expected no problems getting into the mountains which, as they haven’t returned is good news as ultimately that’s our route out of here. There is a solo German in his van, a strapping young Aryan who climbed a volcano outside the city but who keeps to himself in the campground. He has stories to tell, including like all of us his time at the mechanic, in his case in Argentina for a total engine rebuild. I know he has lots of stories untold to us, but you can find them on his Instagram address which  he publicizes all over his Volkswagen van:

A German overlander told me once there is no place in Germany more than 28 kilometers (19 miles) from a house. Which explains the passion Europeans have for South American wilderness. When we drive these amazing wild spaces we find ourselves relating to places we’ve traveled in the US, vast southwestern deserts, canyons, endless forests, the Great Lakes and on and on. If you live on a small continent with 600 million neighbors you have to come here to breathe free, in the Americas. A Spanish father in a van was waxing lyrical about this before he drove off to find a mechanic in Arequipa to fix his Ford camper van. He feels suffocated by camping bans and limited wilderness in Europe and can’t wait to explore the US. 

Here’s a headline you want to read on your travels. “Police In Arequipa wait for reinforcements to clear the PanAmerican Highway.” 

Life in Peru continues to be chaotic on day ten of the miners’ strike. Massive lines of parked trucks on highways, ten thousand miners camped on roads across the country, food rotting in stuck trucks and supplies of propane gas (used to power vehicles as it’s cheaper), gasoline and diesel running out across the country. We’ve noticed the supply of fresh fruit and vegetables shrinking at the PlazaVea supermarket up the street and traffic in Arequipa seems much lighter than usual with a lot less horn honking from traffic jams. Long distance bus service around the country is being cancelled. 500 bus lines affecting thousands of passengers are suspended. 

We talked to our Uber driver and he said food isn’t usually a problem when Peru shuts down (!) but fuel, if you can find it, is going up in price. We’ve been tipping madly, more than usual, to try to help. He is among the 98% of the country who can’t wait for the President’s term to end next year. When she last came to Arequipa he said with satisfaction, people (not him) threw tomatoes at her. 

Trash collectors in Arequipa continue on strike demanding more pay, city supplied protective gear  and more respect from citizens. They currently buy their own masks and gloves and are fed up with finding medical supplies including biohazards and needles tossed into the trash by medical clinics, people and dogs (not Rusty I pick up after him always) shitting in the streets and youngsters vomiting copiously in public on weekends. You know it’s bad if it’s making headlines in the papers. Plus they are fed up with people tossing trash on streets and sidewalks and telling them it’s their job to pick up after lazy citizens. With the city celebrating its birthday in a month the trash situation is such I don’t even want to photograph it you’ll be happy to hear.  Here’s a dude watering the supermarket window display on another perfect sunny afternoon in wintery Arequipa:

We had some clothes to repair so we went to our favorite tailor, Señor Castillo on the far side of the main square. He always has a few buddies in there, in his sastreria, chatting with him as he sews, a bit like the proverbial barbershop in the States, and they were pretty relaxed about the mounds of garbage accumulating on the street.  Our repairs will be ready Saturday. Life goes on.  

What I have come to appreciate about Arequipa after so much time spent here is how normal the city is. People work normal non tourist jobs here and after I spent  time in Cusco getting submerged in the tourist economy I enjoyed being back able to  disappear into the anonymity of normal everyday life in this working city. 

They know me for what I am, a weird foreigner, but I don’t feel singled out as the object of their working lives. They are getting on with whatever they do and I am allowed to swim by  in the sidewalk crowds unmolested. It reminds me of Cali in Colombia, the city you know of as the cocaine capital of the world but we lived it as a useful city filled with services and like Arequipa equipped with a lovely campground that suited us. 

Which is not to say I can’t wait to get out of here, the pressure is building and we have to start for a border at the end of the month. Have new passport, will travel. 

We talked to Renzo who is having trouble contacting his parts supplier for our suspension upgrade. That’s more of a desire, a piece of preventative maintenance to refresh our suspension after 100,000 hard miles with more to come. If we have to do that elsewhere, Uruguay possibly, that would probably be  no problem, a bit of clunking on dirt roads and tire wear is bearable for now. But to go to Brazil we absolutely have to get our ethanol conversion installed and we are pressing Renzo to figure out if he can or cannot do it. I like him because he’s not afraid to say what’s above his pay grade but he is also a man who enjoys a new challenge.

We’ve decided that what we want to do is get the flex fuel system installed and start towards Puerto Maldonado and the Brazilian border when we can and when protests allow. For now there’s no rush as it’s still rainy season which makes dirt roads very difficult.

If we can do the suspension great, but if not we will manage fine.  We can’t get to the beach and we have to be out of Peru by August 14th and frankly I’m sick of sitting still. We are both excited to visit a new country (last visited by Layne in her previous life 40 years ago) and to see some humid Florida style jungle. Rusty likes it right here thanks…poor traveling lad.