This morning I woke to a dream that upon rising I soon forgot. It involved a number of other people but I’m not sure if they were people I met traveling or strangers from Winnipeg. The dream faded as we walked onto the beach in front of the truck and Silvio fought with trying to get the drone working. It required more software, of course, so we drove to Maria Fernanda’s home to hang out with her.
She showed us around the house and told us how her baking business was faring. The heavy unseasonal rain has struck here as well, and she pointed out the leaking roof from the rain coming around the chimney and the sagging ceiling. She indicated the chairs on the porch and then went inside to prepare tea and gave us some more cake as well. We sat and chatted, mostly in Spanish, since she was shy about her English in front of Silvio. Silvio knew that would be the case, so he left us alone, pleading he needed to work on the drone. We talked, still mostly in my terrible Spanish, but it was fun to try. We talked about the vicissitudes of our lives, the choices we have made that have led us to children and the background that we have that makes that choice sensical.
Silvio came back to continue to work on the drone, and Maria Fernanda and I went for a drive to her mother’s place to deliver some tomatoes at the supermarket. We kept going after to the beach where she rents beachfront in order to start a café. She pointed it out and then we came back to Silvio’s drone hovering over the house. Silvio played with it some more but Maria Fernanda’s work and life was catching up with her. She remembered a cake she had to make, and before long it was time to pick up her daughter.
Silvio mentioned that we could stay in town and meet up with her again, and said he was OK with that, but it was time to go. She is a great woman, but I’m not sure what I have to offer her. Our interests align in a number of ways, but we live worlds apart and do not have that much language in common. A pity though, I would have liked to have had more time with her and met her little girl, but I can’t help but wonder to what purpose. When you meet people on the road it is with the poignant awareness that you will likely never see them again. It is the sad reality of traveling. The meetings are intense but ultimately doomed to sad departures.
We left Maria Fernanda in Caldera, and made our way north, once we fought free of town and we were soon at the strangely curved boulders that make up a roadside national park. We stopped the truck, and while Silvio droned I went into the hills to see the contorted rocks. I took a few photos which may not really capture the place, and then came down to see Silvio’s drone hovering at nearly a kilometre.
I drove when we left, but soon I pulled over to look at the shore. Silvio took a nap and I walked through the rocks along the shore and looked at basura, bones that had washed up, and thick shells from snails. Once I was back to the truck, Silvio was still asleep so I just drove further north. We are now hundreds of kilometres from Caldera, and Silvio is making a salad. I drove most of the way today, and I’m fried. The last thirty or forty kilometres were through construction and even more narrowed roads. Some of the towns we have gone through have been inundated by mudslides, and the road also caught its fair share of the destruction.
We are stopped in Taltal for the night at a gas station and the wind off the mountain slopes is strong and carrying dust. We parked the truck facing downslope so the bunks are more comfortable and then while I wrote on this blog entry Silvio made a salad. Now, after having eaten Maria Fernanda’s amazing cake for dessert, it is time for a shower and to crash. Hopefully we can get to sleep early tonight.
