The roads have been hard on poor la Tortuga, and the turbo is broken.
The little thing inside that spins is supposed to have .5mm of wiggle, and it has 4mm!! So we’re stuck in Cuzco for a few days at least (we hope not more) waiting for a part. It’s Sunday the 29 of April, and we’ve been here for…2 weeks already.
Luckily, we couldn’t be stuck in a nicer place. Quinta Lala is a haven. It has everything we need, is right in a wonderful city, and is chock full of friendly and interesting travelers. We’ve probably met more people here than we have on our entire trip. We’ve been having a great time exchanging stories, places to camp, road recipes, and drinking boxed red wine. Apparently in Chile, all the wines come in boxes as well as bottles, and the quality is the same. It probably has something to do with the roads, and the impossibility of transporting glass bottles intact on terrible dirt or gravel roads. We certainly appreciate it!!
Douglas has been making friends by fixing everyone’s trucks – so far he has fixed Colin and Liz’s Ford (twice – that’s Ford for you) and two Land Rovers. We’ll see who’s next.
In the meantime, we’re taking advantage of the time to organize our lives. We have 6 weeks of travel left, at which point we’ll ship the van from Buenos Aires (assuming we make it there!) to the east coast of the US, where we’ll pick up our dog, Saira (she decided she didn’t want to come on this trip – too much time in the car). The van will be 3 weeks in transit, and we plan to spend that time visiting friends in NC and Boston, then we’ll pack everything in the van and drive over to Vancouver, where we’ll settle.
In the meantime, here’s an update of where we’ve been this year, and how long it’s taken us:
USA, NC to Texas: 2000 miles in 4 days
Central America, Mexico to Panama: 4000 miles in 2 months
South America, Ecuador to Peru: 3000 miles in 1 month
So far we’ve traveled 9000 miles, and we think we have between 2500 and 3500 miles to go, depending on which way we go, and what the roads are like. We hear they're pretty bad in Bolivia, but quite good in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.
And, yes, people actually say ‘Ay, caramba’ here. It’s my new favorite curse. I don’t know exactly what it means, but the taxi drivers say it whenever something goes wrong.
2 comments:
Vancouver? What happened to Ireland?
Hey Erica,
hm. This is a long story. Short version - importing Saira to Ireland is trickier than we thought. She needs to have a rabies test done by one particular lab in Kansas, and then wait *6 months* before entering. Ridiculous. We looked into this before we left on this trip, and got bad information. And now it's too late - we had planned to arrive in 6 weeks. We can't go without her, so we're going back to plan A and moving straight to Canada instead. We might still go to Ireland in a few years. It's too bad - we were excited about Ireland. But moving straight to Vancouver makes us really happy, too! 8)
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