Good news is that my car seems to be doing better than I thought it would be at this point. It seems to love Chile, and I am in debt to Chile for their awesome roads.
The day started out a bit slow because I needed to change money from soles to pesos. A guy woke me up at 6:30 for breakfast, if you can even call it that. Some pastrami and a couple pieces of bread and some nasty orange juice along with some tea. But I went right back to sleep because no bank was going to be open at 7AM.
Little did I know that no bank would change money. They kept telling me to go to the casa de cambio, and I eventually found it. By the time all of this was done and I had found the road towards Santiago, I think it was 10AM.
The drive was straightforward enough. There were about 2 or 3 checkpoints, where everyone asked me for my driver’s license. A small village named Quillagua had an Aduana checkpoint, where I had to stop, get out of the car and have this guy check whether the car temporary importation paper matched the car I was driving or not. And then, just like that, no more checkpoints.
I must have seen about 100 cars total between Arica and a town named Maria Elena. It was almost eerie, driving by myself it seemed like most of the time. I filled up a couple times just to make sure, because I hadn’t seen gas stations for such a long time.
I had a pretty good scare around 5 PM today. So I was passing this one truck and I started smelling something like rubber. I thought it was just the truck in front of me, so I went a few miles, perhaps as many as 10, trying to ventilate the smell out with air conditioning and opening up the windows. But no, it continued, and I noticed that my engine was getting hotter and hotter even though I was slowing down and going downhill. On top of that, my oil pressure gauge was acting very funny. I know it’s already acting funny because it’s got mixed in with my RPM somehow, but even when I let go of the accelerator, it would start to go down to a 1 and come right back up to 3. Something was wrong.
So I pulled over for a bit and checked the coolant level and the oil. Coolant was fine, but the oil level alarmed me. The dipstick showed no oil whatsoever. I suppose that’s why the engine was running so hot and the oil pressure guage was acting funny, because I had no oil! I added about 4 liters worth of oil and voila, the temperature dropped almost immediately and the oil pressure gauge was back to normal.
I drove some 10 miles shy of 700 miles today. Which isn’t as bad as driving 700 miles in Mexico, because there are virtually no bumps here and the roads are, for the most part, paved really well. The people are generally good people. There were several road work being done and I had to wait one time for a very large cargo being led by a couple motorcycle guys. One guy had driven ahead and was blocking the way when I drove in. He spoke in fair English, which is something that most people in any other Latin America always refuses to do. Here, it’s almost as if they want to try and speak in English because they got a chance to. I shared some chocolate with him and he gladly accepted.
So another 600 miles tomorrow and I’ll be in Valapraiso. I don’t know how the road’s going to be, but I hope I can make good time and get there in 10 hours, hopefully before sundown.