May 14, 2007
Arica, Chile
GPS: S15 55.776, W073 14.223

Distance Traveled: 1250kms
Useful Distance Traveled: 1150kms

Keys are the bane of my existence, but I'll get to that story later.  We got off on a good start – out of the hotel early, all packed and ready to rock.  Fueled up, and on the road.  Then we rode into a cloud.  Well, maybe it was more than one cloud.  At 7:45am, the temperature was a balmy 14 degrees.  Thirty minutes later, riding through the cloud/fog on windy roads, it was a frigid 3 degrees.  We'd all planned for warm weather, and were suffering severely.

Especially me.  If you recall, i've had a bit of an accident a few days ago, and no longer possess a windshield.  The fog immediately started collecting on the faceshield on my helmet, and I had to constantly wipe the condensation away with my gloved hand, which soon cooled to a mild throb.  

Fortunately, we were out of the fog by exactly 8:40, and the temperature immediately skyrocketed.  By the time we made our daily call to CKGY, it was sitting at 19, and was due to go much higher.

The geography of northern Chile.  Imagine, if you will, Mars.  With an atmosphere, power lines, and a road.  There's not much else, and certainly no plant life.  That's northern Chile.  By the end of the day, my eyes were aching for just a little bit of green.  

At our second fuel stop, the temperature was sitting at 34 degrees, and we were all dying.  Our motorcycle armour is all black, our seats are black, and our gloves are black.  Sitting down on our black bike seats after they'd been in the sun was like sitting on an iron.  If we remained moving, it was bearable – the wind moving through our jackets (especially my slightly swiss-cheesed jacket) cooled us sufficiently that 34 degrees was no biggie.  However, once we stopped moving, the sun kicked in and roasted us.

This turned out to be a bit of a long stop.  We'd all gotten fueled, grabbed some water and whatnot, and were all sitting on our bikes waiting (as usual) for Justin to get his poop in a group so we could get movin' on.  This time, though, he didn't get movin' on after just a little while.  Finally he turned around and said “The stupid key's not working”.  

Sure enough, after we'd all given it an impotent few twists, the key was stuck – wouldn't turn on.  Everyone took of their jackets, except for Justin, who remained on the motorcycle.  After washing the key with gasoline, and a few trips into the very tiny store in search of something that would serve as a lubricant (we'd used all the WD-40, apparently, cleaning the drive chains), Sean was able to jimmy the key into the starting position.  By this time, I imagine that Justin was just about dead, and he announced that he was going to take off the road to get some wind moving over him.

I should mention that this particular gas station in the middle of nowhere is at a crossroads – Ruta Norte (also Rute 5) was the one we'd been following ever since we'd entered Chile.  Ruta 25 was a new one that met up with #5 at this gas station.

Justin, oblivious to the world, took off down Ruta 25.  I was the only one who noticed, and in a bit of a rush to catch up with him and get him turned around, neglected to mention to Rob and Sean where I was going and what I was doing.  I sent a broadcast of my location on Ruta 25 to everyone's GPSs, and took of after Justin.  

Unfortunately, Justin's “I'll go slow so you guys can catch up” is quite fast, and it took me easily ten minutes to catch up to him, and an additional five minutes of flashing my lights to get him to pull over and turned around.

We headed back to the intersection for Ruta 5.  As we sped past the gas station (the roads diverged a ways from the gas station, so it was hard to see clearly), I could not see any motorcycles waiting for us,  and we headed north.

At this time, Justin and I are thinking that Rob and Sean are ahead of us, thinking they're trying to catch up to us.  Justin and I sped pretty quickly down Ruta 5 for about fifty kilometres, before I freaked out and pulled us over.  As he and I discussed what to do about our missing family members, I flagged down a truck that we'd sped past earlier, and asked him in my broken Spanish if he'd seen any motorcycles like ours go speeding past.  Actually, it was a whole truck full of guys, and they all replied that they hadn't seen any.  At least, I think that's what they were saying no to.  I actually have no idea what they thought I was asking.

Armed with this new information, Justin and I decided to head back to the gas station to see if Sean and Rob had waited for us there (we'd thought they may have noticed us going down the wrong highway – I had a position update from Sean that put him square on the gas station).

Twenty minutes later, Justin and I arrive at the gas station.  Rob and Sean are nowhere to be found.  I start freaking out again, but Justin convinced me that the best thing to do (after trying to call mom – our emergency we-got-lost contact for everybody – but we were unable to figure out how to dial internationally on his GSM cellphone) would be to head north to our original destination, which was the border between Chile and Peru.  The way he figured, Sean and Rob would have to wait for us there, 'cause there's no way that Justin and I could get across the border without Sean (Sean carries our increasingly large stash of border-crossing papers).  

I agreed, and we headed off, again, north on Ruta 5 after topping up our tanks.  We travelled north for about an hour and a half, with semi-frequent stops for me to go into hysterics, and Justin to calm me down, before we finally met up with Rob and Sean.  They'd 'chased us' for 150 kms before they gave up and started hunting for us.

When I'd gone chasing after Justin, I'd sent a position update to everyone as I hit Ruta 25.  Rob and Sean failed to notice this, though, until they'd given up on chasing us and had decided that something had gone wrong.  Upon closer inspection, they realised that my position update in no way intersected with their recorded track on Ruta 5, and had headed back to a crossroads where the road they thought Justin and I had followed would intersect with Ruta 5.

Anyways, we lost, all told, about an hour and a half, screwing around on the deserts of northern chile.

Shortly after we'd all met up again, this silver car passed us, going quite slowly, with two girls in it.  We'll meet up with them again later.

A while after we started back, as a group, on the right road, we came to an Aduana station.  Aduana means, in spanish, Customs.  Aduana and Desvio (detour) are two words that I am starting to loathe.  Apparently north Chile is a tax-free zone, so we had to get some papers stamped and initialled before we could proceed.  The silver car caught up with us while we were doing this, and as we passed them again, one of the girls blew us kisses.  Well, she blew me a kiss. I don't know if she did it for everyone, but we're all on identical bikes with identical armour, so she must have.

Anyways.

We caught a massive Desvio later on.  This one was special – it was one-way only, and it was supremely long.  We had to wait about fifteen minutes before the oncoming traffic had cleared the one-way section and it could be reversed so that we could continue on our way.  

Facilities are quite few and far between in this area, so once we'd finally gotten off the ten-kilometre-long-one-way-detour, we pulled over as soon as we saw a gas station.  Unfortunately, this one didn't take Visa, and we didn't have enough Chilean pesos to cover the tab.  Normally Chilean pesos exchange for US at 700:1, but this guy would only give us an exchange rate of 500:1.  Needless to say, dad was choked.

While they were arguing over the exchange rate, this silver car with the girls caught up to us again.  And they wanted to talk to me.  Actually, they didn't want to just talk – they wanted a kiss.  I told them I was married, and she showed me her ring.  Don't worry, Natalie – I didn't kiss her.  We chatted for a bit, I think I managed to tell her what we're doing.  Anyways, they drove off.  We actually ran into them AGAIN, in a city just off the exit for Iquique, which is where they were headed.

Because of the whole justin-can't-read-a-map thing, we were well short of our goal (Arica, in Chile, or Tacna, if we were going to cross into Peru) when the sun set.  We tried to find a hotel in this little town we were in, but no such luck.  

I actually ran into a pair of Mormon missionaries, one of whom is from a town called Laguna? just out of Ogden in Utah, so to my US relatives – his name is Robert (i forgot his last name) and he's in Chile.  Maybe you know his family?  He told us there wasn't really anything for hotels until Arica, so we decided to grab a bit to eat and head on.  Sure, it was night riding, which really, really sucks, but we'd been riding all day and it was flat as a pancake and straight as an arrow.  How hard could it be?

About ten minutes after we left whatever town we were in, we headed into a mountain pass.  Or a canyon.  Couldn't tell, 'cause it was dark.  The road was back-and-forth and twisty and windy.  Took us two and a half hours to cross the 200 kms to Arica, with us finally getting into a hotel room at 10:15pm or so.

Ryan Noble
Arica, Chile