A Long Drive

Election day. Photo: ©Fred Gault

Election Day - Technology in 2008 - History is made. (Map this!)

Recently, the US has been more and more on our minds. The election was interesting enough; the financial crisis made it urgent to follow the US news. We started reading New York Times more thoroughly. We downloaded NPR’s Forum as a political and economic weather-vane for the Bay Area. We figured out a way to vote using the Federal Write in Absentee Ballot, which you can use if you are overseas and you do not receive your absentee ballot.

As the financial horizon looked grim, the election results became more interesting. We were determined to find a hotel room with CNN and wireless internet access so that we could follow the election results live. It never ceases to amaze me what technology can do today. We joined an impromptu election party put together by good friends Fred and Ada. Using a Skype to Skpe video call, we had sausage and champagne together but separately. Monitoring CNN on TV, various web sites and blogs on the laptop, chatting with friends and keeping up an IM conversation with my brother kept us busy all night long.

Winding River

In wine country - A fine Torrontes - Overlooking the vineyards - Great stories

While we were living in San Francisco we usually went to the wine country to celebrate birthdays, so how lucky to find ourselves in the Cafayate wine country during Neena’s birthday! A birthday calls for celebration and how better to celebrate than with fine wine and food, so I arranged for a private lunch for two at the San Pedro de Yacochuya winery.

A day on the farm

SP Yacochuya was located in the hills of Cafayate and had stunning views over the countryside, a panorama of green and blue. We were greeted by the owner’s wife and we sat in their veranda discussing wine and their family history while enjoying antipasti. “wine is life, wine is celebration”, she opined, as we swirled glasses of their excellent Torrontes, a varietal particular to Salta. Theirs was uncharacteristic of the varietal, more like a Sauternes in the glass but completely dry with a long finish in the mouth.

Tasting wine

Our garrulous host led us to our table overlooking the vineyard and the kitchen brought out the main course of cabrito. The fare was rustic but the wines and hospitality were top notch. Looking over the vineyards made us miss San Francisco even more as it took us back to all the good times in the wine country. But in another sense it felt like home and for the first time Neena said that she could live in another country besides the United States.

In the Garganta del Diablo

Neena’s last birthday came near the beginning of the trip, this one comes closer to the end. The last was fraught with frustration as we ran from restaurant to restaurant to find corkage, while this was a quiet genteel experience where everything was perfect. But beautiful perfect meals don’t make for great stories like decanting an old L’Angelus into a Nalgene bottle. Happy birthday Neena, may we have both types of birthdays in our future!

Cactus	Neglect	Red Rocks	Pretty Canyon

New additions to the website:
• Best pictures from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

Valle de Luna

Neena’s reflections

Anniversary - Why? - Time to reconsider - Learning - Crisis

The 1st year anniversary of our trip was on Oct 20th, 2007. Last year, at 10pm this day, we left our apartment of 11 years to head North toward the Arctic circle, before turning around for the long drive south to the tip of the Americas. A year later, we are making an assessment, what did we expect from this trip and what have we learnt?

Humberstone

When Shreesh’s parents visited us in Peru, they asked us the question, “Why are you doing this trip”? Since our four month honeymoon, we have always been committed to taking occasional breaks in our work lives to travel, which both of us love to do. We did not want to wait till after retirement. The time to do so is NOW, in tandem with changes in us and our abilities as we age. I do not think we would attempt to climb Aconcagua at the age of 65, or sleep on the deck of a ship as we did in the Andaman Islands 17 years ago.

El Tatio

But this time, as we are comfortably settled, the trip represents more than travel for us. It was time to take stock, to change our lives if we wanted to. We could continue as we did, leading comfortable lives in San Francisco, or we could change, acquire new experiences in new places with new careers, before it was too late. We had a vague idea that an extended trip through the Americas would give us time to reconsider, away from the places and friends we love so much.

We worked hard and learnt a lot in preparation for this trip. Auto mechanics, Paramedics, Spanish. All were new and enjoyable experiences, some more (like learning Spanish in Oaxaca) than others. Visiting the wonderful Caribbean coast, I finally lost my fear of water and discovered the joy of snorkeling and water activities. I learnt that I can easily hike at 16,000ft, as long as I pace myself. On the long 8 hour drives, we started making big plans. Amsterdam, Budapest, Prague, Montreal. Which city was it going to be? Or should we change careers to study enology? The options and debates were limitless.

Manu

But the financial crisis has, ironically, brought us closer to home. We read the New York Times assiduously, we download and listen to Michael Krasny’s Forum. We follow all the gaffes that Sarah Palin makes and view the election map eagerly. Even if the US is going through hard times, I feel it is an important time to be there, on the brink of big changes. As we watch our portfolio drop, it also seems as an easy option, go back to the city we know, the friends we love, to new challenges which are always available in San Francisco. What will the next few months bring - big changes or flight back to the comforting arms of our beloved San Francisco? I don’t know yet, but the answer to that question is waiting at the end of the trail.

On the road

Shreesh’s reflections

A year gone by - Change - Big changes - Overcoming Fear

I would like to say that “Gee, I can hardly believe a year has gone by!” but I cannot. It definitely feels like a year, if not more. Does time fly by when you are having fun? Yes, if it is an abandon mindless kind of fun I do think it does. I fully support that kind of fun, but there seems to be surprisingly little of it in my life. Being on the road in foreign lands has made me acutely aware of every single day; each interaction requires thought and care with no opportunity to be on autopilot. Time scrapes past like a rasp, peeling off an old layer, making me aware of each little peak and each little valley. Every day I am forced to look at the world with new eyes, decide whether to stay where I am or which direction to take if I go.

Sillustani

I was hoping to change in a big Che Guevara type way, but that has not happened for I still remain a humble and optimistic Ernesto. Change is good and I am ready for it, but it cannot be forced. It needs to happen as naturally and organically as a larva becomes a pupa and the best I can do is put myself in a position where change can happen. In San Francisco, surrounded by everything that I loved, there was no space for change, my life was full with too many fascinating and beautiful things. Change needs space, a tabula rasa where it can occur.

Valle de Luna

While I remain obdurate and unchanging, the world from which I came from now seems to be on the cusp of dramatic changes. Mammon has run wild in many shapes and guises and it is now time for a reckoning, perhaps one of epic proportions. We need to build a strong cage to confine him for another eighty years, because if we don’t even our non-existent God cannot help us.

Volcan Pacaya

Roosevelt said “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”. There are always people who will say ten thousand confidence sapping things filling you with fear. This entire trip has been one of overcoming fear, that mother of all fears, the fear of the unknown. The greatest lesson I can take away from this one year is that I have the strength and confidence to overcome my fears, to learn entire new disciplines and to achieve my goals. Change may engulf us but our core will remain the same, hard and unchanging, ready to weather all storms and to accomplish what we set our mind to accomplish.

In the rubble

Not so interesting - Diamond in the rough - Welcoming people - Herd instinct - Shades of gray. (Map this!)

There is usually a reason why certain spots are off the beaten path. Most of the time this is because there is not much of interest to be gained at that site or the trouble involved in getting there does not merit the payback in entertainment value. On the other hand, going to sites mobbed with tourists can be quite off-putting and most places cannot handle the large volumes of people wanting to see them. Rare is the site like Machu Picchu that can handle hordes of visitors and still feel uncrowded and spacious.

Employee housing

But still we persist, trying to find that diamond in the rough, that place of special value that few have taken the time to examine. Often times even these places are mobbed with tourists and the supposed diamond in the rough turns out to be a poorly cut zirconium. The most obvious case of this have been the supremely mediocre villages of the Guatemala highlands, full of noise, pollution, and little of natural and cultural beauty. Indeed, with the exception of Tikal and Volcan Pacaya, I would put the entire country of Guatemala in that category.

Chacabuco Theatre

One of the paybacks of going to a less visited place is that usually the people are a bit more open and a bit more willing to spend time with a visitor. In the town of Mompos, in Colombia, we were personally greeted by the director of tourism and given a long and enthusiastic explanation about all the little spots of interest in town. This warm and generous welcome was quite common throughout Colombia, until recently, an entire country off the beaten path.

The scream

And so we still persist, hoping that the beaten path is a result of herd instinct and that our unique and less traveled path will make all the difference. This is how we found Chacabuco. Not mentioned in any guide books and so far off the ruta normal that even the tourist office in nearby Calama knew nothing of it, I came across it while doing research on Chile’s nitrate ghost towns. In addition to being an ex-nitrate oficina, Chacabuco was also used as a concentration camp during the Pinochet years. I had to visit - maybe to find the phantasms of those who dared opposed an absolute regime, maybe to find the ghosts of a land raped by mining and drill baby drill.

A happy place

After the detention camp was closed down an ex-prisoner decided to keep the memory of Chacabuco alive and appointed himself as caretaker of the site. In an ironic twist of fate his own memory came under the assault of retrograde amnesia of Alzheimer’s disease. So we undertook a journey deep into the Atacama desert, hoping to meet an old man slowly going crazy in a place of hidden horror. When we finally arrived, hundreds of kilometers from anywhere, we found someone we least expected - a blond girl of slight build from Dresden, Germany, named Maria Schöne.

Chimney

If this were a television sitcom script I would greet Maria’s arrival about as warmly at that of Ted McGinley, but this is not a script and I found Maria’s story as interesting and fascinating as the one that brought me to this place. An architect interested in post-industrial design, she is dedicated to preserving the memory of Chacabuco and is the current administrator of the site. She is also suspicious of the motives of the old caretaker - large scale theft of materials from Chacabuco took place during his tenure and former prisoners that she has met do not recall the caretaker as a fellow internee.

Maria was extremely enthusiastic about the site and gave us a spirited tour, and she also stayed with us until sunset so we could get good photographs. In the evening she invited us to her place for dinner and we talked about Chacabuco, its past and its future, and how a girl from Dresden came to live in an isolated part of Chile.

Welcoming hotel

So as it is with most topics of substance the story gets very complicated and gray as soon as one scratches the surface. This is as it should be - a world without clear answers is ultimately a more interesting one for it is in that murkiness and lack clarity that we find space to form our own opinions and conclusions. As for Maria her research at Chacabuco led her to find Victor, a handsome Chilean man living nearby to whom she is now married.

Unknown Machine	View Window	Roof lines	Nitrate oven

Storage tank	Picture window?	Tree	Sunset

Humberstone, Chile

Nitrate crisis - Crumbling buildings - Magnificent ruins.
(Map this!)

I have found ghost towns fascinating but until now I have never had the opportunity to visit one. The closest I ever got was old abandoned warehouses, which are species of mini ghost town unto themselves. The northern part of Chile has quite a distribution of ghost towns, mostly related to the nitrate industry that operated in the Atacama desert from the latter part of the 19th century to the early part of the 20th. The development of the Haber process in the 1910’s provided for a more economical way to make fertilizer and the nitrate industry went into decline and eventual extinction.

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Today in the desert one can find crumbling buildings, rusty heavy machinery, and decrepit power plants and ovens. What once was so vital to Chile that it fought two wars with its neighbors Peru and Bolivia lays strewn across the sands of the Atacama. Eventually the same will happen to the artifacts of our current civilization and some future humans will have the pleasure of rooting through our ghost towns. I hope we leave behind magnificent ruins…