Three months and four days after leaving, we were back in Santiago! Everything was going to plan, we were ahead of schedule, and we had already arranged the sale of the van.

Leaving Uyuni felt like the crest at the beginning of a roller coaster, right before the dive. We were ahead of schedule, everything was going to plan, and now we had 4 days to get back to Santiago to prepare the van for sale.

Before leaving, we had three errands:

1. Try to find that elusive van part, since our van's make and model was so common in Bolivia
2. Find some quinoa for sale here in its heartland. Not the boring white stuff - but one of the other 30 or so varieties shown off on our Uyuni tour.
3. Eat chicken.

Of those, we only succeeded at #3. It's actually been a goal of mine through the whole trip - I miss the Peruvian chicken I ate weekly back at the office in Herndon, VA. For the first time in the trip, we found a spit of rotisserie chickens twirling out on the street. I swerved into the parking spot right in front. Boy was it worth it.

The other two had funny endings at least. For the parts, we tried a few shops - some didn't exist any more, some were closed, then there was the last place.

Painted across the front with repuestos (auto parts) and with Toyota right in the middle, I stepped inside. "No, we don't sell parts," the lady told me. Hmm, it's right on the front. "Yes we know. But we don't sell parts. You can try the central market." That wasn't a complete loss, since that's where we found the chicken - but zero parts. Strikeout.

There was an aisle in that market that was stand after stand, each with its own weathered old lady selling dozens of types of grain in bulk. We asked one if she had more kinds of quinoa than just white. We got a real look from her with a scoff that told us we shouldn't have asked. We asked where we could find some of the more adventurous quinoas, she gestured carelessly in one direction..."the street. the quinoa street." Ok, thanks!

Back in the van, we tried to get a car wash, here in the town that takes its car washes more seriously than probably anywhere else in the world. The town survives on its heavy influx of tourists, and those tourists see what they came to see in old Toyota 4x4's, and those Toyotas have a hard life of sand and salt. The wash bays were lined up out the driveway with those trusty old trucks, each one taking the better part of an hour. To finish it off, the wash attendants douse the undercarriage in WD-40 to ward off the next round of salt.

Those lines were too long for us, so we moved on to the gas station.

Anywhere else, this is a pretty simple task. But, here in Bolivia, there are two gas prices: one for locals, and one for foreigners. The latter is about 3x the former, and higher than even Chile's tax-boosted price.

But there's a workaround! At certain stations, in certain places, the attendants are willing to bend the law, meet you in the middle, and pocket the difference themselves. It was in Uyuni that we learned the right moves for this dance.

The first station we tried was said to have been flexible in that way, but when we pulled up, the attendant reflexively planted his finger on a memo taped to the pump declaring the fixed foreigner price. We tried another station, where the man was more friendly but just as unyielding, recommending we try the first place again. When we did that, a policeman walked out from the station office, ostensibly to chat with the attendant but more likely to show us that he was watching. It seems he's posted there explicitly for that purpose - to enforce the law at a gas station. Sad.

There was one more station to try, and that showed us the ways of the force. This was a dirty, unbranded station, likely the kind rumored to sell watered-down gas. We pulled up to the pump anyway, and the attendant asked, "Necesita una factura?" - "need a receipt?" So that was the game. Nope, don't need one. She offered 7 bolivianos per liter, we counter-offered 6, and we had a deal. She sold us gas at the local price of 3.7 and pocketed the difference, and we saved about $20. Win-win.

With that, we were on our way to the Chilean border. It was bright blue skies, a great road, and no one else on it. Close to the border we drove through some strange rock formations in the aptly named Valle de las Rocas.

Of all border crossings so far, this was the most-involved. Customs and Agriculture did a joint search of the car, actually searching the car instead of just accepting our offerings of fresh food. Then came the questions - not official ones, but "how long have you been doing this?," "where have you been?," "how much did you pay for the van?," and "you're not driving it to America?" They were just bored, far from everything, and curious. Funny enough, as we went to leave, customs gave us a "just so you know...you're not actually allowed to be outside Chile with this van." So this was one of the infamous border guards who enforced his own version of the rules! It wasn't a threat to give us any trouble, so we politely showed him our paperwork and explained that yes, we had been allowed to leave not just once but three times. Hopefully that makes life easier for the next traveler to find themselves here!

Safely across the last land border crossing of our trip, and on some very well-kept roads, we hauled south with the sunset. It took us about 4 hours to make it to San Pedro, the center of tourism in the north. All of that driving was through the Atacama desert, without much to look at until the sky turned a beautiful glowing red at sunset. We stopped at the town of Chiu Chiu so I could get a picture in a series I've been adding to for years. When I was young, there was a tiny burger restaurant by my house called the Choo Choo grill, with great burgers and only enough seating for about 12 people, in a converted old railway station. I've been taking pictures with their shirt for years around the world, and couldn't miss a town by that name.

We arrived in San Pedro pretty late. The last hour of drive had been pretty slow. Earlier in the day, we had descended from Bolivia to Calama, and the climb from Calama to San Pedro made almost all of that elevation back, going from about 6,000 feet to 12,000 feet in about 60 miles.

Driving into San Pedro we quickly got the impression this was a weird place. We had driven on impeccably paved roads for the last hour or so, but at the town boundary those dropped off and left us on choppy dirt and rocks through the center. There were tourists everywhere, walking on the street since there was no room for sidewalks between the buildings.

There was a strip of about 10 little food stands lined up near the center, and we parked there for a bite of Peruvian food. Despite being a small town, it didn't have many options for van camping, and plenty of alerts to theft and breakins. So, we picked a brightly-lit spot between a cemetery and the fire station, within sight of the town center but not directly next to anyone else. Tired from an 8-hour day of driving, we called it a night around 10.

It was getting tougher to set up camp - with the end of the trip so close, we had pretty much given up on keeping everything in its place!

At 1:30, we woke up suddenly to pounding on the passenger side of the van. It took me a minute to orient myself, as the pounding stopped, then started again. I shouted, "What do you want?" There was a pause, and then a voice outside asked if we spoke Spanish. I responded that we did, and what did they want? We heard some shuffling then peeled back the curtains to see a teenager riding away on a bike. It looks like we had just avoided a breakin. We managed to go back to sleep, but it looks like this was just part of the San Pedro experience.

We woke up the next day without much of a sense of purpose. The thing I had been most excited about here was a tour of the ALMA observatory, the largest in the world, but we had missed that by a day. Kendall arranged for a backyard astronomy tour for that night, and then we drove to an oasis by a village nearby to make breakfast. Within the oasis was a quarry of volcanic rock that was the building block for most of the buildings in the area. Light, sturdy, and bright white, liparita rings like a bell when you strike it.

We went souvenir shopping in that little village and were swarmed by kids dressed in halloween costumes for a book fair. Stephen King was the top author.

We came back to town to wander and see the sights, like the centuries-old colonial church in the center with a roof made of cactus.

In the evening, we sat out on an outlook over the Valley of the Dead. The view was phenomenal, but the sunset itself turned out pretty ordinary.

As it got dark, we made our way to the astronomy show that Kendall had arranged. Billed as the Big Bang Tour, it was mostly a demonstration of night photography techniques by an amateur astronomer and photographer. Kendall and I were the first to arrive and were greeted, as pretty much everywhere, by the local dogs. One was normal and friendly, but the other one had something wrong with it, and was biting everything - the tires, us, the other dog, itself. So while Kendall got ready I played canine politics - while, and only while, I petted the dalmatian, he would ward off the crazy one. As more guests came in, each was at first happy to see these playful dogs and then quickly learned to watch their fingers. Eventually the terrier just sat in the corner and chewed on his own leg.

In any case, once the Big Bang Tour began, we got a powerpoint presentation about astronomy and then went out to a circle of chairs with some lit-up props, a bar with drinks, and amateur telescopes. We had a few minutes before moonrise, and he showed off identification of some Southern Hemisphere constellations. With its high altitude, low humidity, low temperature, and low population, San Pedro is among the best places in the world to stargaze. Much of the "tour" was just time lapse photography of the guests in turn, and ours came out pretty great!

This was at the guide's house, and he kindly let us camp in the yard next door, away from town. It was a quiet, calm night.

In the morning, we drove a loop through the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon). It was dramatic, but somewhat underwhelming after the sights of the three days in Uyuni.

From there, it was down the hill to Calama and then a beeline straight to Santiago.

Not much to talk about there. It was among the most boring terrain you can imagine driving through, for about 16 hours. We stopped for one sight: the Hand of the Desert, a stone sculpture in the middle of nowhere.

For most of the ride, it was just us, trucks, and huge mining equipment that blocked both lanes of the road, slowing us to 20mph and forcing oncoming traffic into the shoulder.

We stopped for our last night of camping in beach town Bahia Inglesa. A friend we had met months before in Santiago recommended it as a clean, quiet beach, friendly to campers, with a tidal pool "full of critters" in the morning. We searched around town for decent-looking food but found nothing, so made the most of it with a feast of frozen burgers and vegetables from the town's grocery store.

It was a beautiful view to wake up to. We walked down the beach around 7am, before anyone else was up, besides the town dogs. They courteously guided us down the beach until they realized we were no good at finding food in the tidal pools.

As we came back to the van, we saw the group of 4 teens who had drunkenly driven their car onto the beach for a late-night party regretting at least one of those decisions. They were stuck in the sand and trying furiously to dig the car out. I helped give them a little push, which was enough to get them moving on the sand and then high-sided on the concrete walkway at the beach's edge. We did what we could to help and then moved along, pretty sure that old Pops would be coming along for his car soon enough.

We arrived into Santiago that night, Thursday, April 25th - three days ahead of our original plan. We parked outside of town to gather all of our bags, then made our way into the city center to move out of the van and into the AirBnB. It was a huge relief to have made it here without any delays or problems.

Once, Potosi was a center of the world, while ts silver deposits made Spain wildly rich. Today, thousands of miners work the same mines in much the same conditions as hundreds of years ago.

Potosi was our first destination since Buenos Aires, and what had brought us all the way across the desert of Northern Argentina to the border at La Quiaca.

For being a fairly remote town, La Quiaca had a lot of character. Goofy statues and art were everywhere, and the town crept right up on top of the border post itself. There was almost no line of demarcation between the two countries beyond some signage. Above the border post ran an elevated walkway, with old ladies pushing carts down it at speed, hustling in both directions to sell their goods.

We had to prepare more for this border crossing than any other, since Bolivia not only requires a visa, but a laundry list of supporting documents to get said visa. Luckily, Kendall was on top of her game from the start, and brought down one of the hardest things to come by: crisp, untainted US dollar bills to pay the hefty $160 visa fees.

We arrived in the middle of the day, first stopping on the Argentine side to dump as much cash as we could for gas. The town also reminded us just how far we had driven in those 14 days since leaving Ushuaia: 3200 miles!

The border station was more chaotic than any border we'd seen yet, if simply for the fact it wasn't as remote and tourist-centered as those in Patagonia. There were no clear signs telling us where to go or whom to see. Turns out that wasn't a problem, since the nicest people you can imagine all worked here.

We pulled up and parked next to some trucks, and a soldier came up and told us to move up right in front of the offices. We tried one office for migration, and the lady walked us over to another window that was marked for customs instead. That lady discovered we didn't yet have our Bolivian visa and walked us all the way to the Bolivian side, cutting us past a long line, helping us with our paperwork, and staying there until we were done. A soldier in the visa office helped us too, even offering us his pen (it's a stupid thing, but pens are impossible to find at these posts). Then, we returned to the Argentine side and another soldier approached us asking if we could use any help. We turned in a piece of paper with a friendly customs agent, and he came and found us 5 minutes later across the compound to give the paper back, saying we'd need it further on when crossing out of Bolivia. That was the most impressive.

In short, after an hour of zigzagging across this compound, we were clear to drive through! We were in Bolivia. It was crowded and chaotic. We tried to get SIM cards for mobile data, but the spot was on its ubiquitous 2-hour lunch break, so we scooted.

Leaving the city, we hit a tollbooth followed by a police checkpoint. iOverlander reviews had warned us that they'd pressure us for bribes, but it seems that checkpoint had gotten the message from previous tourists, or we just got lucky.

The road became rural fast. The road quality was pretty good, but the van lost some power at this high altitude, something which was even more evident with the constant twists and turns.

It took us about 4 hours to reach Potosi, getting in just after sunset. From a distance, the first thing we saw was the Cerro Rico, glowing with hundreds of industrial lamps. The Cerro, literally "rich mountain," was the reason for Potosi's existence. It was home to one of the world's largest silver deposits. When the Spanish discovered it in the 1500's, it alone transformed the empire into one of great wealth. Buenos Aires was established simply as a port to haul this mountain's silver out to sea.

We drove around the mountain, and the sporadic traffic of buses and cars turned into convoys of heavy equipment. We descended the steep, winding roads into the city, in the most chaotic traffic we had seen yet. Our map guidance was wildly off, taking us down battered roads of rocks and dirt instead of staying on the paved throughway.

Once we were down in town, things didn't get much easier. Our first stop was an auto parts store, looking for a replacement for our back gate latch. The store was said to "have it all" on iOverlander, but they didn't have this. The streets were winding and unpredictable, often only a foot wider than the van itself, and packed with pedestrians. It was slow going: a drive predicted for 5 minutes across town to the hostel took over 30. The smog produced by this fleet of old diesel burners was overpowering. When we arrived to the hostel, we were lucky enough to wrangle street parking right outside, with the help of the owner, but that took us about an hour to make happen.

The hostel was a colorful place, with stairs ascending around a 4-story courtyard. A rooftop terrace had a panoramic view of the city and the mountain.

By the time we got a room, we were exhausted, but went out again for some "real Italian pizza" nearby that Kendall said was pretty good. On the way, we saw the town center, with its lit-up reminders of the town's fabulously wealthy past.

Finally, we arranged our tour for the next morning.

That tour is the reason to visit Potosi. The mines of Cerro Rico are still heavily worked, but rather than for colonial slavemasters, small groups of miners negotiate terms with a set of overarching cooperatives. As anywhere, the cooperatives make out pretty well, but now the miners can too, taking home most of the proceeds of their work. A few companies run by former miners run tours for gringoes like us.

In the morning, the tour company picked us up. We got dressed in a jumpsuit, helmet, and headlamp, and headed to a miner's supply store. Part of the arrangement is that we pay not only the tour company, but also buy gifts for the miners themselves, who, being self-employed, otherwise have to purchase all their supplies themselves. The menu was:

• Soft drinks, to quench thirst during the day and as a mixer afterwards;
• Straight 98% ABV ethanol, for drinking;
• Dynamite kits with TNT, fuse, and detonator, nicknamed a completo (like the hot dog)

Everything was only a few dollars, so as a group we bought several of each. Then they let us walk around for a while, looking like complete weirdos at a farmer's market in mining gear.

They drove us up to the mine's entrance, gave a brief explanation, and waited for the mine carts racing in and out on the rails. Once there was a gap, we hustled in, crouch-running between pockets carved in the walls where we could let the carts shoot by.

It was only one track of rail; when two carts were on a collision course, the empty one stopped, and its crew of two or three tipped it over off the tracks. It hit the ground with a boom that reverberated along the walls. Other times, the boom was a dynamite blast somewhere nearby. We were visiting a work site that was very much active, with very much third-world safety standards. That first mine shaft we were in was dug in the 1700's. Before entering, they had told us that cave-ins were still common. When someone asked if a tour group had even been killed or caved-in, they said they'd tell us after the tour was over.

As we walked through, we spotted dynamite ready to be lit just waiting in the walls.

No smoking, folks!

We watched a crew load ore from the level above down into a cart to haul out. Each time we met a crew, our tour guide asked them their ages and how long they've been working there. All of them started in their teenage years, and some still were teenagers.

The further we went down, the tighter the crawlspaces became, until we were crouched and still touching the wall on all four sides. Once, we squeezed through a hole on our stomachs, rotated onto our backs, and hoisted ourselves up through another hole. Ladders were missing rungs, deep pits had no guardrails or warning signs. To ward off the dust, we wore handkerchiefs. 16,000 feet above sea level and in 80-degree heat, it was a sweaty workout.

Don't slip!

The deepest point of the tour was a worksite of two miners that our tour guide knew, from his 17 years working in the mountain. It was a spot where they had the rights to work a vein of silver ore. Bit by bit, they blasted their way deeper down, hauling up the ore in buckets by hand. By now, that shaft is 30-40 feet deep. Each day, when they show up to work, they "spider monkey" their way down it, without a ladder or any guard against falling. At the end of the day, they spider right back up.

The mine was rich in silver, but also in tin, sulfur, and other minerals.

Throughout, there were shrines to two conflicting figures: Mother Mary, and El Tio (the uncle). You know the first, but the second is the devil and the owner, or patron, of the mine. Displease El Tio and you might find yourself in a cave-in. Fortunately, El Tio could be easily pleased by drinking alcohol and sharing some with the ground.

Both flavors of shrine were still colorfully decorated from Carnival, and scattered with empty beer cans and ethanol bottles.

After only two hours down in the mine, we were relieved to see to see the light at the end of the tunnel, then come out to breathe fresh air. This was a grueling daily life for the miners, who often worked 10-12 hour days.

Back in Potosi, we cleaned up, had another meal, and hit the road to Uyuni. We had already arranged a tour to begin the next morning, and couldn't miss it.

Northern Argentina has a different feel from the south: more like the American Southwest than Texas.

We hopped off the ferry from Uruguay, picked up our lonely van from its parking, and set out in the calm middle of a sunny Sunday.

We had one stop to make on the way out of town: the Feria de Mataderos, a weekly street market that's known for flashy shows of horsemanship by gaucho cowboys.

Unfortunately, they didn't show up this time, but it was still a great find, with great street food and lots of handmade crafts for souvenirs.

We made some headway out of town afterwards, stopping of course among a fleet of trucks. This was our life now.

In the morning, we drove through a brief but intense thunderstorm, with high winds pushing us around the road and the windshield wipers unable to keep up. Most cars pulled to the side to wait things out, but the trucks kept on driving, and we knew whose team we were on!

We really were just moving to the Bolivian border as quickly as we could, but that was 18 hours of driving and we had to have some kind of intermediate goal. So we found a trio of little towns aside Cordoba, Argentina's second-biggest city, to entertain us.

The first was Alta Gracia, notable only for being on the route to the other two and also the childhood home of Che Guevara, the revolutionary. We thought we'd stop in, but the museum had other ideas.

We showed up within their opening hours, to see two signs that read (translated):

Monday: 9am to 6:30pm

Tuesday - Sunday: 9am to 6:30pm

Hm. Weird. This was Monday, and the gates were locked, but we could see the door open with the staff sipping mate inside. We joined a confused group of 4 Spaniards loitering outside, waiting for this misunderstanding to resolve itself.

Apparently the misunderstanding is that we would expect the place to be open when it said it would! First, a man from the city public works came out, and then one of the lady staffers, to tell us that of course they're closed, they're closed every Monday. When we pointed to the sign, she said "yes, we know it says that. Sorry." I suggested that maybe they should change the sign or their hours online, and she just shrugged and went back in to her mate. What a good example of communism though! Che would be proud.

In that same town was an odd, creepy statue of Gollum earning a medical degree, or something.

2019-04-1515-32-29-iphone se-img3630.jpg

So, we moved on. We toured through and had lunch in Villa General Belgrano, home of the "largest Oktoberfest outside of Germany," another dubious superlative. It was a faux-German town that belonged more in Disney world, with a centerpiece restaurant being Fritz y Franz. It was entertaining at least. Instead of an Argentine attempt at German food, which would probably be doubly forgettable, we went with Armenian instead.

The sign says it all

The third stop was La Cumbrecita, another town that started as a German colony but was now a manufactured tourist site and a poor imitation at that. I had been really excited to see this place, but this was more of a theme park. It was pedestrian-only during the day, and on entrance you're handed a strip map with the sights you see, in a prescribed circuit, circled on the map. One was a truly unremarkable "waterfall" about 10 feet tall. Another was a slightly green pool of water marketed as a laguna. The lap took us about 2 hours.

Unimpressed

There's a reason this is their marketing photo

But we added to the excitement by not planning out our gas stops well enough, and carefully made our way back down the hill from remote Cumbrecita with the gas light on. We made it, and headed on north, seeing how far we could get towards Bolivia.

Our range got cut short a little bit when the engine thermometer started twitching - first sporadically, then violently, then fell to "cold." Here we go again!

We pulled in at a gas station and had a look. The wire leading out of the thermometer had broken, and it didn't look like too hard of a fix. While we were at it, we checked our coolant level, realized it needed a top-up, and discovered that in Argentina, the color of coolant doesn't correspond to its type; it's more of an expression of personality it seems.

We stopped in at the next town, General Guemes, where there was a well-rated mechanic listed on iOverlander, only by his name, Miguel. At his address, there was a shop; we went in, looking for Miguel; sure, sure he's here.

He wasn't, they were just being enterprising.

But it was a quick and easy fix. Seeing us gringoes appear, they called up their friend from across town. He was a big, square dude who hamfisted his way through the soldering, managing to break what good parts were left along the way. But, after a few minutes of work, the wire was hooked back up and the thermometer was back in touch with reality. He said we didn't owe him anything, so we paid him a tip and went on our way.

The shop

Installing the macgyvered part

While we were waiting for him to show up, Kendall quickly boiled some water so we could enjoy our first homemade mate on the way out of town. It was pretty great! Big caffeine kick.

Mate with my mate

Ever since leaving Buenos Aires, we had been in indecision about our route. In the far north, there was a direct route, and a scenic one that takes 3 hours longer. It was about that time that we had to make the choice, and we took the direct way. We had had just about enough driving.

But the consolation prize was a series of towns in the north known for their scenery. By that point, it was already dark and we wouldn't be able to see anything, so we stopped in the first one for the night: Purmamarca.

We woke up at sunrise to the striking view of the Seven-Colored Mountain. We made a short hike to an outlook: first taking a difficult scramble, giving up, then realizing the actual trail was only 100 feet away and trivially easy. We had a couple of stray dogs that joined in to keep us company. The rocks there glowed a beautiful red in the sunrise. There's no filter on any of these photos (or any on this whole blog).

See us?

Not the way up

This is the way up

tour guide pups

We drove a short circuit to see the rest, then considered our touristing complete, and got back on the road.

This part of the country looked more like Arizona or Utah than any we had seen yet. Beautiful rock formations and little of anything green followed us on the 3 hours we still had left to the Bolivian border.

"The Devil's Spine"

This is a short one. We had anticipated that Uruguay would be the hidden gem of South America. it was a nice enough place, and maybe we were just not in the right state to enjoy it, but it ended up being a forgettable visit.

It was a 1-hour ferry ride from Buenos Aires across the water to Colonia del Sacramento. There are different ferry options: you can take this shorter, cheaper leg and finish the route to Montevideo by bus, or you can go directly by water between the capitals, saving a few hours but at twice the cost. Since we wanted to see Colonia anyway, we booked one of each.

The mob disembarking

We arrived in Colonia in the early afternoon. It's a quiet former colonial outpost now dedicated to Argentine summer tourism. We strolled 20 minutes down cobblestone streets to reach the peninsula that's home to the city's old town. We climbed an old lighthouse that somehow had the perfect lighting to give our photos a professional touch. Clustered in those old streets was an outdoor museum with a whole blue whale skeleton.

Colonia's drawbridge

Whale skeleton

We had a meal down on the water and were impressed, hoping the food would be this good for the rest of our stay in Uruguay.

We got a half-pound of ice cream and headed back to the bus station. It was a quiet 3-hour ride the rest of the way to Montevideo.

Once we arrived, we caught a cab from the bus station to our apartment. We were surprised how European the process was - no "taxi?? taxi!!!" encounters - just swept up in the next one at the stand. Weirdly, we were separated from the driver by a thick plate of steel and bulletproof glass - apparently a fixture of all cabs in the city.

For dinner, we found an Armenian shwarma joint that was so good we went back for seconds the next day. The staff was fun and friendly, too, and fluent in American-accent English.

After dinner, we went to a tango dancing night, but Kendall didn't want to dance! We had no idea what we were doing, but looking around, we weren't alone. There were a few pros, but lots of older folks that were happy just shuffling and drinking.

It was a rough night. We thought we liked the apartment since it was so spacious - but it opened directly onto the street, and it was a street that apparently every city bus rumbled down, late into the night and early in the morning. One went by at least once a minute, 4 feet from the door, shaking the floor.

In the morning, we got breakfast at the mercado central. Uruguay having a lot in common with Argentina, breakfast, like all other meals, mostly consists of meat, maybe with some decorations. I got a piece of stuffed chicken right off the grill, and Kendall found some creative empanadas.

Turns out that with this being a weekend we had missed the top-rated gaucho museum, so we settled for the other point of interest: Museo Andes 1972, memorializing the crash of that year. The Uruguayan rugby team had gone down in the Andes and survived for 72 days before being rescued. Mostly around the ages fof 18 and 19, the group had notably resorted to cannibalism to survive in a mountain valley with nothing else and no supplies. It was a thought-provoking exhibit, with a strange addition of superstition, including pieces about the contributions of psychics to the search effort (notably, with incorrect information) and the implications of the number 13.

We walked on, trying to explore the city in a single day. We did it - there were only a couple of parks along the way. We saw street signs sponsored by Netflix, some novel architecture, and a statue celebrating the role of gauchos in the independence movement. We took a nap on the waterfront, got that amazing shwarma again, and bought tickets for a show that evening.

It was La Cumparsita at the Teatro Solis, a national landmark. Without much information about the show, we believed it to be a tango show, which seemed like a good way to spend the evening. Kendall ended up not feeling very well, so I went on my own. It was not a tango show after all, but a comedy, and I understood almost none of it. Luckily, it was only an hour long, so pretty soon I was back home in our bus lane.

Not a tango.

The next day, we made a quick exit by ferry back to Buenos Aires. The checkin process was annoying and reminded us we weren't back home yet - despite buying tickets online, we had to wait in another hour-long line just to turn our online tickets into real tickets. What's the point?

The ferry we boarded claimed to be the "fastest boat in the world." It was pretty quick, but that seems like a claim too bold to be true. We also had to wear shoe covers the whole time on the boat, like we were painting the place. We thought it might be for customs/agriculture purposes - but nope, it was just to protect the already-aging carpet. After the safety video, ads played on loop for the "Ultra Exclusive" Trump Tower nearby, and then it all made sense.

We had a few days to spend in Buenos Aires, to take a breath before another long haul to Bolivia.

The first day we spent hopping from mechanic to mechanic, looking for someone to diagnose our alternator issue. Since there's no real thing as a "general mechanic" here, we looked on iOverlander for a mecanico de electricidad, but struck out. So, we used Google reviews instead.

The first mechanic was nice enough, and had a nice, clean shop with vintage vehicles inside, and enough overhead clearance to bring the van in. But he wasn't too interested in actually doing work on it, or at all, taking a 4-hour long lunch break and mostly talking about how his son had just bought a van and wanted to build it out like ours.

At least he pointed us to a battery shop, which evaluated our battery honestly and let us know that it was like-new and didn't need replacement. Both told us our alternator was fine, but we knew that wasn't true.

So we drove around from well-rated shop to shop and eventually settled at a place called Norbert with an eponymous owner. It had the vibe of an honest, professional place, but Norbert's son told us they were too swamped in work to take a look at it for a couple of days. When I pressed, saying we didn't have much time, he suggested taking it over to an affiliated shop for the dirty work of disassembly, letting Norbert focus on just the alternator repair itself. That sounded fine to us, so we visited the other shop, arranged for the repair the next day, parked the van in their garage, and headed downtown van-free.

We arranged for an Airbnb while in the Uber, with something like 1% battery life left on both of our phones. It took a while to actually get settled in the unit, but it was nice to be right in the middle of downtown with all the conveniences of an apartment.

In the morning, we got a crafty breakfast and met a free walking tour group. It was the best tour of the trip - an interesting, engaging guide walked us through the city for 5 hours, telling us plenty more about the city's history and the culture as we went.

As we started, mobs of schoolkids in lab coats descended from the most fashionable schoolbuses we've ever seen, to gather in the elegant national theater for some kind of "grow up and do useful things" motivational event.

Among the most interesting parts of the tour was his commentary on Argentine politics and the economy. His description of the course of recent events in the country sounded awfully similar to problems in the US now, especially the rhetoric and special interests of the current administration. In short, though, while Buenos was a pleasant enough place, with the feeling of a somewhat grittier first world, it's far from stable. Locals trust the dollar more than the peso, which has devalued at a rate something like 50% for several years in a row. The exchange rate fluctuates wildly against foreign currencies, which meant, for us, it was "like a 50% discount...on everything," when compared to only one year prior. Given this instability, mortgages are not common, and big-ticket items are paid for with USD. The national debt is skyrocketing, and after past defaults on debt, its interest rate being charged to the government is now something like 60%.

Recognizing a counterfeit bill

One theme of the tour was that of the oligarchy, a set of a couple-dozen families who controlled the country from the mid-1800's on. Among the richest, as anywhere, there was a contest to see who could build the most elaborate mansions and live the most extravagantly. One built the house (below) now used as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs guest reception. She had a son, and that son was dating the daughter of a less-prestigous family. The matron was displeased, so she sent that son off to Europe on a mission and to also forget about the girl. Being a playboy, he did, but the scorned daughter didn't forget it. That daughter grew up to be quite wealthy herself, and so when she learned that the matron had commissioned a cathedral so as to decorate the skyline with her legacy, she bought the plot next door and put up an awfully ugly apartment block, just to block the matron's view. Those buildings still stand, and the cross-street there is named in the daughter's honor.

Family mansion

Building-of-spite on the left

We ended our tour in the extravagant Recoleta cemetery, resting place of Buenos Aires' rich and famous, with a wild story about the body of national celebrity and hero Eva Peron. After her death, her body was caught up in the country's struggle between socialism and authoritarianism, and the authoritarians in power sought to prevent her from becoming a focus of popular resistance. Over the decades, her body was enbalmed by the same man who preserved Lenin's body, then kept in a moving van, an officer's basement, overseas, as a trophy in a general's office, and finally buried deep below this cemetery, fortified underground to prevent another exhumation.

Entrance

Eva's grave markers on a family's mausoleum

After the tour, we got a touristy, boring lunch nearby, but got to visit a bookstore that was converted from an old theater.

For dinner, we walked halfway across town to San Telmo, a 'bohemian' district, for some great tacos. The sky opened up as we finished, and we sprinted through the rain for some ice cream. That was about the time we gave up on Uber, which had been failing us pretty badly throughout the trip. From that point on, we just caught cabs, which were faster, cheaper, and generally less weird.

Night walk on the avenue

We started the next day picking up the van. We were really happy to see this shop act professionally - they started on work before we arrived, kept at it until they were finished, and didn't play any games. The electricians had found some worn-out contacts inside the alternator and replaced them. We were really happy that this hadn't become another intractable issue, too - a one-day fix seemed almost too good to be true after the engine problems. We crawled our way through downtown traffic, disrupted by a protest, and parked the van downtown.

We were just in time to see a weekly event, the march of the mothers of the disappeared. Even now, decades after the dictatorship of the 1980's, a group of mothers and their supporters march downtown to memorialize their children who disappeared as political dissidents. They slowly walk in a circle, fronted by a banner, while they read out the names of everyone on the list. It seems to have become an ongoing theme, as the acquaintances of more recent victims of police violence have joined in.

Marching mothers

A national palace

A statue holding a tree

We visited a museum celebrating a strange, obscure man named Xul Solar - while that museum tried to make him out to be a visionary, he was likely just off his rocker. We found a tiny Japanese restaurant for dinner which had some fantastic brochettes and even better green tea ice cream that we wish we knew the recipe. We sat at the bar, across from a couple of polite but clueless Americans that were just fun to watch.

The next morning, we packed up and headed to the port. We had decided to cut Iguazu Falls out of our itinerary to save about 16 hours of driving and a lot of hustle, and that gave us the time to hop across the bay to see Uruguay. We left the van parked downtown in Buenos and caught the ferry around noon.

(There was nowhere it made sense to include this....but look, it's a normal house on top of an apartment tower! Maybe it's the alternative plot of Up)

For a few days, we were a trucker couple.

We were making arrangements to sell the van in Santiago not long after the end of the month, and suddenly and surprisingly were now on a strict timeline. To give ourselves more time to see interesting things, we aimed to sprint the 2,000 miles from Ushuaia to Buenos Aires in only 4 days.

And, to make it more interesting, all kinds of warning lights flashed across the dashboard not long after we started.

We backtracked along the same road and ferry we had taken to Ushuaia. Since we had made a late start, we stopped in Rio Grande on the coast. There was a very well-reviewed meat buffet there in town that we had missed on the way in, so we weren't going to miss it on the way out.

Wow, was it worth the stop. It was the Parrilla El Tronco, a tenedor libre (literally, free fork), like a buffet you would know from back home, but so much better. You pay, like normal, for a buffet, and get the usual cold bar and salad bar. But, instead of picking lukewarm chicken out of a tray like a Golden Corral, you ask the grill-man (parillador) for the cuts of meat you'd like, and how you'd like them cooked. A minute later, you've got them. And this being Argentinian ranch country, it's the best meat you've had in your life.

We did a few laps at the grill. I have not had such good ribs before or since.

Filled up there, we set up camp at a gas station on the beach. In the morning, we steered hard into 50 mph winds sweeping along the unprotected highway, with nothing but wide-open grazing lands on both sides. We crossed into Chile and then right back out, taking the same ferry we had taken only 3 days before, in the other direction.

Gross.

To save on time, we chowed in the van: tuna for meal after meal.

Those were some long days and nights.

There was one sight to see on the way, though, something Kendall had been looking forward to for a long time. Halfway up the coast, the Peninsula Valdes is home to a sight unique in the world that happens only during the month of April. Orcas deliberately beach themselves at high tide, hunting the sea lions basking on the shore. It was remote enough that we wouldn't be here for any other reason, and a happy side-effect of our travel delays that we were here in the right month.

The closest town to the peninsula is Puerto Madryn, and we pulled in there on the night of 5 April. We expected a quiet little hamlet, but got a full-blown city, glowing on the horizon with apartment towers, highways, supermarkets, and traffic. Late at night, we went for some of the only food still open: Sushi Wok. Man, was that a mistake.

We did park in a pretty great spot, though. A lot right on the beach and pinned in between two police stations had been called out on iOverlander, and it was full of the jankiest old camper vans, buses, and trucks we'd seen yet. Actually, the whole city was! For being a city neither of us had heard of more than a few days ago, it was a surprisingly interesting place.

While we ate our awful sushi wok at 11pm, we watched a group of kids rehearse for a dance in traditional costume.

The plan had been to camp out that night right on the peninsula, wake up to the nature channel right in front of us, and then move on. But, with the electrical problems the van was having, we were too concerned about being stranded out on the remote peninsula, outside of cell signal or towing range. It was a 3-hour drive one-way from the city to the beach where the orcas appeared.

It had been a decision: take the risk that the van will make it, or take the risk of losing a day trying to fix it in Puerto Madryn? In the US, you might be able to count on bringing a problem to a mechanic in the morning and leaving with a solid vehicle in the afternoon, but we knew that's not how things worked here. Buenos Aires was still 10 hours of driving away, and we had no idea if something was about to give out on us. Three different warning lights were on, at first sporadically and then constantly: oil level, coolant, and battery. We could occasionally smell an ionizing odor like after lightning, or like an electric train set.

So, we took our time and scouted for mechanics in the morning. It was a Saturday, so we knew we'd only have a couple of hours. We tried one from iOverlander, but that shop didn't seem to exist anymore, so we started plying Google.

We found a shop that seemed honest enough. A kid that couldn't have been over 17 came out, popped the engine open, and ran some tests to confirm what we suspected: our alternator wasn't doing its job very well. But, the current was strong enough to give us the power we needed...as long as the headlights stayed off. In a country where the only thing the police are looking for is that your headlights are on...this could be difficult! But it gave us the faith that we could make it to Buenos.

How could Kendall get out to the beach, then? We went from rental car company to company looking for one available, but some had taken the day off and others had strange terms. We ended up booking one from a hostel instead. I planted myself at a hotel to recover from last night's Sushi wok, and Kendall headed out to a hostel on the Peninsula.

She spent the night out there to be ready for high tide at 9:30am - but once she arrived at the beach in the morning, she discovered why she was on her own. The time was actually 12:30pm, so she waited it out. She met a crowd of foreigners who gradually appeared to watch the same thing, learning that the orcas hadn't been around for a whole week. One group from Japan had been visiting for 8 years and had only seen the event a handful of times. Chances weren't looking good. High tide came and went, with lazy sea lions waiting on the beach and no sign of orcas. After all it had taken to get there, she decided to wait another hour before leaving.

And it's a good thing she did. Right after 1pm, people called out Orca fins off shore, circling closer to the beach. Kendall snapped away with her zoom lens. (Kendall should write this part)

Victoriously lucky and happy, Kendall made her way back to town. We hopped in the van and kept on going north. After two more overnights at gas stations, we found ourselves on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

We went to Ushuaia because we thought we had to, but it ended up being a highlight of the trip.

When we woke up in Cerro Sombrero, we got our first April Fools' joke: our phones were weirdly on different times and thought we were in different places. Out here though, does it really matter what time it is?

Driving into Ushuaia we saw the first of many signs accusing the country's president...of being a cat. "Macri gato" seems much tamer than the political dialogue we're used to back home, but it's a common phrase to call the man corrupt. Apparently "gato" has its roots in slang for "prostitute."

We arrived in a cloudy Ushuaia before sunset and parked at the tourist center, a cluster of little shacks selling boat tours. There's about 10 of them, all promising a half-day trip out to one of the islands in the channel. We were interested in the one that took a sailboat rather than a boring catamaran, and were hoping there would still be spots. Of course, this late in the season, there were, and we signed up. One shop even told us that the next day would be their last day at sea for the year.

Our first sight of Ushuaia

A long way from...everywhere

We set up at the friendly familiar gas station and cooked up some chow.

Yum.

In the morning, we headed to the dock, only to get word that "oh, we tried to call you... [sure you did], but the tour is cancelled due to high winds. Tomorrow?" Sure, tomorrow. We got our obligatory photos with the sign, though!

With a beautiful, sunny (if windy) day ahead of us, we thought it would be a great day for a hike. We asked at the tourist office and researched online, finding that most in the area were described as "muddy up to your knees," "filthy," but at least with "pretty good views." Not wanting any of that, we found one spot on iOverlander that was "beautiful" and not so bad.

Boy, were we wrong! 10 minutes in, we were hopping around muck in our sneakers. An hour in, we were wading, knee-deep at times, through a bog. We had set out thinking it would be an easy, flat trek to fill the day. Once we embraced the slog, we looked around, and it was hilarious. Across the open field of this bog, with the first hour of woods behind us, and the Laguna Verde an hour ahead of us, there were colorful spots of tourists everywhere, daintly hopping from rock to rock, trying to stay dry. It was impossible. Every single one went in. And, being a bog, it was sneaky! Spots that looked like firm ground collapsed on a touch, and steps that looked like a mudpit were only an inch or two deep. Trying to run through one mudpit, it devoured my shoe and I had to go back and dig it out.

Beautiful Fall Colors

Land of Muck

Soon enough, though, we had made it to the top. The laguna was gorgeous! We sat down for a snack and the view.

Look up there!

Just then, the wind really picked up, enough to make it hard to hold the phone to take pictures!

Being smarter than everyone else, of course, we decided we could follow a line on high ground to work our way around the bog. Then, like everyone else, we found our way right back into it.

Once we had gotten through the bog and onto the normal trail in the woods, we followed a river back down. The river had dozens of beaver dams on it, a mark of colonial experimentation in the early 1900's. Beavers had been deliberately introduced for trapping, but had (as invasive introductions always seem to) some side effects. Namely, the water had once been pure enough to drink in the city of Ushuaia, but thanks to the beavers had become too contaminated. It was only in 2018 that better water treatment facilities made the tap water potable again.

Beaver Dams

The "3-hour hike" came out to around 6 hours, but it was fun. Of course, when we got back to the trailhead, there was an opportunist peddling helado, helado!

We set up camp for the night right in the middle of town, on the water, in the tourist center parking lot. Not a bad spot! We filmed a tour of the van for some interested buyers, which was a fun way to think about the place we'd been living in a new light.

The camp spot

Behind the Scenes: the Camerawoman

Here more than anywhere yet, we saw graffiti, signs, and bumper stickers proclaiming that the Falkland Islands belong to Argentina. This would become a common theme of our time in the country.

Behind the Scenes: the Camerawoman

In the morning, we woke up to beautiful sun and calm seas. Our sailing trip was still on!

It started out a smooth trip on a flat sea, but once we were out of the protection of the harbor, it got choppier. The crew dropped the sails and switched to an engine to get us out to our island destination. We did some laps around a sea lion colony on the way.

Land Ho

We docked right up against the rocks and did a short tour of this island, "Isla H," so named because of its shape. It was two islands not too long ago, but due to the slow current in between them, sediment slowly built up to form a bridge. Each time the high tide washed over, it brought a little more.

Near that land bridge, there was the site of an old indigenous cooking spot. Still visible was a time capsule of sorts, a stack of old shells and bones piled up as the scraps of hundreds of years of meals.

After the tour, we had coffee on the boat and sailed back to town. This direction was a little rougher - with the sails up, the boat was keeled over far enough to put the top of the deck in the water, with us hanging up high on the other side!

Ushuaia had been fun, and the last of our touristing for a while. We had a sprint to do up to the north! We hopped in the van before sunset, bound for the Chilean border.

Punta Arenas was the first big city we'd seen in a while. It's the Chilean gateway to Tierra del Fuego, set on the Straits of Magellan.

On the way out of Puerto Natales, we had our busted tire quickly and easily repaired at a gomeria across the street. We're getting familiar with this drill!

We stopped for lunch outside of town at a 5-star hotel built from a former slaughterhouse. The industry - meat and wool export - is what established Puerto Natales at the beginning of the last century. It was a scenic spot, and a decent meal, but somewhat overrated by our source. It's still fun to try out places that we can only really know about or get to by car, and put our van to work.

The fancy bar

Out front in the wind

Punta Arenas wasn't far away on an easy, paved highway.

Too much driving!

The flamingos are that way!

From Arenas, we visited Puerto del Hambre, the site of a 1500's Spanish colony that was wiped out by hunger, and a 1800's Chilean colony that almost met the same fate until it relocated to where Arenas is today. The Spanish colony met such a bitter end that no one else tried to colonize this globally-important shipping passage for the entire intervening 300 years. The Chileans only colonized it as part of their bid to extend their borders south before Argentina could do the same. They remind us of their territorial ambitions today with a monument at the end of the paved road, to the "geographical center of Chile," which is only such because they claim land all the way to the South Pole.

In Arenas, there's a shipbuilder who, alongside building modern fishing boats, spends his free time making life-size replicas of historical boats. To date, he's finished the Nao Victoria, a member of Magellan's fleet, the first to circumnavigate the globe; HMS Beagle, the ship upon which Darwin sailed the straits almost three centuries later; and the less-known Something Else, the tiny ship used by Chile to found its colony here with 22 volunteers. What was very cool about this place is that not only are the ships life-size and as realistic as he could make them, but we could go anywhere on the ship and do anything, including wheel the massive wooden rudders around. The creator himself was hard at work on a more-modest fishing boat right next door.

En guarde?

On the way out of town, to Tierra del Fuego, we drove through a ghost town that has something that most ghost towns don't: ghost ships, too, or what's left of them. A small town that's deserted except for a bureaucratic outpost, it has the rusted skeletons of ships abandoned there in the early 1900's: a steamer and a sailboat.

We made it across the border and a short ferry, and landed for the night in Cerro Sombrero, a mining town that is trying desperately to win some over the tourist crowds that otherwise just pass through to Argentina. They had a grand little camping spot, sparkling clean except for the French backpackers drying their stinky laundry on all the radiators. We're more grateful for the little things now. We made a dinner and ate it outside on the street.

We kept on driving that day after crossing the border with a couple hours of daylight left. We weren't too far from the Torres del Paine park and the campground where we hoped to stop for the night.

Chile had put up a strong showing with paved roads right at the border, but as soon as we were inland that facade fell off and we were back on gravel.

We made some photo stops, especially when the clouds parted and showed us a sunset right through the middle of the Torres. Beautiful.

The #vanlife really paid off here: instead of being corraled on and off the fleets of tour buses we saw at the park entrance, and having to hike or hitchhike around the park, we got to cruise right in. The few official campgrounds in the park are unfortunate and/or expensive, but there are a handful of "informal" spots marked out on iOverlander, and we picked one close to the base of the hike we planned the next day. It was the parking lot of the visitor center. Apparently based on the motivations of the night guard, it can either be free or $30/night to park there (technically not allowed either way). We rolled the dice and got "free." Sweet. There were a half-dozen campers already set up there, so we blended right in.

We started to make dinner when the water pump started making a funny noise - we had run our water tank dry! We had been so good about filling up, until today. So we did something that was pretty typical back home, but a first here: we made dinner and then just left the dishes out, to do the next day. That sounds pretty blase' until you realize that that fills up almost all the not-floor space in the van when the bed is set up. Cozy gets cozier! But we didn't mind too much, it would be a quick night anyway.

The weather forecast was great, so we were planning to hop right into the marquis event: the sunrise hike up to Mirador Torres. Just like Fitzroy, that would mean a 3:30AM wakeup. We were ready for sleep around 10, but took a look outside at the beautiful clear sky of stars, and the moonlit view of Torres, and exchanged some of that little sleep to play around with time-lapse photos of the sky.

(TBD: Kendall's photos)

We pried ourselves out of bed in the morning after only 3 hours of sleep, and set off on the hike. This one was different than Fitzroy: instead of varying slopes of "up", it was up-and-down even on the way up, which meant a similar elevation gain felt like more work. We also couldn't see the summit for most of the hike, instead hearing the lagoon's river rushing loudly in the dark in the canyon below. We also had very little company until just short of the peak - I think that this time, it might have been because we left later than we should have.

When we arrived, it was a little brighter than when we arrived at Fitzroy. There was a maze of a trail to actually get to the viewpoint, which we hustled over for about 10 minutes. All kinds of signs told us not to take the obvious shortcuts, but I think we should have taken the obvious shortcuts, obviously.

We were rewarded. We had time to settle in on a big rock before the rays of sun met the mountains. This wasn't as "convenient" a viewpoint as Fitzroy: sideways to the actual attraction, everyone is in everyone else's photos. This well-worn trail has ground the mighty rocks down to so much sand and dust, and as new arrivals trudge across it, they start miniature landslides onto those below, usually wiping out at least once. It was chilly, too, but we were ready this time, immediately layering up once we set our bags down.

The trek was once again worth it. The clear skies let the red light of sunrise play upon the rocks for almost five minutes. Small clouds formed and quickly dissipated as the morning breeze was lifted over the ridgeline.

We met some folks from DC there, who swapped photos with us. As the crowd dissipated like those clouds, we played around with our cameras in the light, and had a chance to step up onto a rock set like a stage over the lake:

Like before, we put off breakfast for a warmer spot down the hill. It got warm pretty quickly, and crowded, as the tour busloads and those more inclined for sleep started to ascend at daylight. Most of the trail we had climbed was a horse trail, so we shared it with Kendall's four-legged friends too. Most weren't carrying people, but Home Depot delivery payloads, bound for the trail camp under construction. This downclimb felt pretty long, especially since it wasn't all down! But it felt like a different experience, since now we could see the panorama and the glacial river we zig-zagged with for most of the way. We had counted 11 bridges on the way up, and counted them back on the way down.

Back at our van, we took care of chores, like washing our dishes from the night before with the little bit of bottled water we still had.

It was comfortably warm, quiet, and tranquil, and it was hard to resist a nap, but we had places to be! We set back off down the road through the park, indecisive about visiting other landmarks within the park. Not only were we exhausted and thus pretty indifferent, but without a full tank of gas and a long drive still ahead, we weren't sure we wanted to take chances.

We decided we had already seen enough glacier, and could see much of the rest of the park from the road on the way through. Kendall missed some, though, passing out within a couple minutes of setting off! It was a bumpy, badly-maintained road. We stopped in at a center that the park map had shown to have gas, but were only met with surprise and amusement by the park staff when we arrived. Why would they have gasoline in a remote national park? Ok, so on to town then!

The way to Puerto Natales was a couple of hours. A few kilometers outside of town, we stopped at one of several construction stops, waiting for the one-way road to change to our direction, when the van underbody started making all kinds of noises, creaking and groaning like we were on a ship! What now? I looked out the window and heard loud hissing as our rear tire rapidly deflated. Looks like we picked up another nail out of the road!

Fortunately, that stop was right next to the visitor center for some forgettable countryside tourist trap. We pulled in to their parking lot, and in those 100 meters, the tire went completely flat. We jacked it up, dug another hole in the dirt to be able to mount the spare, and set back on our way. This felt easy by now!

We settled down, happy, exhausted, and relieved, at a cozy little hostel in town. It seems that the owner had caught on to something - what was originally just a house with a couple of dormitory rooms had by now expanded to fill its entire lot, with extra bathrooms in the side lot and a circle of tiny wooden igloos around a campfire in the back. In between was an entire second kitchen, to meet that new guest demand. With some groceries, we cooked up a big hearty meal and ate alongside some Australians, sharing stories and recognizing that we had actually seen them a few days before, off in the middle of nowhere. Small world!

It was pretty loud outside our little hobbit cabin that night, but we didn't care. We were out like lights.

It was an easy 6-hour drive from El Chalten to El Calafate, a much bigger town on the other side of Lago Argentina. On the way out of town, we stopped in at a gas station that was nothing more than a shipping container covered in overlander stickers. Since it was in the national park, it couldn't dig in like a normal station. It turns out there's some controversy about this town - it was established in the 1980's as a way to exert government influence in the region, by scooping out a pocket of land from the national park. But, since the town has grown to fill the pocket, there's no way for the locals to make a living off of the land itself, since they can't farm or raise animals around the town and within the park. That pretty much restricts this town to tourism only, which is understandably difficult in such a heavily seasonal environment.

The face.

On the drive, Kendall stopped to see wild flamingoes in a shallow lake, and foxes by the side of the road.

Calafate is the biggest town we've been in for a while. We had lunch at a cafe where we tried the ubiquitous Argentinian drink, yerba mate, and where we met a huge bear of a dog who just wanted to sniff our food and rest his head. He didn't want to actually eat any of it.

We took a slow pace that day, getting ice cream, enjoying usable wifi...until we realized that the glacier's national park was set to close soon! We hopped in the van and raced over there, a 1-hour drive away. Luckily we made it with plenty of time, and once in, we had 2 hours to stay.

The Perito Moreno glacier is not only an impressive, easily accessible sight, but also the only glacier in the world that is both advancing and retreating. It's just one of many fingers off of the large southern Chilean ice fields. That wall where you see it meet the lake is 70m (~230ft) tall.

There was about an hour's walk of boardwalks around the peninsula to see the glacier from a few different angles. The whole time we walked, we kept our eyes peeled for blocks of ice to calve off. When that happens, it makes a booming sound like thunder. Usually that sound came from within the glacier, as it creaked and groaned its way down into the lake. We did see little pieces (about a meter across) fall off, which were surprisingly loud, but we didn't see any large chunks fall and push a surge of water across the lake.

Floating in the lake were several small icebergs, some glowing bright blue, others murky brown from dirt.

This was a great time and a great way to visit - after the tour buses had all left for the day, what is infamously hard parking was too easy for us, and there was almost no one there.

Once we had seen it well enough we set back off towards El Calafate. But, about a half hour down the road, the sun broke out of the clouds for sunset and turned the sky red. We turned back around to see the glacier in that light, and pulled into a lookout just as a park ranger truck arrived, too. He was there to kick everyone out - the ambulance has left, don't you know it's dangerous here without an ambulance?? - but hilariously offered to take a picture for us even as he chided us for breaking a rule we didn't know about. He then tried to escort us out of the park, but got impatient with our slower driving and sped past.

Here to kick us out

We set up camp downtown at an old, shuttered government building that still inexplicably had free wifi.

The next day, I planted myself at a cafe to do work for my graduate course while Kendall returned back to the glacier to explore a little more. She had been considering taking a boat ride around it, but it turns out the boat rides are stupid expensive and spend most of the day just putzing around the lake instead! She walked around the glacier viewpoints again, this time in the sun, and took some detours coming back to see birds at lakes on the way.

That night, we treated ourselves to the fanciest dinner so far, a "must-reserve-in-advance" cottage restaurant that we were able to just walk in to, but just in time! We were the first of a few to show up, and those wait times got long.

We started off with guanaco, so now we know how all those things taste that run away from the car on the highway. For the real deal, though, we had to get the Patagonian speciality, cordero - lamb.

On the way out of town in the morning, we stopped by a cave with prehistoric paintings which turned out a little underwhelming. It had been enthusiastically reviewed on iOverlander, but I'll let my own followup review summarize the experience:

(TBD)

We managed to make it all the way back to the Chilean border in one 7-hour day of driving. We stopped short and cooked up most of our fresh food that wouldn't make it through their strict customs checks. This was our first time driving back into Chile, but we had heard the stories about vans having to run everything in the van through the x-ray machine inside the customs post.

We made it across the border pretty easily. Since we had already collected and bagged all that was left of our fresh stuff - potatoes, onions - and had included things that were actually permitted, the agent decided to let these gringos pass through without an exhaustive vehicle search. We stopped at the conveniently located grocery store just past customs for a refill, but didn't see the gas station we had expected. We still had some range left on our tank, but this would put us pretty close to empty by the time we'd meet the next gas station, 200km and days away in Puerto Natales! We didn't have much of a choice, so we drove on, but a little more timid on the gas pedal.

On to Torres del Paine!

Hiking Fitzroy would be the best trek and possibly the best scenery of the whole trip.

We arrived in the base town, El Chalten, in the fog and rain, knowing that the famous silhouette was right there over town but unable to see it. Even in this shoulder season, the town was pretty full, with most restaurants and even more bars open through the evening. We tried to knock out some to-do's online, but the whole town's internet was so slow. So, we kicked back, had some mediocre hamburgers, fantastic ice cream, and a heart-to-heart about how we felt about the trip so far.

The plan was to hike Fitzroy at sunrise, which meant waking up around 3:30 for the 4-hour trek. The forecast was flaky, but it looked like the peak would be covered in clouds around sunrise, which would mean about 20km of walking to see nothing. We didn't manage to get packed up and to sleep until about midnight, so when the alarm went off way-too-soon and the forecast was still poor, we didn't mind being able to go back to sleep. Once we woke up at a normal time, we opened the door to see a beautiful, clear blue sky, with the famous silhouette towering over town. This was a good sign for tomorrow!

We put the great weather to use by hiking a shorter version of the main trail, which led to a clear, surprisingly warm lake with a great view and a lot of nappers.

View of town from the trail

We set up camp just across the bridge outside of town for the next night. There was a cloud formation rolling over the mountains before sunset, so we set up for a time lapse video.

After sunset we went into town for groceries, looking for ground beef for our van classic...spaghetti. They ground the beef right in front of us, taking about 15 minutes for what's usually an in-and-out...but that ended up being the best damn ground beef we've ever had. Absolutely incredible. Kendall got held up with double-barrel banana gun on the way out.

Way better than this looks

We didn't do much better getting to sleep on time tonight, so it was a hard wakeup at 3:30, but we didn't have the weather excuse this time. We took a while to get moving and hit the trail late, so we hustled up, quickly shedding the down layers we had put on in the chilly morning. We didn't see any other headlamps ahead of us on the trail, and we were afraid we were already too far behind to make it to the sunrise.

Fortunately, the trail is steep at the beginning and end, but flat in between, and the woods give way to low brush. With the full moon lighting the way, we turned off our headlamps and were struck by the beauty of Fitzroy, glowing white in front of us, bathed in a star-filled night sky. It was hard to keep our eyes on the trail. We didn't have time to set up for a good photo, but I snapped some quickly with my GoPro just to remember the moment.

About 1km short of the summit, we came upon the campground and groups of hikers heading the same way - we weren't late! We were just among the few starting from town.

From here, it was a sharp turn upwards, with plenty of signs warning us of steep, unstable terrain on the path. It was steep, alright - like a kilometer-long staircase. It might have been hard, but as we started, we saw the sunlight start to creep over the horizon behind us, and we knew every minute counted. We raced up those rocks. By the end we were down to t-shirts in the 40-degree weather.

As we crested the last few meters, we knew it was worth it. Fitzroy was right in front of us! Get ready for a lot of pictures.

Recognize it?

There was a small crowd at the summit, but plenty of space for all of us.

We got to watch the moon set right into Fitzroy's peak. As the sun rose, the mountains turned pale white to blazing red to gold, and then softened again as the sun rose into the sky and the shadow fell down into the lagoon.

We watched it for about an hour and a half. The cold was setting in, so, as hungry as we were, we took our breakfast back down the rocks with us. The sky was entirely clear, and pretty soon we were warm enough to stop and eat, drinking straight from a glacial stream.

The hike down felt completely different from the way up, since now we could see all the scenery. We kept turning around to take in the skyline.

At the bottom, we told ourselves we'd watch the sunset over Fitzroy in the clear sky, but both passed out on the couch and woke up after dark. Everything was the same as the night before - camp spot, stupidly good spaghetti - but tonight we knew we'd get a full night's sleep.

Luckily, our first border crossing turned out to be quick and easy.

We started the day picking up some paperwork from a local government office, having it laminated, and then notarizing a document (Declaracion Jurada) promising to bring our vehicle back into Chile within 180 days of leaving.

Chile Chico is a town that, despite really being in the middle of nowhere, seems to have it together. The gym and activity center in the middle of town was active in the morning, with kids and parents running in and out, and dance and sports classes going on. Everyone I interacted with had it together, which hasn't been so common so far. The town is set right up against the lake, which was already more turbulent than our placid kayak the day before.

It was a short drive to the border, where (besides walking in the unlocked staff entrance and getting a lineup of alarmed looks) everything went to plan. One junior customs agent was confused and surprised that we were able to spirit away a prized Chilean vehicle through the border, but at least the senior agent knew and stuck to the rules. Even though we did everything the law requires, there are many, many stories online about customs agents having their own rulebook and not allowing foreigners to leave with Chilean vehicles. The best hope then is to just sit and wait for the next customs agent, or try a different border crossing altogether. Luckily, this trail seems to have been blazed enough before us that the procedure is a familiar one.

We had emptied the van of anything we didn't think would make it through customs - all of our fresh food - but it was never checked. In the next town, we filled up on gas, veggies, and cash. We got our first impression of Argentina - less organized, dirtier, and cheaper than Chile. The ATM's are weird (nation-wide) in the high transaction fee for a low cash limit - sometimes $10 to withdraw a maximum of $50 or $100. Groceries and gas were both a nice surprise, being about 60% of their cost in Chile. This being Argentina, we picked up a block of estancia steak for dinner.

This town in particular was deserted. Being tourist centered and right after tourist season, most folks had taken off for their own vacations now.

We took a shot at getting the back gate latch repaired, but no luck - no hope of finding the part way out here any time soon.

With that, we headed on south. Our next goal, El Chalten, was about 8 hours drive away, so we planned out our overnight while on the road. We settled on a tiny cowboy town, (name here), about half way there.

We hadn't been sure what kind of roads we'd be facing, but were incredibly relieved to see that they were well-paved highways with almost no traffic. That is, well-paved except for short bits with the biggest, deepest potholes I've ever seen on a highway. There would be a warning sign, "Zona de Baches," and then the weaving would start. Keeps you on your toes, I guess.

But this part, on Route 40, looked just like the middle of Texas and made for easy driving and easy working in the back. We saw our first guanacos, and then many more - and they were smart enough to stay clear of the roads. We hit a top speed in this van, 140 kph (about 85 mph), and covered a lot of distance. For the first time in the trip, we made it in to our overnight site well before sunset, letting us gas up and start dinner then relax and watch the sunset over the pampa.

This was a funny little town that might exist just because of its gas pump. It was the normal price, not the tourist gouging we had heard of, with the pump covered top to bottom in overlanders' stickers. The "station" was also the convenience store, bar, and hotel front desk. The bar was full with what we assumed was the entire town.

From iOverlander recommendations, we decided to camp out between there and the town's police station, a gravel lot said to have free power and wifi but in reality with neither. We covered more ground today than any other day of the trip, and it was time to celebrate with a big dinner and a moment to take a breath. We made way too much food, disgracing our first argentine steak by shopping it up into a stew.

From there, it was another long day of driving south. We had read reports of a rough gravel stretch along the way, but it ended up being pretty easy compared to the Carretera Austral in Chile, not to mention about 6 lanes wide with zero traffic.

We arrived into El Chalten a couple hours before sunset and settled in, planning to hike at sunset the next day.

The marble caves are a long distance bus ride for most tourists, but were conveniently on the route for us.

We arrived late at night in Puerto Rio Tranquilo, a town that pretty much exists just for tours to the caves.

In the morning, we were hounded by the few tour operators who are still running during this descent to low season. Instead of hopping on their lame bus, we just went down to the boat launch ourselves. There's a kayak tour operator who lives down there with his family, and we hopped on a tour with some locals and Germans. We saw a different group getting a full-on lecture about using sea kayaks, with skirts and all, but there we were with our touristy sit-on-top ones. Better for us though! The lake was perfectly still and flat, which the guide would later tell us is incredibly rare in the Patagonian wind. It was quick moving in those kayaks, about a 20 minute paddle down to the caves. One of the Chilean girls in the group was having a surprisingly difficult time paddling where she wanted to go, so we had some pauses.

Thanks to the calm water and the lake's level, we could actually paddle right through them, making a couple laps in between the boat tour groups.

We hitchhiked back up to the van's parking with some Germans, since the road had been too steep for our van. More German practice! Problem is, after conversation like this, German vocabulary fills in all the places in my head where Spanish should be.

After this came the longest gravel drive of our trip, and also the end of the Carretera Austral for us. It does continue farther south, to Villa O'Higgins. That leg is said to be the most beautiful but the worst-maintained, and is also a dead end: you have to drive right back up it to be able to continue south (unless you're on foot or have a beast of a 4x4). Looking to make some more progress while the weather was good, we decided to aim for the border crossing at Chile Chico instead.

It was a beautiful, bumpy drive to Chile Chico, driving halfway around the massive Lago General Carrera. The weather was excellent and the views around every bend were worth all the bumps.

We stopped at a couple places for pictures and ended up arriving into the town a little after sunset. We were surprised, as we came around one of the final bends, to see the sun setting...in the east. Glowing orange and just touching the horizon, it was beautiful but made no sense. That's no sun, that's a space station the moon!

We've never seen a super moon like this - it was huge and on fire. We got to watch it rise as we pulled into Chile Chico. We set up for the night at a campground, happy to have running water and a little bit of normalcy for the first time in a few days.

The constant jarring and vibration of the van on those roads had not only shaken us a lot by the end of the day, but had added new squeaks and rattles to the van which we'd have to investigate and fix. The most fun of those was that the ailing back gate latch finally called it quits, clamping down hard on the release, and falling to pieces when we had to just yank the door open. We'll have to get that fixed in a big city, where there are parts - but for now, we're tying the door shut with a ratchet strap :)

Tomorrow is our first border crossing - we've heard stories, but we're hoping it's easy!

South of Futaleufu was the Patagonia we had pictured: dramatic mountains and scenic hikes. The first on the list was Cerro Castillo.

It would be a long drive in the rain to the next town on the route, but we'd rather be driving in rain than hiking in it!

We stopped after a few hours for a dip in hot springs next to the ocean. We had felt so good after our glacial swim in Futaleufu that we decided to take a dip in the ocean too, which felt warm in comparison.

Hot springs...

...cold ocean

We made lunch in the van, with the door open and jealous motorbikers gawking in. This is maybe the best part of having a rolling kitchen and bed.

We kept on going on those gravel roads, and the rain never got too bad. We did get stuck behind a California-plated 4Runner which was being so careful on those roads... meanwhile we're trying to overtake in our 2WD high-top van...

Roadside scenery

I tried to do some coursework in the back while Kendall drove. On paved roads, it's pretty great - but it can be hard to read all the blurry words bouncing around on gravel and rocks.

Our next big town was Coyhaique, but we had to make a detour first through Puerto Aysen to get a little slip of paper from Chilean immigration authorities (PDI) for Kendall that we either never got or lost. By the time we arrived, they were closed, so we did the standard grocery run and set up shop for the night at a gas station. The attendant was nice enough to let us sleep in the service bay to keep us out of the rain. Rain's not a big deal in the van, but it's nice to be able to prop the door open when we're cooking, and not get things wet when we go around back to storage.

In the morning, we woke up, stretched out, made breakfast, then got the van ready...only to find we had a flat tire! Slow leak overnight. Good thing we parked right at a tire place, right?? Nope, they only sell new, and we should try to repair ours first, and that was across town. We went to mount the spare and found that, of course, the jack that Juan left with the van isn't even tall enough to let us change the tire, so we had to dig a hole in the parking lot to get the spare on.

Womp womp

With that mounted, we checked in at the PDI office and the guy chuckled at us gringos, saying that the paper we needed wasn't even necessary since everything's tracked in the computer system. Makes sense... but we've heard all kinds of stories about the border posts not being on the same sheet of music as the city headquarters...so still good to be careful.

We hunted around with iOverlander to find a tire repair place and eventually got a recommendation on the street heading out of town. We rolled up, and without saying a word, the guy took our busted tire, patched it, stuck it back on, then said only "cuatro mil" - about $6. That was easy!

The tire shop

We drove on to Coyhaique, picked up the part we needed for the power steering to work again, and found a friendly mechanic to help install it at the end of the day. In the US, that might be pretty quick - but that took us all day, so we tucked in to a gas station in the middle of town, snagging free wifi from the store next door.

Tucked in

In the morning, we made good time out to Villa Cerro Castillo. The sun was out and the road was clear, mostly paved, and through a national park.

Even though the trail we'd take to the top is in that national park, the entrance is somehow on private land, and we had to shell out to some random farmer dudes to let us in. They were obnoxious people, but we had read the (very recent string of) Google reviews for the place and were ready for it. Apparently they will just reject people from the hike they don't like, and objecting to their high price of entry is cause enough for them to not like you. It was an old guy with a gut and a fanny pack and a young guy dressed in all brand-new Patagonia clothing, and the old one was stretching intensely like he had just been on a long run, which we found hard to believe. Weirdly enough, he'd still be there and doing that when we returned 5 hours later...

It was perfect weather - sunny, calm, and a little cool, with a dry trail all the way up. We only saw about 5 other couples hiking the whole time - one of the advantages of visiting in the shoulder season. It was a steady grade with a well-maintained trail, which we'd come to appreciate more after our next couple of hikes.

It took us about 4 hours to summit, and we enjoyed a lunch at the top. We made it back down quickly and set off before sunset down the Carretera Austral, headed for Lago General Carrera and the Marble Caves.

Sunset on the road

Futaleufu would be our first stop on the Carretera Austral, the long, wild highway that connects Chile's mainland with its southern reaches.

We didn't go far that first day on the road after I got back to Chile. We had a fancy lunch on the shores of Lake (?) then settled down in a campsite on the far side. It's been run by a German family for the last 40 years, and they've had the land since they originally colonized it in the 1840's. It was also another fun chance to use my German instead of Spanish :) ganz toll.

Camp, lake, volcano

For me, this was a good welcome back to van life from the comforts of home in the US: a good view, showers, and quiet and dark at night. We made a tasty stew of the vegetables we had on hand, eating it right from the bed so we didn't have to convert the bed back to the couch. It's not a hard conversion, but involves pushing some wood panels around, and we didn't quite have the hang of it yet.

The road south from here, Puerto Montt, was the famous Carretera Austral. Historically nothing more than a gravel track linked by ferries, it's now under heavy construction, which meant frequent stops, lots of debris, and still nasty roads in between. Some dirt, some gravel, and some rocks. Parts had us as slow as 15mph, hoping we didn't lose a tire or get stuck in the dirt.

By the time we got to the last ferry, in Hornopiren, it was late, and we set up camp for the night by the water. We were joined there by a few other campers, including an Aussie who was traveling solo but had picked up a long-term Chilean hitchhiker just that morning. He spoke broken Spanish, but his new companion spoke only Spanish, so we're curious how that has turned out. We ate a van-made dinner over the water while he played the guitar.

Kendall rustled me awake in the morning, standing in the doorway: "Look!" Three horses were grazing just out front of our door, which is pretty much Kendall's dream. To her disappointment, they didn't want much to do with us. The weather was perfect and as we made breakfast we could see the crew preparing the ferry across the bay.

There are two competing companies departing from Hornopiren to Caleta Gonzalo. One takes the long way, out to the ocean, but delivers you point-to-point. The other takes the scenic route, dropping you at an intermediate landing and leaving you to drive a short leg to another ferry. We of course chose the scenic one. We napped for much of the first 4-hour ride, but the scenery from the top deck was excellent. It was uncharacteristically sunny and calm for Patagonia as we churned past waterfalls and salmon farms.

I hopped off the ferry ahead of the cars to film our exit with my drone, but managed in my groggy post-nap state to fly it straight into an 80-foot tree. It looked like a cartoon fight as it slowly hacked its way all the way down, puffs of shredded leaves blasting out of the canopy every couple of moments. I fished it out at the bottom, wedged in a Y-branch, and while all 8 blades were broken, the body itself was fine. Cool.

After the final ferry, we drove along gravel roads through Parque Pumalin, the legacy of Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face. We'd find out later that he was a pretty controversial figure in Chile for his involvement in ecological protection here. Since we were now comfortably in the off-season, with Chile's students all back in school, the campsites and pull-offs were all empty, and we explored the short trails down to the nearby lakes.

We stopped in Chaiten for lunch and to orient ourselves. We had already outpaced any kind of detailed plan - we were so surprised to actually be driving south that now we didn't know what to do. We had burgers at one of the few places still open in this deserted, tourist-centric town, where the walls told us about the town's own controversy.

Chaiten had been the region's capital until 2008, when its eponymous volcano erupted and dumped a heavy layer of ash all around, diverting a river's flow right through the town and wiping much of it out. Casualties had been low, but with the town so disrupted, the national government ordered the town to be abandoned and population relocated elsewhere. To emphasize the point, the government shut off all support for the town, most importantly water and electricity. Residents refused to abandon it, and in 2011 the government relented and acknowledged the existence of this new Chaiten. The restaurant was eager to relate the struggle to us with papers posted on the walls and even its name: "Rights, not flowers."

We figured out that as pretty as this coastal town was, our goals were further south, and so we hit the road again towards Futaleufu. We wouldn't be able to make it before dark and had heard the roads were pretty rough, so we stopped at a campsite recommended by iOverlander. It turned out to be one of the most scenic spots of the trip.

We watched the sun set and enjoyed the first hot shower in a few days.

In the morning, as we got ready to go, we made a classic overlanding mistake: we didn't check the water quality before filling up. Apparently the area gets its water directly from a mountain reservoir, which means after rains, the taps spew out dirt, leaves, and other debris.

We enjoyed the last bit of paved road until the turnoff to Futaleufu, and then it got bumpy. We were in a hustle, too - unsure how long this good weather would last, we had made a booking for Futa's specialty: whitewater rafting. Departure was in two hours, and it was a two to three-hour drive! No time to stop for scenery. We did pick up some American hitchhikers, who probably questioned their luck when our van started to smell of smoke and burning rubber. Around the last couple bends into town, the steering got weird, and then completely quit on me as we pulled in to park in Futa. Here we go again!

But we had made it to rafting with plenty of time to spare. We forgot the van, geared up, and hit the river with the group. This was their flagship tour - 3 hours on the river, with multiple Class V rapids.

It was incredible fun. A great tour guide and a good boat took us plunging into rapid after rapid, with huge 7-10 foot waves crashing over the boat. The glacial river was drinkable, and a beautifully clear blue, letting us see the rocks streak by on the bottom in the calm between rapids. By the end of the day, we were the right mix of happy, chilly, and tired.

Futa was another tiny town where anything goes, so we just camped out right where we had parked. We treated ourselves to a dinner out, and got a mechanic recommendation from the waiter. We talked about what we would do if the van was immobilized here as it had been in Vina - parts would take far longer to arrive, and who knew if we could find a capable mechanic? No one in this hamlet would buy a tourist's broken van in the off-season. We joked about burning it down, but hoped for the best.

Futa Camping Spot: Main Street

The next morning, we popped the seat up to look at the engine and diagnose our problem as well as we could with the owners' manual before visiting the mechanic. Leonardo runs a shop right out of his home, was sharp enough to quickly diagnose our problem from my description, and drove us back down to the van to pull out the busted parts. It turned out this was a pretty straightforward bug, if a little frustrating: the bearings in the power steering belt's guide wheel were completely broken, but Leonardo also pointed out to us that they had been greased. This meant that the problem had been identified in the past, but instead of replacing it, the owner had just greased it to eke out a few more miles. Leonardo told us that fix couldn't have lasted more than a couple thousand kilometers, so...no surprises there.

Mechanikendall

The failed, greasy bearings

We could have waited over the weekend for the parts to be delivered to Futa, but we decided instead to drive on without power steering and tackle this in a bigger city.

We tried to book a kayak tour, but in our search around town, we stumbled on preparations for a wedding instead. It turned out that the groom was himself a kayak instructor, and all the other instructors would be attending the wedding, so that was out.

To make the most of the beautiful, sunny day, we did a great, 2-hour hike on the outskirts of town up to the Piedra de Aguila (Eagle Rock).

La Piedra

Like many things in Chile, this trail was privatised, meaning we had to beckon a rancher out from his house to come take our money and open a gate.

We cooled off afterwards with a refreshing dip into the icy glacial river near the base. That water is so clear!

Fresh!

With a few hours before sunset, we headed out of town and back to the Carretera Austral. We stopped for the night in the half-town, half-remains of Santa Lucia, a mountain village just within reach of a massive landslide of 2016. As the sun fell, we toured the wreckage, which was still present enough that some houses were half-intact and half piles of junk, right at the furthest reach of the landslide.

On the edge of disaster

As so often happens, we were soon joined by another camper van. We don't know each other, but we seem to travel in packs!

We made another camper stew and called it a night. Tomorrow would be a lot of driving.

Campsite

Dinner

Once we discovered our mechanic didn't work on the van unless we were there watching, it meant another two weeks supervising his work.

I arrived back up in Vina on Feb 18th after an eventful bus ride up from Pucon. The 9-hour leg from Pucon to Santiago was perfect - dark, quiet, and the perfect temperature, I got one of the best sleeps of the trip. It was at the terminal in Santiago that the fun began!

So, in Chile, intercity buses depart from large terminals with gates, somewhat like an airport, with a difference being that you're only given a range of gates at which to wait for your bus: maybe "7-13". You go and stand there and watch: for a bus, of your brand, with the correct departure time and destination listed in the front window. There's no unique number or other information to uniquely identify your bus.

Where this got funny was that in Santiago, the bus line I had chosen (at random) was running almost an hour late for this hour-long route. I bought a ticket for a 9:30 AM bus at about 9:15 AM, and so went straight to the gate and waited for the first purple Condor bus. That wasn't the one! But I didn't realize that yet, so I loaded my bag on and tried to board, but got rejected. The bus ended up leaving half-empty, with a bustling crowd stuck there waiting, for the now 3 overdue buses. Then they started to arrive - out of order. Where things got really wonkyL thanks to protests by the growing crowd, the 9:30 bus (mine) - which had arrived before the 9:15 bus somehow - was switched to the 9:15 bus mid-boarding. Bags were loaded and unloaded, some people could get on, others not, and the crowd just turned into a froth, with everyone running around to make sure they didn't miss their bus. At one point, there were two 9:15 buses waiting there, with families and old folks making frantic laps between the two. I tried boarding both, got on neither, and then sat there and watched the show. Eventually, one bus driver nudged his dashboard clock hand forward to 9:30, and we were off, around 10:15.

I arrived in Vina, dumped my bags at a university hostel, and walked up to the mechanic shop we had come to know so well. I arrived during the long lunch break and waited. Even as the shop came back to life, Ricardo, and our van, were nowhere to be found. Eventually Ricardo arrived, driving a customer's Mercedes, with a scowl on his face. It turns out that he was mad at us because he thought we were mad at him (?), and he intended to get to work right away. He promised that he himself would work on the van, not any of his family (the whole shop is family). And work would promptly begin...tomorrow. I also discovered that the van's door had been unmounted without telling us, leaving all of our things open to the garage, which, through a side door, was open to the street.

It ended up taking 9 days of work - renting a crane from nearby, hauling the engine out of the van's cab, taking it apart, and finding all kinds of things:

• Parts which were very recently installed yet were the wrong size
• Warped surfaces of the engine which could explain a lack of pressure
• Cracking in the timing belt cover, which is actually also the oil pump mechanism

Each day, I checked in with Ricardo at the beginning of the day, watching and waiting while he worked.

Meanwhile, we heard from the previous owners by whatsapp, who of course said they knew nothing about the problem and this was just bad luck to have engine problems start on the day we bought the car. Juan's advice to "set up a tent at the mechanic and watch him every day" was useful comfirmation, if a little late, but was frustrating given that they had dumped their two years of poor maintenance (and apparently misfit parts) on us. It should have been them waiting here for a month.

In between mechanic visits, I worked hard on graduate studies and side projects at the hostels. The first hostel was a mosquito den, where I'd seal the doors and windows but then wake up at 5 in the morning with the walls covered in the little things and myself covered in bites. The second was a great place to work, and I got a lot done in those days.

I was pretty bitter about my decision to drop a pretty good life back at home for this, but at the same time, I was happy that Kendall was able to enjoy the country and weather down in Pucon.

At the end of February, Kalan headed back to the states for a week for a pre-planned work trip and a wedding. With our van finally in driving shape, Kendall headed south to do what she wanted to the most: ride a horse!

But, halfway to Santiago and only a half-hour away from the mechanic, the oil light came on, along with some new noises, and Kendall turned right back around to Vina del Mar.

She spent another couple days there and ended up repairing or replacing the oil pressure sensor, starter, brake shoes, and a seatbelt.

Then she headed south again to Pucon, where she...(tell story here)

Meanwhile, I went to my good friend Riley's wedding and saw old friends I haven't seen in years. Meanwhile, my team at work needed a development project done in my specialty, so I came back on the clock. I worked some long days to get it all the way from start to finish, which was the fastest I've ever done it and mostly fun. I went skiing with my sister in the Cascades and made some good meals with my mother. One of my favorites was actually trying to imitate coconut macaroons that Kendall had discovered down in Chile - they were very easy to make and IMO even better than the original.

I was set to fly back down to Santiago on March 8th, but thanks to a snowstorm didn't make it out until 4 days later. Kendall made quick moves to make the best of the time in between, and drove 4 hours back up to Pucon to go on a 3-day horse trek she had been eyeing for a while.

I finally made it back down to Kendall in Puerto Montt on March 12th after a long 25 hours of travel. Our van was working great and we were right on the edge of Patagonia - let's go!

Unfortunately, the van part that our mechanic Ricardo had ordered wasn't enough to get our van on the road again yet.

He waited a day before telling us that had installed it and run the engine to test it with the new pump - but the red oil light came right back on, and then the engine stopped.

Originally, there had been 3 options to fix it:

1. Sensor
2. Oil pump
3. Complete engine rebuild

With options 1 and 2 exhausted, all we had left was number 3. Since it would take days just to disassemble the engine, and then have to wait a week more for parts from the US, we decided to leave town. Ricardo arranged for the van to be parked in a neighbor's garage for safety, and then we packed up our backpacks and Ubered to the bus station.

We caught an overnight bus to Pucon, an adventure/outdoors-centric town 10 hours south, in the heart of Chile's Lake District. It was set to be our first real stop on our drive south, so even though we knew we'd have to double back, at least we could be on the road, doing something, instead of waiting around near the capital.

The overnight ride was better than a normal bus (and better than having to drive yourself!) but the lights and TV's stayed on through the night.

Chilean buses are funny - their max speed limit is loudly advertised throughout the bus, and if the bus exceeds that, you have the legal right, no, the obligation! to inform the driver and order him to slow down. We never exercised that.

We arrived in the morning a little groggy but happy to see perfect weather. It was 80 degrees and sunny, and we had the whole day ahead of us.

Pucon is a small town, about 10 streets across in a square grid next to a lake. Almost all of it is hotels, cafes, tour guides, and rental shops - it exists for tourism.

We checked in at a little BnB hotel with a handful of screaming kids doing laps, got lunch, then hustled across town to book our places to the main event: the volcano hike.

Volca'n Villarica is the star of this town's show: towering over town to the south, the volcano is visibly active, but predictable enough to be climbed. It's Chile's most-popular hike, and every morning during high season, hordes of tourists don snow jackets and crampons at sunrise and haul themselves 5 hours up to the smoking crater.

Pucon's Volcano

Kendall, the master trip planner, had the best tour company in town already picked out, and fortunately they still had spots for tomorrow's hike!

We woke up at 5am the next morning for our hike. After an hour's drive to the base, we hopped out of the van into howling winds. The guides asked us if we all still wanted to climb in the winds. Obviously, yes, so we headed on up.

Gearing up

The first hour of climb was plowing through scree alongside a couple hundred other pilgrims. It's not always necessary - since this is also a ski resort, there's a chairlift right there. But: it's run "on the side" by folks who work at the resort, and it sounds like they just make up their minds each morning if they feel like coming out to rake in $10 a ride. This morning, they didn't.

Lines of ants in the snow

Part of the way up, we hooked on some crampons to weave up across the glacier. Near the top, we dropped bags and donned gas masks for the last few meters to the crater. At the beginning, they had told us we'd only have 20 minutes allowed for pictures, but it turns out that's more than we'd want in that sulfur gas! It was too cloudy inside the crater to see the magma below, but it was still incredible to stand on the lip of the crater and take in the sheer scale of this tunnel down into the earth.

The maw

We had a brief break for lunch and then geared up for the final part of the hike: sledding! Why walk back down a hill when you can slide down it?

Lined up in the chute

There were routes already carved out for us. 20 minutes long, with fast straightaways and slaloms, it was like a water park in the snow. When we started, it was 30 degrees and blowing wind; at the bottom, when we got off, it was just shy of 100 degrees and perfectly calm. From the end of the toboggan back to the base was a fantastic downclimb: 3-feet-thick gravel paths that you just plunged into with every step, taking 10-foot strides each, basically just plowing your way to the bottom one boot at a time.

Afterwards, we celebrated our ascent with a meal, a nap, and sunset on the beach.

The next day, we tried out a new sport - hidrospeed. It's whitewater rafting but without the raft. You surf down rapids in a custom-made bodyboard instead. Even in the afternoon sun, that glacial river got pretty chilly by the end!

Ready to hidrospeed

Pucon's Volcano

That evening we went sailing on the lake at sunset, which turned out to be a lot more thrilling in that wind because, it turns out, we still don't know what we're doing! At least there weren't any tankers, tug boats, or sea lions around this time.

The next day, we checked out free bike rentals available from the city and moved to a hostel that was screaming-kid-free. We tried to bike out to a waterfall in the area, but couldn't quite make it up in the 2-hour-round-trip allowed for the bikes, which looked good at the start but pretty soon we realized didn't have working brakes or shifters. We splurged on a little bit of Chinese food and sushi, which just like in Vina came in huge portions. Ceviche sushi, wrapped in cream cheese instead of rice, is something that should catch on.

Ceviche Sushi

Sadly, the whole time we had a nagging thought in the back of our heads - when will our van be ready so we can actually start our trip? Ricardo, our mechanic, was weirdly ghosting us on whatsapp, and it looked like no work had actually been done in 4 days (we'd later find out that was true...).

So, we hopped from bus company office to office looking for a last-minute overnight ticket back up north, which was a tough prospect in high season. I was lucky to stumble on a cancellation, so that night, I rode a comfy, quiet bus back to Santiago, while Kendall stayed behind in Pucon. After 3 days of travel, it was back to the mechanic.

As we wait for our van to be repaired and eventually set off on our journey south, we're making the most of the time here on the ocean at Valparaiso.

We're really fortunate to be staying where we are - a B&B on one of the hills over the ocean - a calm, safe residence with everything we need - a kitchen, good wifi, and only a short walk to the metro.

I've been spending a good part of the day fixing up the blog - you might notice the improved data page and pictures in the articles. Kendall's producing our first video and planning out more of our trip.

Not a bad place to work

It was hard not to get frustrated with being stuck here - flying down from the US, we were both very ready to get on the road and go see the country, especially Patagonia. We thought about using a few of these days to make a bus trip south to surf town Pichilemu, but it will be much easier to get there with our own wheels later on. We looked into flying north to San Pedro and the Atacama desert, but they're flooded after heavy rains. Even Easter Island - but short-notice flights out there are $1000 and up.

We decided to make the most of what we had and just stay here. This B&B we found is booked up on the weekends all the way through the season, but just yesterday, one of the guests called to cancel, so we're able to stay put until our van gets its next part. Of all places to be "stuck," this is about as good as it gets.

Dinner at sunset

Fish Market, Chilean Specialties

After a couple days cooking in the van, it's great to have a normal kitchen and normal fridge again. And what better place to buy meals than the fish market right in front of the apartment!

We wandered down there one day around 3pm...but selection was a little thin, and a little pungent. We tried again the next day at 10am. There's a building, the official fish market, with stands and hawkers and crowds, but on a tip from our BnB host, we went around back, directly to the boats.

Even that late in the morning, boats were coming right in from the water and dumping their catches into buckets in front.

$1.50

We had no idea what we were doing but we gringoed it and got a small fish from a bin where others were still flapping around. We learned later that it was a "pescada" (a hake fish - not to be confused with the spanish word for any fish, "pescado"), the "budget fish that's good for frying."

Watching videos from youtube, we cleaned the fish ourselves and saved it for dinner. It ended up being pretty great!

Yum

We also picked up some bite-sized coconuts off the street and had to figure out how to eat those. Turns out that a hammer does the trick:

also $1.50

Nope. Bite-size

The result

Touristing

Every day we're going in to the city to see something different. Tuesday, we visited the site of the old prison towering over town, which has since been converted into a cultural center, with kids playing soccer in the yard.

Kendall visited the Natural History Museum, with some of the most unfortunately stuffed animals she had ever seen.

oh, wow.

not great

We went to the Circus, "el mas famoso de Chile," and it was hands-down the worst show we've ever seen. Besides the gigantic animatronic King Kong at the end, it felt like a talent show put on by a group of friends on last-minute notice.

Clown, drum, flaming drumsticks

We walked back home along the ocean, getting a better show watching wild sea lions leaping onto an abandoned pier.

Sea lion leaping 6 feet for a nap in the sun

"The slowest train in the world"

Red Bull Downhill Race

Sunday morning, the BnB hosts casually mentioned that there was a mountain bike race happening downtown that afternoon. Turns out that that was the Red Bull Cerro Abajo ("Hill Descent"), where the riders run a course down the steep hills of the city, down staircases, across roofs, through buildings and gaps barely wider than their handlebars at full speed.

Compared to other Red Bull events, this one was chaotic and unorganized. Some of the racers were over 5 minutes apart, so as they came through the course no one was expecting them. Even when the race was over and everyone was through, people continued waiting around, even the race staff. The friendliness of Chileans and the great weather made it a great event to attend anyway.

Cooking Class

Yesterday (Monday), we took a Chilean cooking class, which was really well run and gave us some good new meals to make:

1. Pebre, like pico de gallo but better
2. Ceviche, the Chilean way (shredded fish, not diced)
3. Pastel de Choclo, "corn paste bowl", probably the Chilean national dish
4. Empanadas, but not like the empanadas you know - more like huge delicious hot pockets
5. Leche Asada, like flan but better
6. Pisco Sour, a dangerously sweet brandy mix

That night, we watched the moon descend down into the ocean through the owner's telescope:

What's Next

The part arrived at the mechanic today, about 3 hours ago. They say it should be installed by tomorrow morning. We're 🤞hopeful that this one part will be the fix we need.

Maybe this wasn't the quality van we thought it was.

It was Friday afternoon and we were headed south.

Kendall had just finished up her week-long Spanish class and so was now natively fluent.

We had seen everything we wanted to see in the area, spent two nights on the beach, and were ready to camp out in the woods and hike volcanoes.

But the red oil light in our van, which had been flickering on since we bought it, was now consistently lit. There was a rattle which was getting louder. We thought we could trust the sellers, and we were sure this was just a problem with some sensor.

We quickly poked through reviews on our trusty app, iOverlander, picked the best mechanic we could find, and headed over. This would be quick...

Narrator: it wasn't quick

Metal fragments in the oil pan

They advised us not to drive anywhere until the problem could get fixed, no earlier than Monday, when they'd be able to get replacement parts for the damage they found.

We set up camp for the night. The shop boss, Richard, was incredibly generous, giving us access to his shop after hours and letting us run our shore power line up to the shop, meaning we could run our cooler and computers without having to worry about battery capacity. Our solar panels didn't get much sun in between the buildings.

Pushing us into a level spot

The next day, we ran some errands and found a climbing gym right around the corner! How lucky is that? And they had industrial-strength wifi to boot.

Kendall gets a climb in

When we weren't there, we were in the van working on this blog, graduate coursework, or other projects.

On Monday, we woke up to the van being boosted up onto the jack stand. That morning, they made the repair - but the problem didn't go away. They found another set of parts which had been damaged by lack of oil and replaced those too.

The second set of damaged parts

Morning tea in our living room

They had fixed damage that had been done by low oil pressure, but hadn't addressed the root cause. The next step was to replace the oil pump.

They spent two days looking for the part locally, then had to mail order it from the states. It's due in on Tuesday, February 12th - and even then may not be the fix we need. If the rattle's still there, or oil pressure is still low - the next step is an engine overhaul, which won't be fast, or cheap.

While we waited, we saw some of the sights of Viña, walked to some fantastic Peruvian food, got some more climbing in, and did a lot of work. We made some little improvements to the van, like mounting a cargo net for more space and putting up string lights. Van life isn't simple in the city: we had to plan out showers and using the bathroom in advance.

So good we went back for seconds

Christmas in the van

We saw parts of the city we wouldn't have if we hadn't been searching for things to do. One was the Castillo Wulff, a mansion built over the sea a century ago by a German trader, with glass floors, turrets, and an unbeatable panorama.

The downtown beach

There were some perfect days to go to the beach, but we were too restless to sit there and relax.

After four nights camping in the van in an alley, and four days working and waiting in it, we got a little stir-crazy and decided to find better digs.

Meet "Lupita"!

Lupita, named by the previous owners, is our 2000 Toyota Hiace camper van that will take us south to Patagonia and around the rest of the continent. Originally an ambulance in Santiago, the van was converted into something more habitable many owners ago.

We were particularly attracted to the high roof (we can both stand up inside!), and Toyota make, which means we’ll have less trouble finding spare parts if when something breaks.

While we don’t know much of Lupita’s history, we know that the most recent trip it took was from Argentina to Alaska which accounts for a fair number of its total 265,000 kilometers (165,000 miles).

The first modification we're making to Lupita is adding solar panels to the roof. We want the ability to camp for days without finding campgrounds with electricity or hostels to stay in. Solar panels mean we can park for days in the most remote parts of Patagonia and still have power to charge our cameras, run lights and the fan, and keep an electric cooler going. Just the little comforts of home!

Thanks to a recommendation from a Danish couple, we arranged for that work to be done at Camper Travel, a shop on the north side of Santiago. We met Juan and Lucia there in the morning, let the shop get to work on the van, then headed into town to do the paperwork.

They did great work! We were lucky to find a shop that had a dedicated crew who spoke fluent English and Spanish and who kept us involved in every decision. It turned out that thanks to the shape of the van's roof, we had to make a run into town to pick up solar panels that would fit, and move the cargo rack up towards the front. Better yet, thanks to the roof-size mixup, we ended up with almost twice the solar power (170W) at no extra cost.

One downside is that they installed some pretty cheap components as part of the "solar package," like a PWM controller instead of the more modern, common MPPT type, so we'll have to see how that holds up.

3pm: Solar Panel Shopping

6pm: The first panel is mounted

While the mechanics got to work, we all headed into the nearest town to pull tickets, wait in lines, and (eventually) transfer the van from Juan to Kalan.

At first, we tried to do it directly with the government, at an equivalent of a DMV, and the way most Americans would think to do such a transaction. But not in Chile!

Line at the DMV

A quirk of Chilean society is that almost all legal work is done through a notary, who acts as an intermediary to arcane bureaucratic processes. Once we landed at one of those notaries, spent some money and a couple of hours, we were all set! The van was now ours.

It's official

Back at the workshop, we bid adieu to Juan and Lucia, they bid adieu to their two-year home-on-wheels, and the shop finished up the work, staying past closing to finish it up. At 8pm, we packed it back up, hopped in, and cruised down the highway back into town.

We arrived in Santiago on Tuesday and settled in. Our hostel, one we picked out to be quiet and well-located with fast wifi ... was well-located at least. If hostels all seem to have a favored nationality, this one was French. If the late-night parties outside of our room's window didn't give it away, the non-stop chain smoking did! We adjusted to the 1:30am communal bedtime, still getting up at 7 see the city and check off the steps to buy our van from Juan and Lucia. Amazingly, it had arrived in port on time and everything was going to plan.

The location, though, was great - a hip, modern neighborhood that could easily be in Madrid or Miami - cafe, boutique, gelateria, repeat.

We saw the city sights over the first few days: a stroll through downtown; a walking tour on the way back; a visit to the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, a chronology of the fraught Chilean politics of the 70's and 80's. It was impossible not to notice the parallels between the nationalist phrases and tactics of Chile's Augusto Pinochet and the diatribes of one of today's more notorious figures.

Constitution Square

And there were a few errands. First on the list was following the steps to earn our own RUT, the Chilean equivalent of a social security number, which unlocks all kinds of non-touristy activities like buying a car, registering a cellphone number, and apparently earning membership points on grocery purchases. Seriously, they use the RUT number for everything!

With the help of a local agency (Suzi Santiago), we got our RUT after a short morning of waiting in Chilean DMV's.

We're not tourists anymore!*

Once we had our RUT, we let Juan and Lucia know: we were ready to buy the van.

Hi everyone! It's good to have you here. As we write, we're on an airplane above the Caribbean, halfway from Atlanta to Mexico City. It took a fast week of packing and preparation to get to this point, and we're both very happy to have that done with!

A few hours later, over Chile

Everything we have is either with us, locked up in a steel cube, or has a new happy home. Two long, long to-do lists are finally complete - it's amazing how much you can accomplish when you've got the hard deadline of a flight ticket and an indefinite adventure abroad. Bills paid, letters sent, dentists seen, craigslist "free" section hordes withstood, and projects finished. I checked off not one but two items I've been working and scheming on for over three years!

The Blog: Neither of us has much in the way of creative experience, so we're learning as we go! Some of the things we're most excited to share with you are...

• our data section, because that's what you get when a data scientist and a software dev take a long trip together,
• Kendall's (TBD) wildlife journal, one to rival Audubon, no doubt, and
• Our next career as viral Youtube stars. Can't be that hard!

The site will change a lot as we go, so stay tuned, and please let us know what you enjoy the most!

Kalan & Kendall

Now that we knew we wanted a van, all we had to do was buy it! Easier said than done...

We began our search in early December 2018. Kendall had been watching the market for months and had a good sense of what our options would be, on Facebook, Drive the Americas, and other forums. The best time to buy a van like this is the South American summer - December to January - because of the high amount of turnover then. Many travelers seem to start and end their trip around that time, and so the supply picks up.

Early on, we considered driving the whole way in Kendall's sweet '96 4Runner, but we decided against that because of the amount of time required and the comfort level of living out of an SUV. Then, we looked at buying a van in the US, possibly converting it to a camper ourselves, and shipping it to Colombia, but that became our last resort because of the costs involved ($2k to ship, $15k to buy, $10k to convert).

We had a few criteria:

• Transfer in Patagonia would be ideal, Santiago would be almost, but we could make anything between there and Colombia work. Central America wouldn't work for us because of the time and cost involved in shipping the Darien Gap, the undriveable wilderness between Panama and Colombia.
• On top of that, some countries are easier to purchase vehicles in than others. Chile is better than Argentina in that regard, but a US plated van would be easiest.
• Kendall would probably be happy in anything with 4 wheels, ideally a 4x4, but I like the comfort of not sleeping in a tent for months on end. So we were looking for a camper van, already converted, with a bed and maybe a kitchen and some other trappings of civilization. A high top one is nice, since you can stand up inside, but those can be hard to come by.
• Of course, we were looking for something reliable, with plenty of repair parts available locally, a trustworthy seller, of a size that wouldn't limit us in cities or high wind, and (if we could find it) some character or a good story.

A few days in, we found a match: a Danish couple was selling their high-top Toyota Hiace, in Santiago, around the right time. We got in touch, making a video call to them from our climbing gym. Despite the video signal cutting out every few minutes, they gave us a great tour of the van by Whatsapp from halfway around the world. We felt an enormous sense of relief as we rock climbed for the next two hours, in near-disbelief: it was real! We were all set, and went out to dinner to celebrate. As dessert came, so did a text: "Sorry to say this, but we've decided to sell to another couple." It turned out that another buyer had proposed better terms for the transfer - perfectly fair, but entirely unexpected. The Danes were incredibly gracious about it, gave us lots of good advice ("Just promise us you won't do the rooftop tent!"), and even helped us continue to van shop.

Back to searching. Disappointed, we assumed that we had seen the best of the market already. Over the next few days, about one new van a day came onto the market - a greasy, old 300,000 mile Chevy Astro on Friday; a massive, teutonic Wohnmobil imported from Germany on Saturday; a Toyota Tacoma on Sunday, with a homemade drop-in camper that looked like one of the tanks ISIS made by hand. Each one had a flurry of interested comments, and even the gross Astro sold before answering our inquiries.

We even looked on the cars.com equivalents in Chile and Colombia, thinking we could buy and convert locally to save the hassle of shipment.

Nothing looked good, and with only a month before our planned departure, we were afraid we wouldn't find one in time. We fell back to the last resort, shopping around DC for camper vans we could "quickly" convert over the course of a week or two (most conversions seem to take months) and quickly ship south.

We were only a day away from buying an abandoned pet grooming van, complete with dog-sized blow dryer, house-sized A/C, and custom fiberglass top...

...when the perfect van appeared:

It was another high-top hiace!

We were at dinner in Arlington and wrote right away. No gamesmanship or trying to swing a deal this time - we were all in.

They wrote back quickly and all the signs were great. They'd been traveling this half of the world for two years, and the van was the carefully crafted and revised product of that experience. The van was a Toyota Hiace, the reliable, ubiquitous people-mover of South America, and best yet, it was a high-top! This was that second chance you wish you always got.

Most incredible of all - they were an hour away in Baltimore! They had just shipped the van and were celebrating the end of their long journey. This wouldn't have to be a send-the-money-by-internet-I-promise-I'm-real after all! The next day we made the quick trip up to Baltimore to meet them in person, hear some great stories from a hemisphere of travel, learn about the van, and make a deposit.

With the van scheduled to arrive in Santiago on the 21st of January, our trip was thrown into motion. We now had a little over a month to pack up, end our apartment leases, put our jobs on hold, and fly down to Chile to start the adventure!