Luck and Losing in Chile's Lake District
We’d been tracing Chile’s slender torso for a month and a half. Gone were the days of lazy, drifting vanlife — peacing out in the same lonely cove or mountain village for a week or more, fishing, surfing, forgetting the day of the week. When we crossed the border from Peru we adopted a break-neck pace, reminiscent of road trips of my youth (1200 miles in two days, Dad at the wheel parceling out sips of root beer and “pee-pee breaks”, Jesse and me singing a tired refrain: “Wheeeen are we guuunnna get therrre?”). But what began as a rally-pace through thousands of miles of lonely tarmac (damn good tarmac, nevertheless), became a stutter-and-stall and altogether cease-to-persist. We’ve had car troubles. Lots.
But first - it’d be remiss not to recount the eerie beauty of the Atacama Desert in Chile’s north. Eerie because of the stakes there on the forsaken backroads, though graphically marvellous. This isn’t just an ocean of sand as far as the eye can see - the most deserty desert in the world contains surprising variation. Geographical whimsies like a salt river coursing through swaths of dunes, salt pans with resident flamingoes, a dozen or so volcanoes piercing the middle-distance.
We drove like we were on a mission because we were. We were due in Santiago the first week of February where Tim’s folks would be joining us for three weeks of road tripping through Chile’s Lake District. After a string of eleven-hour-plus days on the road, we arrived in the capital with time to spare. We spent our first night in the tranquil, tree-lined northern suburbs with fellow countrywoman, Jean - sister-in-law of my good pal Sarah. She took us in without hesitation, kindly acquainted us with delicious wine and gave us our first genuine shower since Peru. Thanks, Jean.
Once we collected our first passengers of the trip and savoured a few days of restful, luxurious non-driving at an AirBnB in Santiago, we headed west to the coastal city of Valparaiso. There we meandered the steep graffiti-clad streets and pilgrimaged to the home of my favourite Spanish-language poet, Pablo Neruda. His exuberant and eccentric personality - and his propensity for excess - were visible in his home teeming with odd ornaments.
It happened when we started working our way south again - Babo gave her first signs of dissent. It was dark and we were on a dirt road, so we spent the night right where we were. The next morning we awoke to a throaty engine and a burst of honks and realised we had parked in front of a farmer’s front gate. “El auto no funciona” - was the extent to which we could explain our problem to the man and his wife on their way to work. He looked mildly sympathetic and offered some advice with the name of the nearest town where we might find help - in the rapid-fire Spanish that Chileans use.
As we drove - carefully, and thankfully on quiet backroads - the orderly hillsides signalled to us wine country. We didn’t hesitate to take in a vineyard or two on our way - undeterred by the absence of power steering or brakes. Besides, it was Sunday.
I’ll spare you the details of the actual mechanical saga. We had made it to a campsite near a town and the owner arranged a mechanic friend to come and attend to our car. What followed was some eyebrow-raising tinkering, several calls to Dad in the U.S.A. to cross-check the mechanic’s diagnosis, days of sourcing a part from Santiago, so much Google Translate and heaps of forced patience. Trevor and Eleanor took it like seasoned pros - poetic and philosophical to the last, ever-quick with an anecdote from their road trips through Namibia and Mozambique.
When we got on the road again, four days later, we had been well-fed with a parrilla - a Chilean braai - and equipped with a few bags full of onions and peaches. The mechanic had treated us like friends and family (with the exception of the bill). From here we explored the bizarre monkey puzzle forests of Parque Nacional Conguillio - blackened volcanic landscapes and blue lakes. And again, Eleanor and Trevor took the unpredictability of vagabond life in their stride - ever up for boondocking and bathing in natural sources. And just to illustrate just how game they were, Mom (a long-time lover of the tiny house movement and enthusiastic down-sizer), hatched a plan to accommodate all four of us in the van. This arrangement, which she joyfully and passionately detailed to us on several occasions, we never did find ourselves desperate enough to try.
We had several beautiful days in the Lake District of south-central Chile. The landscape here reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest, combined with the lush lava scapes of the Hawaiian islands. We camped on a volcano rim, next to a river where anglers waded to their wastes to fish for salmon. We picked blackberries and stopped for empanadas as often as possible. We pulled out our blue tarp to shield us from the rain, drank tea and knitted baby alpaca scarves.
Three weeks later it was time to bid farewell to our hardy road-compadres in Puerto Montt. It was on our way from the airport that the familiar loss of steering and breaks returned to haunt us. This wasn’t a mere apparition of problems past - it was indeed the shoddy work of a backyard mechanic (however amiable). This time, there would be no further driving.
Here is where the story stalls for a two week interval of obligatory forbearance. We might have said that our luck ran out or that ours was a fool’s errand anyway. And had I been detailing the episode some weeks ago, perhaps I would have taken this slant. But I am ever-more certain of the wisdom of such sayings as: “All’s well that ends well.” And, “Everything will be alright in the end. If it is not yet alright, it is not yet the end.” These are not mere platitudes.
We happened to break down in front of the home of a young mechanic. Angelo lived with his two brothers and his father, a taxi driver and mother, who ran a restaurant inside three buses parked side-by-side in the driveway. We were towed all of twenty metres into the driveway and wordlessly invited to stay the night until the next day when we could sort out the problem. The problem - a broken hydraulic pump and pulley - would not, in fact, be sorted out for two weeks until a spare could be located and shipped from Chile’s north.
I’m aware that it’s easy to wax wise about drama after the fact - the horrible, debilitating and scary sentiments of the moment often morph into moralistic, even humorous, cautionary tales, with some distance. But fresh in my mind is the sense of being at the mercy of our situation and in need of understanding and compassion - and then the uncomfortable feeling to pushing the limits of that compassion. I didn’t even mention Victor, the mechanic employed at the Chevy dealership who moonlighted as our personal mechanic and did everything from sourcing the part to fitting it when it eventually arrived, and rescuing us again when there was a hiccup.
Angelo’s family not only remained boundlessly hospitable, but they lavished us with bread and coffee, fresh fruit and seafood and cake throughout our stay. In turn we ate at their restaurant a few times and gave them a parting gift basket of goodies. Then they gave us a packed lunch and a goodbye note. It defied social convention and the kind of give-take reciprocal kindness we’re used to exchanging. There was nothing we could do but accept their generosity and marvel. And try to hold in our minds their model of a simple life, nonplussed by intrusion, unflinchingly giving and even - can you believe it - seemingly, blessed by it.
