Overlanding

Usually my photography is on the road recording what I see for my diary. Today I get to post a bunch of pictures I took for wandering me, and that’s only because it was Rusty and I wandering the gardens at La Bonanza camp ground. 

Outside La Bonanza there is a paved two lane road which runs from the town of Piendamó for 45 minutes through the hills to the town of Silvia. There’s no sidewalk, all land bordering it is fenced and private so our walks stay inside the campground and on the solitary trail through the woods nearby. 

It’s annoying to be stopped for the moment in our travels but these walks are my sanity check, getting out between rain showers, living under the gray skies, watching Rusty have fun while looking for pictures. 

It reminds me of walking Rusty in the Keys, looking for colors or shadows and light in the mangroves, the places we walked which only had mangroves. I’ve seen a few of those mangroves in our time together as the young Rusty raced through them. 

A day in the city tired old Rusty, and he’s going gray, as am I, Layne will hasten to point out. 

Kika and Anwar have a great gardener keeping this complicated garden under control and blooming. 

I just get to wander and using black and white I get to do something different from the usual recording of life on the road. 

This is Mischief the campground dog and she has the energy of a puppy even though she’s seven years old. 

She annoys Rusty sometimes but he gets really annoyed at me if he sees me being nice to her. He is a jealous dog. 

To overland in the traditional sense of the word you travel by vehicle through foreign countries and here we are not quite overlanding right now. We have learned to slow down and enjoy not speeding and the privilege of being retired makes that possible. 

Webb Chiles says he’s not retired because he hasn’t had a pensionable job for almost all his life. His job is to be Webb Chiles which he is doing very well even now. My job was to get to my birthday each year without declaring bankruptcy. I’ve managed that at least. 

Now we are driving the PanAmerican Highway and our job is to get to Ushuaia at the southernmost point of Argentina. That’s 5500 miles away from La Bonanza where we are now. Naturally we won’t be driving that direct route, there will be many more miles. 

Webb wrote to me empathizing with our latest blockade and noting the freedom of open waters by contrast. He has a point and it’s well taken. For me the challenge of the road does something that sailing never did for me. It’s been a thought in my mind for a while and sitting still in Colombia has brought it home. 

Lots of overlanders fantasize about taking a sailing trip which is funny because when we say, oh yes we did that, they look at us like we’ve grown a second head. To drive a car is a skill anyone can master and we all do, so we can be independent and go to work or take our high school classmates to school and be cool. But to sail away? That’s different , that is in no way practical and can even be dangerous as people drown in water. When a van breaks you pull over to fix it, you don’t sink obviously. 

I didn’t leave the sea because I was afraid of it so much as I was curious about the land. I know so much more of Mexico from driving it than I learned from harbor hopping the coast.

I love driving and the Promaster is a great van to drive, comfortable, quiet with light controls and easy steering with front wheel drive. I really enjoy maneuvering the van in city streets or sitting back and rolling down the highway sitting high above the traffic watching South America go by. I look forward to the act of discovery that is driving. 

I never did die at sea, I didn’t sink any of the sailboats I owned and despite a few remarkable survival stories I managed to get through it all without hurting myself or anyone else, at least physically. I wasn’t scared but I never felt at ease, I always wanted to arrive to see new places; I never entered Webb’s “monastery of the sea.”

I met a French couple at the campground about our age and driving over the next month to the port at Cartagena where they will put their Peugeot van into a container bound for France. I’m sorry I said (I speak French) the adventure is over. Oh no she said, soon we will be home in France her eyes lighting up at the prospect. 

With almost three years on the road living in a van we aren’t normal anymore. For most people the PanAmerican Highway is a journey with a beginning and an end. If you are young you may have only a matter of months or possibly a year and a fixed amount of money, or if you are older you may have a sabbatical or simply a strong desire to get back to your grandchildren. Time is measured in weeks and months for most overlanders. 

For us in our weird child free world time is elastic and even endless, our journey ending in old age and immobility or even death. Or boredom and exhaustion, those enemies of effort. I get more homesick than Layne does and I miss wild camping in the States more than she does. But if we are held up by a problem all we have to do is wait. It is an immense privilege to have time and to be paid each month and to be on the road with no obligations. I wake up every day and thank the Key West Police Department for my pension. 

There are some Belgians in the gray Fiat van that looks like a Promaster but I haven’t even spoken to them, I expect we shall exchange platitudes at some point but I can only hope they have traveled widely and have an open schedule and if they don’t speak English Layne would be excluded so what’s the point? 

Language is the curse of travel and the expectation that fellow overlanders will speak English can be intensely irritating to the many Europeans on the road. And yet at a gathering of several nationalities most of the time English is the common language like it or not. And for many travelers conversational Spanish is out of reach. 

It’s a funny old life on the road, a mish mash of cultures and expectations, frequently not met, of irritations and setbacks all made worth while by the realization that every day is different and intense. On the road time doesn’t flash by, you don’t live a routine that allows you to forget what you did or how you got where you are. This isn’t commuting and repetition or even expectation. And that makes it worthwhile to me. And I have grown because of that.

I cannot foresee a time when I will long to settle down. I will have to but part of me will remember this as the best time of my life when I have the maturity to appreciate how I am living. And you don’t have to travel to have that happen; for me apparently I do. 

Popayan

Years ago Layne said she wanted to visit the White City of Popayan, a lovely university town in an Andean Valley in southern Colombia. I put a star on Google maps and we held it in our heads as destination. Well, here we are. 

Yup, it’s white. 

Perhaps we built it up too much but it’s a bit disappointing as a tourist destination. There’s not much there for us but we should acknowledge this is an important city in Colombia because it is the capital of the Cauca Department, and it’s not just a tourist backwater.

Layne had her eyes checked while I stopped by the Customs office and straightened out (I hope) a snafu in our import paperwork for GANNET2. I kept getting emails telling me the car had overstayed its temporary import; but it hadn’t because we had got a perfectly legal 90 day extension. All I had to do was get the customs people to connect the two paper trails. I hope I succeeded. 

Then I got a haircut from a young Venezuelan immigrant living in Popayan with his uncle.despite my fear he would go overboard he restrained himself and I got a nice trim with no fashionable weirdness. 

Selfies confuse me but rest assured I was smiling inside. Eye doctor done, check; customs done, check; and haircut completed, check. 

Ironically while we were doing Useful Things in the capital of the Cauca Department guerrillas were blowing up police facilities across the department, not that you would have known here, and we only found out when we got back to the campground. 

Chinese for lunch and leftovers for dinner. It wasn’t bad but to get in they have to unlock the padlock. We found the business of being locked in and unlocked out rather absurd but I suppose locals know more than we do, don’t they?

While we lunched two cops were killed and four injured in a series of bombings around the department. Cauca produces most of the coca leaves processed into cocaine for Americans’ drug using pleasure and peace talks with the government appear to have collapsed. Luckily they had to go boxes for our dinner back at the campground. 

We happened by a rather well known pastry shop on our way back to GANNET2 after lunch. I started laughing when they offered us “communists” and “liberals” different cookies actually but I like the little ones filled with vanilla custard. 

Compared to more tourist towns Popayan seems rather pedestrian. I’m not sure why but I rather suspect it does fine from government offices, the university and light industry. It may be painted white but it doesn’t seem to need tourists.

When we come back to Colombia we’ll give it another try and as we won’t have any expectations we may like it more. 

Rusty enjoyed walking the streets well enough so there is that. 

We drove home, an uneventful drive if you consider seeing coffee beans drying in the middle of the road normal…

You don’t have to chill meat around here apparently. 

I call the campground dog Mischief but Rusty is warming to her. 

No word yet on any more guerilla nonsense. I’m ready to do some driving. 

Change Of Plans

“There's something happening here 

What it is ain't exactly clear 

There's a man with a gun over there 

Telling me I got to beware 

I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound 

Everybody look what's going down…”

Buffalo Springfield

We seem to have screwed things up in Colombia, maintaining our practice of causing chaos everywhere we go. Bearing in mind we are in Cauca Department and the town of Morales is about 15 miles away when Kika our landlady mentioned some dead policemen over tea yesterday afternoon we sat up and took notice. 

We are not in the habit of worrying about our safety in the ordinary course of life on the road but this is not ordinary. Peace talks have broken down and driving to Medellin puts us in the middle of a firefight Bummer. Kika: 

Her husband Anwar, below. They have a secure location here where they have lived for seven years so we are quite safe. 

If this post seems melodramatic forgive me; things are melodramatic at the moment. We are too old to take stupid chances so here we are in a full service campground waiting for our last  Amazon packages to arrive by the end of next week. 

If the war grows we will leave for Ecuador 250 miles away. If calm prevails we will complete our tour of Colombia with a visit to Medellin. For now we will plug in, turn on Starlink and walk Rusty on the trails he loves.

Not a difficult place to pass some time and stay safe. 

Last Day

I had a morning to myself which meant I could hang out and do nothing while Layne went to the Tuesday market in Silvia. 

Rusty got his walk and I did a kitchen clean with sunshine pouring into the van. It felt like a bright fresh sunny spring morning. 

What a great garden to have to myself with all the campers gone to market. Myself and Rusty. 

The gardener was out mowing the copious quantities of grass. 

Across the fences I could see in the distance a farmer shuffling his cows separating them into two fields and they kept him running. 

Meanwhile in Silvia the overlanders were living it up. 

Layne sent me this picture of Veronique from Montreal eating some of the best rice pudding. That was kind of Layne because she brought none home saying there were no to go containers. A likely story as I am very fond of rice pudding. Join with me in enjoying the photo. 

I washed our dishes in the campground sink to save our own water of course. But I also got to stand in the beautiful morning sunshine. 

Rusty follows me around so because I don’t like to disturb him I sat around for a bit enjoying the cool morning air. 

Dishes drying in the sun; dog napping also in the sun. 

We got some new neighbors from Germany in a pop top Iveco expedition truck, Martina and Gerhardt. They are driving south like us so we will expect to see them on the way and for that reason it was especially nice we found them so approachable. 

Malika our Moroccan landlady, fluent in Arabic French English and Spanish which is lucky as we all show up at La Bonanza in our own weird flavors. 

Tomorrow we are taking off for a road trip around central Colombia with a couple of days in Medellin. We want to road test GANNET2 before we leave Colombia and we want to check out the last piece of this fascinating country we haven’t yet visited.