October 23, 2018 – November 12, 2018

Entering Chile was such a drastic contrast to our last few days in Bolivia. The highway was paved and had wide shoulders, we were driving 80 to 100 km/hr and there were road signs giving distances to the next town. We were headed for San Pedro de Atacama, a small tourist town not too far from the border, where we were looking forward to warmer temperatures, a shower, and a little bit of village life – maybe a nice restaurant, some interesting shops, that kind of thing.

When we arrived we had difficulty finding a camping site. We drove right past the first place we had on our list as it was down a lonely abandoned road and too far from the centre of San Pedro. The next site looked great, but all of their camping spots were booked (many packaged tours make San Pedro one of their stops). The third site, well, it was good enough, but not great. Basically a sandy parking lot. But it was secure, the solar showers were hot if you hit them at the right time of day, we had electricity, and it was within easy walking distance of the town centre.

We had read that Chile was going to be expensive, and we were finding exactly that. The “parking lot” camping was costing us about $15 CAD, per person, per night. Diesel cost about $1.40 CAD per litre. Yikes.  Even so, we decided we needed a dinner out. After all, on October 25^th we had been on the road for exactly one year!

Our guide book had made San Pedro sound absolutely magical, but after the isolated nights in Bolivia, it was all seeming a little too contrived. We considered visiting one of the many tourist attractions in the area but after seeing the large tour buses with said locations plastered across the front, we decided it would be hard to beat our experience in Bolivia, and so after a few days of town life, we moved on.

We drove to the regional capital of Calama to resupply groceries and propane and to chase down how to pay for our car insurance for Chile and Argentina. Our guide book had said that there were no other words for Calama, other than it was, to quote, a “shit hole”. We braced ourselves for what this mining town would be like, picturing rough houses, dirty streets, and rough watering holes where angry men washed away the dust from the copper ore.  However, we were pleasantly surprised! There was nothing wrong with this town.  From a tourism point of view, there wasn’t much more there than an opportunity to resupply, but after some of the places we have been in on this trip, it was far from what we would classify as a “shit hole”.

We spent a night in a rest area in a neighbouring town, complete with toilets and showers (well, until morning when the water for some reason was shut off). The next day we started to make our way to the coast. We made a quick detour to visit the Mano del Desierto (Hand of the Desert), an art installation that we had seen on many other blogs over the years.

We pulled in, shut down the truck, walked around the sculpture taking a few photos. Ten minutes later Derek tried to start the truck….the engine cranked for a dozen seconds but didn’t fire.  We stared at each other in silence, a sick feeling creeping into both of our stomachs.  We had noticed that the truck had seemed a bit slow to start recently, but it always started. We were in the middle of a huge desert, miles and miles from any sort of mechanic shop. I watched the only other car in the parking lot pull out and wondered if I should run over and ask them to call a tow truck. In a flash Derek had the “Haines Manual” out. I decided it was not yet time to start talking tow truck with Derek, so we sat, we sweated and Derek read. He stopped reading. He was very quiet. “Well?”, I asked. “I’m afraid to try to start it,” he said. Ooh, not good. He then “bumped” the starter a few times, as described in the manual to cause the primary fuel pump to engage for 20 second intervals and then truck started up. Huge sighs of relief all around, I think even Piper gave out a sigh. We hoped that it was just a temporary problem, maybe due to the truck being parked on a fairly steep angle. We decided to keep driving. What else? There was nothing where we were.

We headed on to the coast to look for places to camp. IOverlander listed several sites along the coast.  We would drive off of the main road towards what looked like an ideal spot.  Then we would pull in and there would be garbage EVERYWHERE. I’m talking broken glass, burned tires, old mattresses – really horrible. So we kept going. We ended up in the municipal camp ground in a little town called Taltal for the night. We were kind of bummed, as we had been looking forward to some isolated, free camping along Chile’s coast for quite a while and of course we were still worried about the truck and the consequences if it really developed a starting problem.  While at the municipal campground, Derek changed out the trucks two fuel filters to see if that would help with the slow starting issues.

We drove through the “no dogs allowed” park of Pan de Azucar and found a relatively clean camping spot on the beach just south of the park boundary. We spent a few days there, and while there Derek changed out the truck air filter, in an attempt to correct the slow starting issue….it seemed to make a difference. YEAH!

In Bolivia, it was difficult to find anyone who would fill the propane tank in our camper.  We have been using this little Bio Lite stove to save on propane….here’s a little video Derek made about the stove.

We continued on, finding a decent ocean side camp, except for the “no dogs allowed” signs (we were again in a National Park area), so we moved on.  A few failed attempts to camp along the ocean due to not wanting to camp amid the trash, we ended up spending a night parked next to the lighthouse in a the small town of Huasco. We were getting really frustrated with how dirty all the free camping spots were.  In addition, friends had given us a heads up that the coming weekend was a 4 day weekend for the Chileans, which would likely mean lots of people descending on their favourite beach spot.  We decided to spend some money on a nice beach side campground in the small city of La Serena.

For about $32 CAD per night we had a site across from the beach, with a table, shade and a grill, as well as our own personal toilet and shower. We decided to hang out there for the weekend, and enjoyed walking along the long, wide, clean beach. La Serena is the second oldest city in Chile, and it had a relaxed seaside charm to it.

While there, Derek discovered that a weld that we had done in Arequipa, Peru on our exhaust system had not held, and so we ended up extending our stay one more day to get a sleeve installed on the weak section of the exhaust system.

While the truck was up on the ramps, the mechanic asked Derek to start the truck to test the weld for leaks. All was good. Derek turned off the truck, we paid, we chatted a bit, and when Derek went to start up the truck in order to back down off the ramps, it cranked, and cranked, and cranked….and then started. It was seeming like the starting issue was more severe when the engine was hot, and, again, the truck was on a slope.

We decided to keep going. Derek wanted to do some more research as to what the problem might be before we considered going to a mechanic. We headed inland into the Elqui Valley, an area known for its astronomical observatories, it’s Pisco distilleries (Pisco is a distinctive brandy made from grapes), and for being the birth place of Gabriella Mistral, one of Chile’s most famous literary figures.

It was so good to see the green of the valley. The north of Chile is almost all desert, as was much of Bolivia and the coast line of Peru. We were getting tired of sand and dust and very little in the way of green. Here, irrigation up the slopes of the valleys resulted in great swaths of green, mostly grape vines. We spent a couple of days camping in the country side around the main town of Vicuna, then decided to head into town for some internet to see if we could diagnose the truck. It was starting, but not as quickly as it should, and Derek had a few more ideas of what the problem could be but he needed some help from Google.

At our camping spot in Vicuna, Derek performed a few tests, but was unable to find the source of the problems.  We decided we needed a Dodge shop with diagnostic tools and made an appointment in La Serena for the following week. We had five nights to kill before the appointment, and didn’t want to drive too far from La Serena. We ended up finding a nice spot by a river. We hung out, read books and Derek tried some fly fishing – he caught a small 22cm rainbow trout which was quickly returned to the little stream.  We then moved on to a spot near a reservoir where we had a great fire.  In general things were going alright but the whole time, Derek was feeling uneasy about the truck.  It was possible that it was a problem with our fuel injection system, which could be very expensive to fix and could delay our trip for weeks, maybe even months depending on the parts situation.  Yet the truck continued to start reasonably well when cold and seemed to run well once it was going.

We were anxious to move on. We were getting tired of being delayed so many times in the last few months…..6 days in Piura, Peru with the water pump, several days in Arequipa for tires and the brake issues, more than a week in La Paz, Bolivia for dentist visits, several days in Sucre to get Piper’s paperwork in order, and now we were killing time waiting for the appointment for the truck.

Then again, we had been on the road over a year, and we had driven approximately 37,000 kilometres, so perhaps it should have come as no surprise that we and the truck had a few maintenance issues.