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Chile

My journey started, as many do, from home. I was was waved off from the railway station by my brother, before settling down for the first leg of my trip. At the other end of the line, I disembarked in Kings Cross station and was quickly making my way across London to Heathrow airport by the tube.

Flight number one was with Alitali to Rome. Once in Rome, it was short wait before my long-haul flight to South America. After a sleepless overnight flight, and a brief stop at Sao Paulo, I was in Santiago Chile. I was amazed when, as we landed, the other passengers started to applaud the pilot.

I travelled in from the airport by taxi (I wasn't confident enough, at the time, to take the much cheaper bus), and arrived at the meet-up hotel, in down town Santiago; only to find that the Dragoman group had moved to a cheaper hotel (the hotel Carib). So I got another taxi across town to the new hotel. Cheap it certainly was, with few of the comforts of home, but it was clean and I didn't catch anything.

Meet the group

Most of the rest of the group were also staying at the Carib, so I got the chance to meet up with the them; and to play at postman, as I had been asked, by Dragoman, to bring post with me (this included the new customs forms for the truck, as well as letters from home for the crew). It was in the Carib that I was also introduced to my first (of many) South American beer - Cristal - quite nice, but not as nice as a English bitter beer. :-)

Some things became evident to me, as I explored Santiago, such as the way women were treated. They were definitely not as "liberated" as they are in the West. Also that this society (and, as I was to find out later on in the trip, all Andean South American societies) was split along racial lines. Those descended from European stock were at the top end of the society, while those descended from the Andean Indians were at the bottom.

From Santiago I and 22 other travellers headed for the coast, through some very rough scenery. Along the way we were all assigned our truckjobs on this first day (mine was to look after the backpack locker, at the rear of the truck), along with tent partners (two to a tent) and cook groups (cooking for 25 people - 23 passengers and 2 crew - is something that I never got used to).

Our first night's camp was near the coast at a place called Las Salenas. Here I was introduced to such overlanding skills as putting up a tent (which I shared with an Australian chap), and scavenging for firewood.

Little dog

Our second night's camp site had the luxury of showers. Hot showers. This came in very handy as a local stray dog came mooching around our campsite. He was just a puppy, scrawny, dirty white, with a broken front leg. Most of the women coo-ed around him, and picked him up and petted him. Until it was noticed that there were small white bugs infesting its coat. These had transfered themselves to the clothes of those doing the petting. Off they ran to the showers to get rid of this unwanted infestation.

We passed, during this trip, many road-side grave markers. Most weren't as elaborate as the one in the picture (a cross covered with the number plates of the crash victims), but they were everywhere. On dangerous bends, the roadside was covered with these markers. Some were like little shrines with fresh flowers and candles burning.

The roads, with the exception of those in large cities, were not metaled (tarmaced). They were levelled and graded at, fairly frequent intervals, but the constant passage of trucks caused corrugations to form. These made parts of the trip very uncomfortable. We were not to see regular tarmac roads until Ecuador, where oil money made this possible.

Big Hand

Driving through a featureless valley - dry desert giving way to distant mountains, some with astronomical observatories perched on their peaks - we came across a concrete statue of a hand. Quite why the Chileans had created a large concrete hand, out in the middle of nowhere (24 09 29.99 S, 70 09 23.51 W), I never did find out. But we stopped and all got out to take photos.

Bush camp in the Atacama desert

From the hand we travelled, by yet more dusty bumpy roads, north to the Atacama desert. Reputed to be the driest place on earth. The sand was often more like a fine dust, and smelt (and tasted) like cement. We camped, one night, in the middle of nowhere - simply turned off the road in the late afternoon and set up camp a kilometer or so into the scrub. These sort of impromptu bush camps were one of the great delights of this trip for me. We could do this because the truck was self-sufficient in most things. We had plenty of water (both internally and in jerry cans), food, cold beer (thanks to the on-board fridge), electric lights slung from the side of the truck (powered from its batteries) and music (tapes). To this we would add a roaring fire, get the stools out, and have an enjoyable night. That evening in middle of the desert it got very dark, and I started to see a strange luminescence on the surrounding hills. The air was so dry that a sort of static discharge (St. Elmo's Fire) was happening.

Cooking in Moon Valley

My first "cook-night" was in a stunning spot called Moon Valley (22 56 54.44 S, 68 17 52.71 W). We arrived early in the day, having food shopped on the way, so I had plenty of time to sight-see before starting to cook. The weather was fine, with plenty of sun, but a strong breeze was blowing. This didn't cause me any concern until I started to cook.

Outdoors cooking can be fun, but learning to cook for so many people, while getting used to the four gas burners in the wind, was not. The sides of the burner housing could be set upright, to shelter the flames from the wind, but it was still hard to get the meal prepared and then cleared away afterwards. All in all though, the chicken casserole that we prepared that night went down well.

My first land border crossing

At the Chile/Bolivia border, the border posts were some 50km (30 miles) apart. The Peruvian border post was in the middle of a flat desert plain, in the middle of nowhere. Apart from the two or three border post buildings there is nothing but cold dusty desert for miles around. We camped overnight in the customs building - three walls, a roof and a concrete floor. A stray dog turned up, just as we were eating our evening meal (a stew cooked by that day's cook group), and was fed various scraps from our plates. The poor thing had never had such rich food before, and promptly vomited it back up, all over Boomer's (our trip leader) sleeping bag! After shooing the offending mutt away, we bedded down for the night. Nobody got much sleep that night, thanks to the penetrating cold and effects of the high altitude. Next morning one of the women in our group, trying to get the dust and dirt from her hair, emptied her water bottle over her head. Sheets of ice formed in her hair. It was cold. The water that I pour from my water bottle onto my tooth brush turned to ice by the time I put it in my mouth. It was very cold.

The truck's diesel engine had been setup for warmer climes and lower altitude, so this cold bright high altitude morning it wouldn't start. We had to push start our 14 ton truck. I, not pacing myself, ended up exhausted and suffering from mild altitude sickness. Judith, a Swiss nurse and one of my fellow travellers, realised what was happening to me and sorted me out quickly by feeding me sweets. Once my blood sugar levels had been restored I realised just how "out of it" I'd been. This was not the only time that Judith looked after me.

Later that day the crew pointed to our right, towards some unexceptional rocky ground and shouted "mines". I looked, but couldn't see any mine shafts or spoil heaps, so wondered what they were on about. I then saw the barbed wire, hung with little signs with "pellegro" and little skulls on them. Ah, so it's the other sort of mines that were being pointed out to us! But not all of us had figured this out, as shortly after, while still in the area, we stopped for a "comfort" break, and one of the women, seeking privacy, headed off towards some empty rocky ground. We had to shout and get her to retrace her steps, out of the mine field she'd walked into.

Soon after the rocky, mined, ground we came to salt flats. The surface of these salt flats was hard, but a few inches down it had the consistency of rice pudding (the overdone sort, favoured by so many schools in the UK). It was essential for our truck to stay up on this surface layers, so we had to keep our speed up (30 mph - 45 kph - or so) while driving across it. It didn't take long for us to see what would happen if we slowed down. A local truck had gone through the surface and was up to its axles in mud. Finding a hard sandy spot, we stopped to lend a hand, but to no avail, we couldn't move their truck. So we offered the driver's mate a lift to the next town; so that he could come back with help. The lift lasted all of 200 meters, as we went from 30 mph to 0 mph in the length of our truck. Everybody went flying. We too were stuck, sunk up to our axles in mud.

Stuck in the mud

The next 8 hours was spent digging down through the wet mud to a hard gravel layer beneath, some 4 or 5 feet down. Then we jacked the truck up and put railway sleepers (which we had "liberated" a couple of days earlier as a source of firewood) under the tyres. Each time we tried to drive forwards on the sleepers, the truck slid sideways off and back into the mud. Fortunately a passing jeep took the other truck's driver's mate to the local village of San Juan, and a tractor was dispatched to pull us both out. After a long day's digging, jacking up and pushing, it took the tractor 5 minutes to pull us and the other truck out. We both then followed the tractor, in fading light, onto San Juan, where we camped down for the night. The locals were fascinated at having so many strangers in their midst, but kept a respectful distance from us. We bedded down in a large, cold, room that the villagers gave us.

The next morning saw us topping up the trucks on-board drinking water tank from the well in San Juan and driving on to the Bolivian border post.