Saturday In Arequipa

Layne is in Asheville celebrating nephews graduating from high school with the family, I’m in Arequipa watching Rusty sunbathe and snore.

Everyone has left the campground except a French Ford Transit van whose occupants whom I’ve never seen are touring the Galápagos Islands I believe. The hotel staff have some downtime in the camping department though a vehicle can show up any time. I’m using the women’s washroom as it’s closer to GANNET2 and there’s no one to be offended. 

The transmission shop is preparing our gearbox for rebuilding on Monday.  Apparently the torque converter hasn’t yet arrived as there has been a muddle over the size but that’s the last piece needed to complete the assembly. The torque converter is a large heavy donut (below) that uses transmission fluid pressure to change gears and it is usually what breaks on Promasters as they are too heavy for it. In the US you can get one for $350. Double that for around here I expect, or maybe more. 

Here’s hoping the warehouse has the right size in stock. Layne doesn’t want to be bringing one from the US as they are very heavy. In other news I got an email from the US consulate in Cusco announcing the arrival of my new passport. 

An application that was supposed to take six weeks took 16 days - may the power of Uncle Sam never grow less- however this leaves me with a dilemma. I could take an hour flight and back in one day but that means leaving Rusty alone in the van for 12 hours which seems a bit much. Or I could send them an email asking them to hold the passport till the end of the month (when Layne gets back).  Which is what I’ve done. If the transmission gets fixed I could drive to Cusco and pick it up which would be a good test drive. Two days there and two back. We’ll see but the process is done.

I’m reading history mostly as an escape and looking at Layne’s pictures from another world so near by plane, yet so far by van. Appalachia looks pretty good in the spring all green and everything. Here it’s winter and feels like nights are getting colder even though the sun shines fiercely all day. I have three more weeks of this solo living thing. Grin and bear it. 

Passersby

Layne is in the US and Rusty is with only half his family for now so he’s not totally happy. I am struggling to find a routine as I wait to hear good news about the transmission. So Team Lost has come off the rails a bit. But here is a young Czech couple who bought a van in Chile to go for a tour for a few months: 

Another youngster or two. He’s from Oregon and she’s from Brazil and they are driving around in a van until they settle in her home country.  

Rusty on an early morning walk past the Czech van. He doesn’t like to leave the campground much but he’ll occasionally walk a few blocks outside in the morning with me. 

A diesel powered French Promaster with a family inside, parents and two youngsters around seven years of age or so. Witness the small people bicycles on the roof. 

Europeans love their giant expedition trucks. I think they are more trouble than they are worth. You can buy a used one for the price  of a van if you know where to look.  

French couple and their dog. A bit too rambunctious for crusty Rusty. 

A German dude with limited English, friendly though. His wife gets around nimbly on crutches.  We’ve met overlanders in wheelchairs. Let nothing stop you. 

26 year old Paul from France.  Bought the car in Colombia and is tent camping around South America. 

The car needed a water pump, spark plugs and an oil change. All done and off he went.  

Germans traveling. I insist on getting photos to record our journey. 

The French leaving. Adieu!

Hugh and Sue from Canada and their Land Rover Maple (mapleleafdrifters on Instagram). We met them in Nicaragua, this photo was in Panama and we said goodbye in Argentina. They are off to Europe and we miss them.  

Layne sent me this picture of fun at the airport. She’s in North Carolina now eating Indian food with her sister. 

We’re here. 

Road Food

It’s been a while since I posted food pictures so here’s a ramble across a few tables in South America.  Before Layne left for the States we had breakfast in town, an American breakfast  like a grand slam at Denny’s. Layne had French toast and I had pancakes. In Peru. Weird huh? 

There’s a Spanish place in Arequipa owned by a guy actually from Spain who likes it here enough to open his own eatery and serve pretty good food, risotto…

…paella.

And cheese ice cream for dessert. It’s a local thing in this town so called because it has the color and consistency of cheese. 

But not the flavor. It’s actually a light vanilla half ice cream, half sorbet served with cinnamon powder sprinkled on top. Not bad, light and refreshing and not cheesy at all. 

Peru has a reputation for imaginative cuisine and here we have fish, crawfish, Brussels sprouts and puréed potatoes. Not a combination I’d had before but I would again.  

This is a Peruvian specialty too. A stuffed bell pepper filled with beef in a raisin studded sauce and a side of potato gratin layered with sweet Peruvian cheese. 

And a banal chocolate dessert. You’d love it anyway you’d like it. 

This is the village where we broke down in the high plains. We had lunch here and as it’s Peru it was memorable. 

Potato soup. Simple and delicious. 

Alpaca, potatoes, tomatoes and onions and rice. Soup and the plate for $2:20. 

Gratuitous Rusty photo. 

A throwback to Mendoza in Argentina at the end of summer. 

Empanadas. Each country does them slightly different, I like the Chilean version with more pastry but Layne prefers these from Argentina. Colombia and Bolivia fry them which get a bit tiring. We ask for the “Arab” version in Peru as they come out slightly spicy. 

And this was high tea in the village founded by Welsh expatriates in Argentina on the Atlantic coast. Check out Gaiman if you are interested in your welsh ancestry. It was pretty good and this was $22 for two and all the black tea you can drink. 

Julia and Konstantin are back in Seattle now and their Sprinter van is on the way. Here we were having coffee at Punta Virgenes, the southernmost mainland point of Argentina, penguin country. 

Cute aren’t they, but they aren’t food unless you’re starving and at the end of your rope. 

And Peru has 4,000 varieties of potato. Interesting but the ones we eat normally still taste the best to me. I’m a creature of habit. 

There. Raid the fridge. 

Swiss Goodbye In Arequipa

When overlanding you cross paths in campgrounds, which can be good as you spend a lot of time on your own on the road. Not that I’m complaining but I am married and women like company. I enjoyed Armin’s company and he showed me some upgrades he’d done to his home and that we want to have done to our van when we get to the shop in Uruguay. So we had some electrical boy talk. 

We met Liz and Armin here in Arequipa, from German speaking Switzerland in a Toyota four wheel drive camper. They had a couple of problems, the rear differential had a crack and the box on the back was coming unscrewed from the frame. I know we have no transmission right now but everyone has problems sooner or later. It’s life on the road…

If you look closely above you’ll see Armin chatting with a German traveler and next to his leg is a gray box. I was sitting reading and I looked up and I realized how different we are in some ways. When I empty our toilet tank I try to do it unobtrusively when other campers aren’t around, perhaps early when Rusty wakes me up or when everyone is in town. Europeans just haul their crap right through the campground. I’m going to have to harden up. 

They are travelers and they told me a story about driving through Cameroon when they were overlanding Africa a few years ago in a different Toyota pickup, a Hilux with a camper shell. They were driving from Cameroon to the border with the Congo and it was not a good road, it was dirt turned to mud and there wasn’t a lot of traffic except for military vehicles patrolling the border and resupplying frontier posts every month. This story is another reason I don’t want four wheel drive by the way, as I’d get into just as much trouble as they did. I was in Cameroon on a motorcycle (a Yamaha SR500 if you care) in 1979 and I put the bike on a train to avoid the washed out highway. They drove. 

They came to a puddle in the road in the jungle and they figured they could cope but as it happened the puddle got very deep suddenly and drowned their pickup with water coming over the windowsill. Very long story short the Toyota was stuck in that puddle for three weeks until a military truck pulled them out. It took two more months to import a new engine and transmission from Germany and dry out their home to get back on the road. “It was a difficult time,” Armin said in a mastery of understatement. 

You can see in the photo above their new(er) Toyota has a big black air pipe sticking up from the engine, known as a snorkel. Telling the story Liz laughed and said “everything would have been okay if we’d had a snorkel” thus preventing water getting into the engine. We have adopted the phrase “if only we had a snorkel” when something goes wrong. 

I guess the point is there’s always someone worse off than you and perhaps their story explains why breaking a gearbox isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world. And no, we have no plans to overland Africa. Don’t be caught without a snorkel. 

Arequipa On Foot

A few photos from this lovely southern Peruvian town. 

The campground at LasMercedes last week.