April 9/10 – Chile
Sunday, April 23rd, 2006Day 251/252 – We started out the next morning, after saying our good byes. We slowly drove Henry, our van, towards the Straits of Magellan. After about 20 kilometers ( 12 miles) we pulled over to check the oil, to make sure there were no leaks and that everything was fine. We had a hard time starting the van back up. As we ascended a small hill the van didn’t have much power, and was running really rough. We pulled over again, in fear of overheating, because the engine power really dropped down and we were worried we lost another cylinder. Then we couldn’t get the car to start… after 10-15 minutes he finally turned over and we decided that there was no way the van would make it another 150 kilometers. We didn’t want to get stuck out in the middle of nowhere again, so it was back to Cerro Sombrero.
As we drove back to park the van we passed Javier, who was headed to a friends house. He invited us back to his friends house and we talked about the van. He offered for us to stay with him again. We felt so bad, but very happy to have a place to stay that was warm. Since the heating in the houses here is free (because the company town is based on natural gas) all the homes are warm and toasty, making it hard to want to stay in a freezing van with the temperatures dropping below freezing at night.
The next solution to the van problem was to see if we could give it to Javier, and continue to travel by backpack. Then once we got to Australia, we would buy a new van. We were sad to leave Henry, but Javier is the perfect owner for him, and he has done so much for us. Financially it was also the best idea, since it was going to cost so much to tow the van to Punta Arenas to get it worked on (cost of the parts and work), along with the shipping costs to Australia. It made it more expensive to fix Henry than to just buy a new van in Australia. They are pretty cheap in Australia.
Monday, we had to talk to the Aduana and see how to deal with van in Chile. The United States embassy was no help to us at all, and neither was the Chilean embassy in the States. Ricardo was our savior. He called around to five different people until he could get the correct number to contact the Auduana in Punta Arenas. They said that it wouldn’t be too expensive to ‘import’ the car and that they didn’t have to see the car, only the paper work. Excellent. We were going to catch the next bus, for non-workers, which left Wednesday morning. It was perfect because we needed to pack our bags and pack the items in the van we wanted to take with us. Ricardo had a friend that was going to be driving to Punta Arenas with a truck the next day, and he could take our boxes of camper items for us. Javier had to leave town the next day to do some work in Punta Arenas, so he said he’d meet us at the bus station the next day. All seems to we working out just fine.
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