ODO: 349,918
Ahhh, a quiet day at the beach. Berne makes blueberry pancakes for breakfast. This is special because we finally found syrup! Not a popular food item in Latin America, they prefer honey on their pancakes. We put away our laundry, and reorganize the pantry so all our new groceries will fit. The cab and camper even get a good dusting! Just in case it’s pleasant, we put our feet in the ocean. Surprising to no one, the Pacific is pretty chilly. In the evening, the sea lions on the island we see out of our window start to yell.
Today is a big deal…it’s our two year adventure-versary! Our big plan to celebrate: look for a Thai food restaurant we liked on our way south, and go see Mano del Desierto (Hand of the Desert). To get there, we drive up the coast for a while before turning inland. We wind through some canyons, and hills dotted with small scale, personal mines. Reaching a mirador, we find a lone desert fox. It’s a littler nervous, but also a little hopeful we will give it food, so it doesn’t run away. And it’s right, we toss it some dog treats that it does not care for. When we offer it a small sausage, it takes it, and disappears into the desert, which ends our photoshoot.
Down the other side of the mountains and into the Atacama again, we make it to the Hand of the Desert. It is screaming windy, so we take a couple of quick pictures and get out of there. We can’t find the Thai food place we want, so we settle for some weird sushi (we think they got our order wrong, but we didn’t notice before we left), and some carrot cake instead. The carrot cake is great. We find a truck stop that is rumored to have fantastic showers for the night.
They are not rumors. The showers here are incredible. Hot water, high water pressure, and so, so clean! A+ start to the day. Back on the road, we head for some geoglyphs, and the worlds biggest clothing dump. Clothing from around the world gets shipped to Chile, and dumped in the Atacama desert. Because it’s so dry here, the items don’t break down. This dump is visible from space, and was all the environmental rage a few years ago. Instead of doing those things, we stop to watch some sea lions, and decide we want to spend one more night on a beach. We’ve been sticking to the coastal road as much as we can. We find a place over looking the ocean, with some small-medium sized lizards running around. Our spot for the night is just south of an airport, so we are treated to several low flying planes as the sun goes down.
We pack up very slowly, enjoying our beach spot as long as we can. We’re headed for a resupply in Iquique when try passenger front corner of the truck starts to behave strangely. It sounds like the tire is rubbing on the fender when we don’t turn sharply, which is odd. In the grocery store parking lot, KoKo discovers we have a broken shock. This is very bad. This is one of our fancy racecar parts that is hard to find. We wander around the grocery store while we try to make a plan for what to do that doesn’t involve waiting a month for parts to be shipped from the USA. It is Christmas time in here, all the decorations are out and Christmas music is playing over the speakers. It’s a weird soundtrack to mechanical trouble. The checkout lines are really long, so we get to work texting every open mechanic in town. You can text businesses in Latin America, it’s really nice. Leaving the store parking lot, very carefully, we drive under a low hanging wire that catches on our roof rack. We rip the wire, and several that are bundled to it, off the pole. Nothing is sparking or shorting, so we assume these are not power lines. We need to get off the road, today is not working out for us. This city is big enough to have chain hotels, so we burn some points, to hide from today.
Once the sun has started to go down, we venture out to explore the neighborhood. We are across the street from the beach, so start by walking along the high-rise lined waterfront. We haven’t heard back from any of the mechanics yet. We walk to the end of the promenade and back. There is an outdoor roller rink along the way, so we stop to watch the roller skating show that is happening. It’s like figure skating without the jumps and spins. And a bird poops on Berne. Maybe that’s enough for today.
The hotel is where we decide to stay for the entire weekend. We have several ideas for how to triage this situation, but most require the help of at least a grinder. “We think” we can graft on a stock 4Runner shock, the tricky part is going to be finding a 4Runner shock…We haven’t seen many in this area, or Prado’s. Those two trucks, and the Tacoma are all essentially the same guts with different outers. There are some beach walks, some dinners out, and some long work sessions over the weekend. Berne develops a nasty cough, so there is also lots of resting. And no word from any of the mechanics. Berne finally finds an off-road shop that seems interested. Off-road shops are the most helpful, for many reasons, but the biggest being that the truck is really cool, and the owners love to chat about it, and get to work on it.
We do not use our late check out today. We’re on call, waiting for the off-road shop owner to tell us we can come over. When we finally meet up, he tells us that he does not have the part we want, but might be able to do something else. Gotta love an off-road shop, always up for a challenge. The shop owner, Gabriel, is obsessed with FJ Cruisers, the other vehicle with matching guts to the truck, and has a couple that are in various states of build. After much, much, much grinding, they are able to modify an FJ shock to fit into the space our broken Fox shock used to live. And, amazingly, our shock isn’t completely broken! It somehow managed to unscrew itself from the bottom housing, and essentially fell out, instead of snapping off like we originally thought. We bag them up and stow them. This broken part should be much easier to find.
A couple of hours later we are back on the road! We head for the clothing dump, and the first off road test of our new shock. Interestingly, the dump is gone. There is evidence of a dump having existed…There is also ample evidence of garbage being burned. No more visible from space dump. While we’re out here, we look for our first geoglyph and come up empty handed. Oh well. Back, back on the road, we find a few groceries, some gas and an additional gas can. Berne has an adventure in mind, and its 700km with no gas stations. We find a empty field and tuck in under some trees for the night.
Geoglyphs round 2! We start off on a high note: A heard of llamas and their shepherd are depicted on the side of a hill, and it is incredible! Even with the power lines running through the valley. We drove 120km out of our way to see this, and we are not disappointed. Being a windy, sandy desert, there are dust devils everywhere. We drive alongside and through them to get to the Tarapaca Giant aka the Atacama Giant. Believed to represent a Shaman, it lives on the side of a hill, with a few other shapes, best seen from above.
Berne found a route that takes us through three volcano national parks, so now we drive straight up, hitting 10,000ft in less than an hour. The landscape changes from barren desert at the bottom, to lots of cactus and scrub grass as we ascend. Over the rest of the day, we rise and fall in elevation, always between 10,000ft and 15,000ft, which causes several of our groceries to explode. Interestingly, we’ve never had this happen before. The worst of it is the salad dressing on the cushions. When we finally stop for the night, next to a heard of llamas, it is cold and windy. We deploy the instapot for a big soup that helps with the temperature and elevation. The wind rocks us intermittently to sleep.
