This morning I woke early, and soon Silvio was telling me he was waiting until I was awake. I wanted to put up a blog post so that people would know that I had come back to the land of the wired. Once that task was accomplished with the free wireless from the highway stop, and we’d eaten, we got on the road again, the land gradually drying out, although pools of water lay in the low spots as a testament to an unusually wet fall. In the last number of years the desert had gotten more and more rain, and apparently, according to a guy Silvio talked to at the gas station, the desert is blooming.
We are now in La Serena, and I am in the truck while Silvio is shopping in the grocer. We don’t like to leave the truck alone. I’ve been approached twice but I put them off by speaking English or even worse Spanish than I regularly do.
We filled the two jerry cans that Silvio had bought for the trip, and now that one leaks we need to find another. Right now it is resting against by knee, upside down so the leak is on the top, with a garbage bag over it. Once we fill up on groceries we’ll pick up another jerry can.
While Silvio was shopping I caught up on writing and spoke English for two people who approached. One of them was a guy asking for change in the parking lot, but the other one was a woman in her forties. For both of them, once they heard my English they left immediately. Once Silvio came out pushing a cart, he told me he had spoken to the woman and she’d ignored him until she realized he belonged to the RV where she had engaged with the gringo. Then she was more friendly and before long we were seated at her and her husband’s table while they discussed tattooing, marijuana use, sites we should visit in Chile and why they left Buenos Aires. We were at their place for perhaps an hour or so, filling the water tank for the desert, and enjoying yerba mate.
By the time we left it was later in the afternoon so we picked up a jerry can in a place like a home depot, and left La Serena. By later in the afternoon we were showering in the camper and eating dinner. It was late when we stopped in at a station de servicio. Silvio asked a dad driving his two daughters if the place was safe for the night, then we went to where a cyclist from Germany was stretching beside his bicycle and tent. We drove beside him to ask him if the place was safe but found him as unfriendly as anyone we have met. We established that our language of communication was English, and then discussed his trip. His recalcitrance made him a bit difficult to talk to and when we invited him to share a meal with us he declined. After the friendly Chileans, his lack of socialisation stood out. We left him lying on the rocks in his tent while we enjoyed a hot meal in a heated caravan. As Silvio said, he could have slept inside and hung out and had fun. We would have fed him and taught him how to be a human being, but he was a Bartleby to our invite.
We slept late, for we looked at Silvio’s pictures and were finally asleep by almost two in the morning. Even though we are parked in truck stops, it never feels like we are in a public space, for it is quiet enough inside that we ignore what happens outside except for the sight of the back and sides in the camera’s view.
