Today, Thursday, April 18, we have gone as far south as we will go.  We drove the Pan American to the end.  The Pan American ends in southern Chile on the island of Chiloe.  We took a ferry to the island and drove south until the only option was turn around or wait for the next ferry to the Carretera Austral.  The ferry to the Carretera Austral is a 12 hour ride and it does not run all the time now that it is going into winter.  The road south once the ferry takes you across, is 1400 miles further on a gravel road to the very tip.  The weather here is cold, very windy, rainy and getting more like winter every day.  We are here out of season and most things are closed, like gas stations and stores.

We stopped and took a photo and had a little time of reminiscing and we came up with some things we have learned on this trip and here they are:

1. Everyone in the entire world eats hot dogs, french fries and drinks Nescafe.
2. People make out everywhere here, old people, teens, in cars, on blankets, on benches – some cities have parks devoted to making out called Love Parks.
3. Freedom is not that important to a lot of people
4. Putamyo has it all wrong.  Music of the Coffee Lands should include Young Turks, Gangnam Style and Karma Chameleon.
5. Every email address we have gotten in SA has been hotmail
6. People in Colombia do not have window screens
7. While some places look spectacular, most of the places look normal and unremarkable.
8. Sylvia LOVES shish kabobs.  She has an entire main lesson book featuring crayon drawings of shish kabobs
9. No one in Peru drinks cold drinks, always room-temperature soda and beer.
10. People in Colombia have never seen a camper trailer
11. Musica romanitca is instrumental versions of American songs played on traditional Andean instruments and played everywhere.  The most popular are Dust In the Wind, Hotel California and El Condor Pasa but the list is long (usually 80’s power ballads) and we are bringing back CDs!
12. Tomato sauce in every country includes lots and lots and lots of sugar
13. All the $2 bills and Sacagawea dollars end up in Ecuador.  Sacagawea looks very much like an Ecuadorian woman with her baby.  The Sacagawea dollar was coincidentally chosen the same year Ecuador decided to use US money.  Coincidence?  We don’t think so.  See photos below!
14. Everybody has Facebook
15. Dolls are always white skinned – why??  If I had a million dollars, I would open a dark-skinned doll factory.
16. In Colombia, women wore shoes that matched their shirt every day.  They must have a lot of shoes.
17. You pronounce cuy “kweee” just like the guinea pig sounds
18. In Peru, everyone checks every piece of money for being a counterfeit
19. Manjar, oh we have learned so much about manjar.  We even learned to like it.  Somewhat.  Some of us more than others.  It is everywhere and in everything.
20. Everything comes in a plastic bag, not a bottle or jar.  Bags of water, ketchup, jelly, mayo, tomato sauce, manjar…
21. There are many species of cavy.  They are all different and they are actually different species, they do not breed
22. The extreme ingenuity and work ethic of people in Peru, long days, hard work, hardly any pay and people are happy
23. Many words are hard to translate (like, about, too, so)
24. If you wear an outfit like this, it makes you instantly look like a fascist.

    

We spent a few days in Santiago strolling around the broad pedestrian streets and eating Chilean sopapillas (deep fried bread topped with spicy fresh salsa) and pine nut & cheese empanadas.

We went to the Museum of Memory & Human Rights where we learned quite a lot about the reign of Pinochet.  Unlike the Shining Path exhibit in Lima where Peruvian people did not have cameras (even in the 1980’s) and all the photos were from foreign journalists, this museum was well documented with video, photos and interviews and it was an effective museum.

We went to the Museum of Modern Art and were thoroughly entertained for an hour.

We returned to the camper and got the low down from Rueban: a man was looking at the camper.  We soon found out why as a note was tucked into the window – he wanted to buy the camper.  He returned the next morning and he talked to Mark for a long time.  People always have questions about the camper – how does it work?  Where are the water tanks?  How do you hook it up to the van?  Mark was illustrating the last one and put the hitch on the van and forgot to take it off.  He also forgot to lock it on.  We left that day to visit NYKLine’s SA office to work on shipping logistics.  We drove through Santiago, got lost a few times and stopped at a park.  We decided to just call NYK and headed back to the camper, stopping at the grocery store to bring Rueban a bunch of different cookies (Ryan did gas station store recon so we had a good idea what he ate).  We returned, cleaned up and prepared to head south when Mark realized that the trailer hitch was missing!  He had left it connected to the van and it fell off when we drove that morning.  We painfully retraced our route, possible only because Mark has a photographic memory for driving.  We call him the Forensic Driver because he can always tell what happened at a scene or remember exactly the way we drove.  We drove but did not find the right hitch.  The next day, we drove back into town to buy a hitch but, because such things like trailers are rare in Chile, so are trailer hitches.  We went to three stores before we got to the wonderful store MetalCar where they sent us to a place to get one fabricated.  Turned out fabricating a hitch was not engineeringly sound and we could special order one for $600 plus expedited shipping plus the extra hitch AND 10 days of waiting –  so we returned to MetalCar to buy the hitch they had bu (Mark said he could make it work) -but they were closed.  We headed back home and, as you may have guessed, we were  downright despondent, disturbed, and depressed.  So we stopped at the grocery store (very fancy, like Whole Foods) and bought Rueban a three pack of empanadas from the deli.

In the morning, we headed back into Santiago where Mark took the van to a brake shop to have the back brakes adjusted and the kids and I walked around looking for street food (which of course we found) and then back to MetalCar for the hitch.  Its not the right hitch but it seems to work.  And best of all, the nice man at MetalCar posted a comment on our blog of all the food we should try to eat in Chile, something we are absolutely hoping to accomplish!  If you are ever in Santiago and need help with your trailer, head to MetalCar! http://www.metalcar.cl/

The whole Santiago escapade was like a giant scavenger hunt and we had a really thorough driving tour of the entire city and now feel like we are very well acquainted with Santiago.  We will be coming back through here on the way north so we are looking forward to more  Latin jazz.

So now we were ready to head south.  We hitched up the camper, said goodbye to Rueban and headed south.  The days are getting shorter and colder, the sun doesn’t come up until after 8am and other overlanders say the wind is bad in the far south but we are going to see how far we can get.