24, You lucky, lucky b...

This beach was addictive, despite our constant urge to drive south we treated ourselves to a day off. Well, it wasn’t exactly a day off. Steve decided that it was a good day to pull the front half the engine apart to change the melted timing belt cover (ignoring the implications of it going wrong in the middle of nowhere almost out of water). Because we can’t just sit still. We played in rock pools, caught a huge (ish) fish that got bought into the rock pool by a wave with bare hands and then ran away from the rock pool when another wave bought in a jellyfish.

Now here is something that happened longer ago than you can believe, the miners trapped underground in Chile that was allllll over the news. 9 years ago, NINE years! 33 miners trapped 700m underground for 70 days. Since we were passing by, we swung in to take a peek at the briefly famous San Jose Mine.

Turns out that whilst the story is interesting, the place is really dull. Just a few holes in the ground. But there was the actual rescue capsule and even one of the actual real life no longer trapped miners giving the tours. Oh and also…. Actually no that’s about it.

Our desire to be productive as reached new levels, tailgating tourist busses can sometimes grant us free WiFi and improved MPG, win win.

Pisco is a drink, similar to brandy, claimed by both Peru and Chile as their own and protected in name to certain regions in both countries. The Chilean region is called the “Elqui Valley”, pronounced “Alchie”, as in “it’s 9:30am why are you drinking you bloody alchie”.

Our alarm call was four trillion goats bleating their way through the sand with several people, a few horses and half a dozen dogs trying their absolute best to keep them in check, they weren’t very successful. Horned shenanigans aplenty, it was the perfect morning pantomime.

Lured in by reports of generous sample sizes, we decided to indulge in a purely educational and partly medicinal tour of the “Capel Distillery”. It was all very nice, especially the three hours spent in the lovely shady car park with nice toilets and fast WiFi eating lunch and sobering up post tour. The most interesting thing we learnt, that we can remember anyway, is that oak barrels can only be used twice for storing the Pisco and then lose their ability to add flavour, like a tea bag. So the oak is usually crushed up but they re-use it where they can, such as the counter tops and walkways.

The valley is gorgeous with a slower paced, almost Italian feel to it. Grapes growing on every piece of land possible presumably to maintain the ability to call it “Pisco” and not “Brandy” which doesn’t sound anywhere near as fancy pants.

We learnt that when vines have to work harder, like here where they grow in crappy sand then the fruit has a better taste. So the torturing of these vines makes for a better bottle of Pisco, 6kg of traumatised grapes go into each of these bottles. Maybe that is why stressed people turn to drink, to taste the same pain as keeps them awake at night and shouting at the traffic jam.

Another claim to fame here is the clear night skies, a number of observatories litter the desert and so we cut through a bumpy backroad to see what all the fuss was about. There were indeed stars, lots and lots of stars. Some brighter, some duller, some closer to others than others and others further from the others than some others. And a few others too.

Almost out of food we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave this blissful area quite yet, so we had a dinner of lettuce and cheese. Finally some running water after weeks of arid deadness, we camped beside the lovely river where there lived 5 dogs. Very friendly dogs, running around having the best life.

Bastard dogs, traitors, sinners. Bastards.

After a very pleasant refreshing morning swim, we returned to get changed and shut the van door, no sign of dogs anywhere. 5 minutes later, just 5 frickin’ minutes later we open the door and Steve’s two week old Flip has gone. Still no sign of the dogs. Those bastard dogs.

Two hours, yes TWO hours of searching through the brush, near and far, resulted in zero success. We even used an empty bottle as bait and followed the bastard dogs to where they took it but with no success. Never has Steve wanted to punch a cute puppy right in the face before, but it was hard to resist despite the happy loving friendly eyes of the little shit bag.

Bastards.

With great reluctance we travelled on without drowning a single canine. Back to the coast to watch seals try and ride waves onto rocks quite often bouncing back down into the raging waters below, Pelicans soar past like bombers and vultures continue to be disgustingly ugly.

Since around the time of the salt flats we’ve had an engine warning code for a misfire on cylinder 2. There were no symptoms of this and so we assumed it was related to the fuel pump dying that time or salt in somewhere. Only when we went to leave the coastal carpark a severe stutter suddenly disproved this theory, it was real. We made it to a place to camp and an extremely long evening of investigations pointed towards it being an injector. It wasn’t the spark plug, it wasn’t the ignition lead, it wasn’t the compression and it didn’t seem to be the coil pack. (Yay for hoarding spares!) All this investigation possible thanks to a cheapo Bluetooth code reader from eBay, best money ever spent.

But it’s OK, we’re 60km from Santiago and in the middle there is a shop Steve has had saved on the map since before we even set off. A used Subaru parts shop. The one and only on the trip since America, 25,000km and we have just 60km to limp on three good cylinders and one intermittent cylinder. Not bad.

So we start by driving on the main highway through a long uphill tunnel with only one lane on each side, and no hard shoulder. Not so smart… We’ve a car park saved within walking distance of the parts shop but just a few blocks away in heavy traffic the engine stops. Nothing gets it going again so we push onto the driveway of an apartment block and start cursing, maybe when it’s cold it’ll run again…

And then along comes Rolando, our angel but that sounds a bit gay so we’ll say our saviour instead. He speaks perfect English and owns a VW Kombi and is about to depart for his own overlanding trip next month. He was on his way to the parts shops as it turns out there are hundreds of car parts stores on the same street, but that they all shut in the next half hour as it is Saturday. 5 minutes of walking and it’s like heaven, turns out there are a bunch of Subaru shops and the third one has a whole bin of injectors with at least 20 of the ones we need. Score!

After spraying fuel all over everything the new injector is installed and IT RUNS, IT BLOODY RUNS HOLY COW WE CAN HARDLY BELIEVE IT. And yes, that is a fire extinguisher that we didn’t need.

Rolando lives just up the road and says we’re welcome to stay with him, so we park our newly moving van up in the secure car park and spend the evening drinking his drinks.

What crazy timing. Unbelievable, and you might not believe it but it’s all true. We broke down with engine problems 5 minutes’ walk from the first shop selling exactly what we needed in over 25,000km. We then had just half an hour before the shops shut for the rest of the weekend, but Rolando came past to warn us, showed us the way, helped haggle the price down and then gave us a place to stay.

Oh and even luckier than all of this, when we first broke down Jenjen walked to the nearby shop to grab a couple of things while Steve stared and cursed at the dead engine and she found popcorn kernels for the first time in Chile, something she’s been missing in the same was Steve would miss his tools or Westy Rick was missing his second cylinder. Winning!

We spent the next day getting a tour of Santiago with our new friend, met another will be traveler soon and some statues claiming to be horse tails but looking like something else.

It all worked out, we should break down more! See you on the road Rolando, you bloody hero, thanks for looking after us.

We finally got conned. All this time and they finally got us. Chile, as a more modern and developed place, uses card more than cash. With the help of two other attendants the petrol station douchebag distracted us whilst charging us too much. Instead of the price, 41,077 pesos he typed in 52,667 which was the quantity of fuel we bought to three decimal places, the other number on the pump screen. So this is so he can be like “d’oh, wrong number” if we had noticed, but we didn’t until it was too late and we were a hundred kilometres down the road, 28 dollars poorer than we should be. Oh and the stolen flip flop. It really hasn’t all gone our way this time.

But overall we’ve done OK, ahhhh four cylinders burning cleanly. What a relief.

But oh no, a new horrible buzz from the engine. Thankfully just a massive rock wedged into the exhaust heat shield. That was a good time to have the timing belt cover back to full integrity and not patched with beer can anymore. Thank f…

And now we’re on the first road upon which we will backtrack, Santiago is nearby the port from which we will ship in two short months. So now we have to decide if we visit a place now, or on the way back up. A constant reminder of how the end is sadly closing in. But not yet, absolutely not yet.

Map. That is the link. Hey, why is it still blue? Stop it! The link is on the left, ignore this bit we don't know why it's doing this it shouldn't.