Still Here

I liked the comment suggesting Renzzo is slowing down to keep me out of trouble on Layne’s orders. I thought it was funny but now I’m wondering how I didn’t figure it out for myself. 

No change. Tiny change. Barely perceptible progress. 

I like his patient approach taking care in his work which gives me confidence the job will be done right. However it has to get done and I’m frustrated by the lack of motion. 

I can’t blame him in reality. His local customers are local and they’ll  be back most likely. I hope I will never be a repeat customer so I can see his point, speedy service for people who might come back in the future. Besides there’s nothing I can do. No point making a scene. 

He asked me when Layne was coming back and I told him the truth. There’s no point in lying about it. I’m guessing at this point the transmission will be done by a week from Friday. God, I can’t wait for her to get back and not just for this. I think Rusty will be happy to see her too though he’s doing pretty well just hanging out sleeping in the grass. Maybe I should call the shaman below for a cure: 

It’s silly to get stressed about this as the plan all along was to be still right now but with my brain all I can wonder is if the repair will work. Will GANNET2 return to normal…proper reliable functioning condition? Will she feel trustworthy? 

We’ve both asked ourselves if Amazonia is the right place to go right after major van heart surgery? It’s a whole lot of nowhere if something goes wrong. Take a look at this, 400 miles of dirt with a rebuilt untested transmission: 

I’m an impatient soul and I’d like to start testing things now, going for a drive, building my confidence and it’s silly because there’s no need to be impatient. It’ll all come together in the fullness of time. 

I’ve got to learn to be zen like my dog. Actually Rusty isn’t laid back at all. He stresses just as much as I do and he gets annoyed when I leave him in the van when I go off to see the transmission or go to the stores. 

He walks around the compound morning and evening with an occasional ten minute stroll outside. He’s marking time and I can’t tell him when we’ll all be back together. 

There aren’t any surprises here, 70 sunny degrees by day, cold 50 degrees at night, surprisingly chilly when I get into bed and have to shove Rusty to his side to make room. He grumbles too. It’s a tough life. 

Bloody dog. All he does is sleep. 

I’m working on watching the Sopranos. I’m half way through season five. I think I’ll get it done, transmission or not. 

Sunday

Hoping the gearbox will be back together during the week. Meanwhile we wait and it’s not exciting especially as I think I’ve seen enough of Arequipa. 

Layne is in California for another couple of weeks so I would be here anyway, this stop was planned, but not having a working van is annoying. Renzzo is reassembling it but the pace is not rapid. 

The Swiss van stayed another day, the occupants off in town somewhere. A nice couple of Germans showed up in an elderly Russian van, a UAZ. He was surprised when I recognized it. 

Their plan was to go to Central Asia, the former Soviet Union where these machines are quite common so when the war broke out in Ukraine they scrapped that plan. 

Thus they came to South America and have got this far from Colombia but they aren’t fond of mountains. At 10,000 feet this old van barely rolls so they’re looking for lower altitudes on their way south. However they plan to go through Bolivia as their van has a gasoline engine which they think will make finding fuel easier in that unhappy country. 

Rusty is enjoying not traveling. He hasn’t been out of the campground for two days. Oddly happy. 

GANNET2 looks okay. Soon I trust,  she will drive okay too. 

Slow Progress

Progress on the gearbox is slow, painfully, glacially slow.

The good news is he is careful and patient and attends to the details. 

The bad news is there are tons of details. I knew automatic transmissions are complicated but when you see yours stripped down to the very bare essentials it’s pretty startling. He picks the pieces up and cleans them with gasoline then dries them with compressed air.

One by one they get laid out with the new pieces and reassembled. 

And it’s cold and some factory nearby was cleaning its smokestacks  or something and the neighborhood smelt like a bonfire. 

Next week I should be able to move GANNET2 and take a test drive and that feels more stressful than it should. What if it doesn’t go well? There’s so much riding on this that now that we are closing in on the repair it’s getting to me. 

There’s no point in worrying, I know that, but I want to get going when Layne gets back. Where to will be a big question, shall we proceed to the lonely jungles of Brazil? That will be a test of our confidence in the repair. 

As I was leaving the campground I crossed paths with a Swiss couple coming in. Apparently they are spending but one night and going somewhere else right away. 

I rather like having the place to myself. 

Except of course I get to share it with Rusty. Check out below his annoyed he gets when I close him in the van as I prepare to leave him and go get jobs done downtown. He turns his back on me. 

The thanks I get for looking after him. 

Count Down

Renzzo at the transmission shop says he will call me Thursday to let me know how the rebuild is going. 

There is one box of bits that hasn’t arrived but he says he’s got enough to get started. I hope he does just that. 

There’s always that worry at the back of your mind that when it goes together it won’t be right. That will be a stress but right now everything is on track. At least I’m fairly sure it is. 

The campground is empty right now and I’m okay with that. Rusty is happy being still for a while. 

I had a bag of laundry to drop off round the corner so I figured I’d try leaving the campground and not putting him into the van where he can nap and feel secure. I was hoping he might be relaxed enough to do his usual sunbathing. Not a bit of it, he was sitting staring at the gate when I got back ten minutes later and he was all over me like those were the longest ten minutes of his life. I guess that’s an experiment I won’t try again. He has to stay aboard GANNET2, his safe space when I’m in town.

Later I got him out for a little walk and this little dog popped up out of nowhere to say hello. Then he trotted off back home.

I could be taking a test drive next week. Not that I’m anxious or anything. 

Italian Road Trip

I am supposed to plan to have the van in the shop on Friday to reinstall the rebuilt transmission. Until then here I am in Arequipa, Rusty is my company and occasionally there are the vagrants in the campground who come and go. 

Arequipa is a nice enough town and convenient but nothing much changes. The weather is solid, blue skies and sunshine by day and cold crisp nights. No dramatic storms or floods or anything. 

Groundhog Day they say, when the days repeat themselves. I don’t mind so much, it’s nice to take a break from the road and this break was planned anyway. I was just supposed to have a working transmission.

A month here after six weeks spent here last year, is a long time in one place. 

The people come and go from the campground. This week we had two small vans with Chilean license plates, but as usual they were occupied by foreigners, in this case one pair of youngsters from France and the others from Czechia, but they came after dark and left the next morning so I said hello and didn’t even get a photo. Then they were gone. 

I saw one more German tag on this Mitsubishi, and that’s not unusual as half the overlanders in South America are German and I’ve met plenty. I was not terribly interested in meeting two more passersby. Germans are everywhere not least because they get generous sabbaticals and decent retirement so they get a chance to see the world before they lose interest. Besides I’m pretty self sufficient in my aloneness, but something went wrong, she came up to me and said she’d seen all the flags of the countries we’ve visited. They were young blonde and cheerful plus they spoke excellent English, so they trapped me into conversation. Damn. 

They landed in Montevideo, drove to Ushuaia over the past nine months and are on their way to Alaska, then across Canada to Halifax where the pickup would get shipped home. All completely standard normal travel up the PanAmerican.  Except they weren’t German… the two blonde kids were Italian. My surprise was nothing compared to theirs. “We haven’t seen an Italian on all our journey,” they said looking at me like I was the second coming.  We went to lunch. 

I took them to my favorite fish place which also allows dogs. Rusty napped in the gravel while we exchanged life stories. They took jobs in Germany for the money and they made lots. Luca is on indefinite unpaid leave and will get his job back when he gets home. Imagine that in the States. And imagine this: he may not want it because these youngsters have completely lost their taste for the rat race. Travel broadens the mind sometimes and screws your well ordered life up. 

What makes it even weirder is that Giulia and I have lived parallel lives. I’ve never met anyone whose biography is as close as hers is to mine. She claims Viking ancestry through the Sicilian side of her family which gave her blue eyes and blonde hair. Much of Europe and Central Asia has marched through, landed on or occupied Sicily since long before the time of Christ. She and Luca met in junior high and it was dislike at first sight.  Three years later they discovered they liked to travel and they became buddies. Then they split and went to different schools and learned that they missed being around each other. They speak fluent English, she went to USC and later Hong Kong so she also learned Mandarin. He went South Korea and learned Korean. How do you like that? Childhood sweethearts long since married. 

I grew up in a castle in Umbria; her family has a castle in Tuscany, her family is arguing over the division of the family properties just as mine did…unlike my siblings she is tight with her younger brother who lives and works in North Carolina. I felt like she could be my youngest sister, it was the weirdest thing. 

We had lunch then we had coffees on a roof top cafe and Rusty shocked the waitress because he looked like the twin brother of her own recently deceased rescue dog. The waitress is a refugee from Venezuela who has lived in Arequipa for eight years and has a habit of rescuing other refugees. She has made a home for eight street dogs, one for each year she has been in exile from her unhappy country. I was caught up in all this and forgot to take photographs of course. 

We talked and talked, about politics and the state of the world and the strange times we are living through, the likelihood of war in Europe and changes in the world in which we live. I’m watching the marines being drafted in one more act of destruction of the world I knew. I felt closer to the Venezuelan waitress’ situation than she would ever know. 

I can’t imagine taking a 911 call and finding myself dispatching marines to confront civilians on US streets. I am so glad I am retired and away from such decisions. I told Giulia about my grandfather’s resistance and imprisonment in Workd War Two and she told me how her grandfather was the Fascist governor of Rome, on the opposite side. But here we are both on the same side now, in favor of the rule of law and empathy raised on DEI and  never tested. 

Meeting Giulia brought into sharp focus my dilemma. I can stay here safe and unmolested or I can go home and find a barricade to take a stand on. I know what my grandfather would do. 

IN THE DARKEST DAYS

OF GERMAN AND FASCIST DOMINATION FROM SEPTEMBER 1943 TO JUNE 1944

HERE

CESARE PAPARINI

FAITHFUL TO THE TRADITIONS OF HIS ANCESTORS, IGNORING DANGER, GAVE SANCTUARY TO ITALIAN AND ALLIED SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS 

AND EVERY REBELLIOUS SPIRIT

THIS WHEN TYRANNY RAGED ITS FIERCEST, CAME FORTH  FROM THESE MOUNTAINS THE NEVER SUFFOCATED LONGING FOR FREEDOM

FROM THOSE WHO FOUND SAFETY HERE, WITH GRATITUDE ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THEIR LIBERATION 15 JUNE 1945