ODO: 321,298
Today we cross all our fingers, wear our lucky earrings and try to stay calm. It’s time to check with the post office and see if we can’t learn more about the whereabouts of our parts. We have decided if they don’t arrive by Friday, we cant wait for them any longer because we need to leave Guatemala. Good news! The nice gentleman at the post office tells us our parts will be clear of customs and ready for pick up by Friday! More finger crossing that he knows what he’s talking about. Full of excitement, we head to Pacaya, a dormant volcano to relax away from the city until Friday.
There are cows everywhere when we wake up. Well, maybe there are only ten, but they have spaced themselves around us. A baby cow is treating us to the song of its people as a nice welcome to the day. Or it’s yelling at us to leave its field, we’re not sure which. A couple of ranchers come through to collect their cows over the course of the morning. One stops to chat, and lets us know that this area is very safe (always nice to hear from a local), and if we would like to hike the volcano he would be happy to help us. KoKo spends the rest of the morning staring at the volcano, until the clouds roll in, obscuring our view. A little later in the day another rancher wanders by and has a long conversation with Berne in Spanish (Berne’s Spanish is getting really good). He invites us over for dinner, but we politely decline.
Friday. Parts day. We hope. We leave the volcano behind and head back to the post office. Everyone is anxious. After a little bit of waiting, a trip down the block to pay the customs fee, and lots of questions, we leave with our parts! Our confidence was low that this was going to happen, so there is a lot of excitement. There is a camp spot about an hour away that is geared towards overlanders, and doubly so people who need to do some work on their vehicles, and we head straight there. The place is a large walled in area with a big house on one end, and a large two bay car workshop full of tools at the other, with a grassy area for camping in the middle. There are also two giant Rhodesian Ridgebacks on guard duty, but both are very sweet once they are introduced to us. Now we get some rest because this weekend will be a lot of work.
And now we work. The morning is spent, with the help of our host, gathering metal and setting up our work space. The shop is a short walk from a hardware and small auto parts store, so we head that way to grab a few more things we need just in case everything is closed on Sunday. While Berne goes on a drive to pick out metal (of course we’re going to make something custom, have you met us?), KoKo gets to work investigating the grease stain on the back of the truck. She discovers our diesel line is leaking badly at the filter, and leaking inside the camper. She gets the line clamped and the mess cleaned up so it’s ready to talk about when Berne gets back. Not excited.
Berne comes back with a large piece of sheet metal so now it’s work time. We start with the driver’s side because there is no awning over there to contend with. After some measuring, Berne is fabricating the rear brackets using a combination of our tools and graciously provided host tools. The afternoon and evening are spent drilling holes, gluing metal to other metal, and setting rivets. Almost 50 rivets. That was how many we bought, not realizing we would go through so many. We also re-installed our mood lights that were removed for the temporary weld fix we had done a month ago. We work until late, late at night. Until we finish the driver’s side completely. Time for some much needed dinner and sleep.
KoKo wakes up yelling, “THE VOLCANO IS ERUPTING!!!”. What is really happening is the Catholic church down the road is setting off its “call to mass bombs”. Yes, that’s right, the church sets off small mortar shells at 5am to call its followers to first mass. Also, we aren’t camped on a volcano. We didn’t learn what the noise was until much later in the day. They call people periodically until almost 8am. Once we make it out of bed, our first stop is the handwear store for more rivets, and a stop-gap solution for the diesel leak. A second, long day spent fabricating and riveting, and somehow, by 10pm on Sunday night, we are finished. Double exhausted, we fall into bed without dinner. No church bombs are going to wake us up tomorrow.
Tired and sore, we being the packing process. All of the tools need to be packed, and the camper needs to be reset. Then its Monday meetings time while we gas up. Todays big adventure: cross the border into El Salvador. The border sneaks up on us, which is a nice surprise. Checking out of Guatemala is quick, but entering El Salvador is really nice. The infrastructure at the border is great. All the terminals have a person in them, and they are moving very fast, the bathrooms are really nice, they even have a lactation room. This is our first border crossing where we import the truck online. Yes, every time we cross a boarder we have to export and then import the truck. This may be our easiest crossing, and there is no inspection at all! We head into Santa Ana to gather our bearings and spend the night.
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