South America
Ringing in the New Year with Tia Eva (Drive Day 185: Dec 31st, 2003)
I have never been more grateful for my training as a journalist. It’s why I feel no trepidation about striking up conversations with strangers. Or looking up the friends of friends of friends on New Year’s Eve. Which is how we end up at the packed dinner table of these two women: Margit and her aunt Eva – a one-time German refugee married off to an older Bolivian man to escape the Nazi’s. We accept Margit’s invitation to camp the Avion in her driveway and ring in the New Year with a new appreciation for the kindness of strangers.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
Crossing into Cochabamba (Drive Day 184: Dec 30th, 2003)
We are trying to make it out of the troubled capitol before the respite of the holidays is over. That’s when locals predict the riots to return and the threat of another coup to return. So we continue the search for my father’s camper. According to his memory, he sold it to the husband of a Bolivian woman we met in La Paz. Thirty years ago we traveled this route with Sonja and her little boy James. Now it’s just the two of us, stopping to marvel at what has been abandoned in the years between these trips in time.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
Moon valley (Drive Day 183: Dec 29th, 2003)
My stomach isn’t quite ready for cobblestones, but streets of pale yellow stone are the only way to get to the Valle de Luna. If you poke at the tips of the spindly mounds of earth the dirt crumbles in your fingers. Only cactus seems to take grip and prosper. But the spirits are okay with subdivisions here. Signs in front of half-built mansions advertise prices in the $400,000s or $2,000 a month to rent. But hey, you have a view of the moon.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
Chola ladies and pork sandwiches (Drive Day 182: Dec 28th, 2003)
I am recovering enough to try the local La Paz delicacy – Chola sandwiches. The ladies who make them are also called Cholas. They need they layer, standing in outdoor market stands all day slicing freshly roasted pig, offering buyers a taste before committing. Then they pile the slices onto a cheesy bun with a spicy relish of pickled onions, carrots and peppers. The finishing touch is a dollop of mayonnaise so delicious that I tell myself “who needs refrigeration” at this altitude?
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
Silencio es salud(Drive day 181: Dec 27th, 2003)
I am recovering from another round of motion-sickness meets altitude-sickness meets unnamed parasite but we hire Eosebio to take us on a taxi tour of La Paz. I have to laugh at the signs warning against honking cars – silence is apparently healthy. Our native taxi driver’s presence helps shield us from some of the more tenacious street hustles and persistent beggars and he points out places tourists never go – like the Valle de las Animas or valley of the spirits. No one lives in these hauntingly beautiful foothills of the Illipimi mountains; the spirits don’t want to be overcrowded.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
The Heights – of irony (Drive day 180: Dec 26th, 2003)
Even though La Paz is the highest (in altitude) of any South American capitol, it actually sits in the base of what looks like a collapsed pit. Which is why the slum town-turned-third-most-populated-city in the country is called El Atlo. It perches on the edge of the pit and is the site of the most recent rounds of riots. It’s easy to see why – people here have nothing left to lose. And yet one of them, a taxi driver named Eosebio, guides us down into the city so that we arrive safely at the only hotel he knows of with a parking lot big enough for our camper. A Christmas gift indeed.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
On a one-horse-power open ferry (Drive day 179: Dec 25th, 2003)
If there’s one piece of advice I’d give future road trippers it would be to avoid driving in Bolivia on Christmas Day. The roads are lined with children begging for food and the custom is apparently to slow down and toss out bags of bread. The worst part is they don’t tear into the treats like kids should – they save it for later and keep flagging down vehicles. When we arrive at the ferry terminal to cross Lake Titicaca I am numb with sadness. Which I have to snap out of to process the fact that we are going to entrust our home-on-wheels to perhaps the least seaworthy vessel I have ever seen. Even my father didn’t try this route, but we’re here and there’s only one way across. We can’t sink on Christmas, right?
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
Copacabana, Bolivia (Drive Day 178: Dec 24th, 2003)
The town’s name conjures up images of tropical drinks and beach umbrellas, but we have crossed into Bolivia and the most exotic part of it is a poncho museum. It’s Sunday so we could have the priests bless our truck for good luck. But it is punishingly cold and dismally depressing. Kids without shoes peeing in the gutters, stoned Rastafarians selling hemp bracelets outside a cathedral lined with ill-gotten gold. Not where we plan to spend Christmas on the road.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
On the shores of Lake Titicaca (Drive day 177: Dec 23rd, 2003)
It is clear we have long ago left the Sacred Valley. Even the names of the Peruvian towns we drive through are losing their loveliness. In one called Sicuani kids steal a little flag from the camper’s grill, we pay more in tolls to get through Puno than it costs in diesel, and crazed bicyclists in Juliaca try their best to induce heart attacks as they cut in front of us. We’re bone tired by the time we stop for the night in the lakeside town of Pomata – just in time for a quick round of photographs before we collapse.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
Hard sell and harder roads (Drive Day 176: Dec 22nd, 2003)
We wake up in our camp spot outside another Incan site called Racqhi. A teenager has been waiting for us to open the door so he can guide us on a tour along the Inca trail. Which happens to pass through his uncle’s pottery studio, so we end up buying a vessel that the road ahead will surely bounce into bits. The best part? He agrees to take home some of the bags of veggies we had to buy in Urcos.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
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