MUNGO EATS Latin America

We left Uyuni this morning, with a plan to drive kind of southwest toward the Chilean border.  We plan to stop at a few sights along the way, a national park, two very picturesque lakes, and a geyser.

The road heading south is not paved, but at least it is a nice distinct road.  Unfortunately, since it is not paved, it is mostly a washboard.  It started to get so bad, that we started eyeing up the dirt trails just to the side of the roads, running across the desert.  These trails are usually smoother, but softer, so it is a bit of a risky trade off…bounce and be safe, or ride smoothly and risk getting stuck.  I’m sure from the title of this post, you know the choice we made.  All was going fine, the road was not too soft and it was much, much smoother.  We passed a few ruts in the road and I asked Kevin if the road was still okay, or was it getting soft.  He said, “It still seems fine, not too soft…Oh no, now it’s no good.”  We had come to a grinding halt.  The trailer is very bad for getting stuck.  The tires on it are quite a bit larger than the originals and there is little room between the tires and the fenders.  It is very easy for mud to clog up the space and then the tires really cannot even turn, so we are just dragging the trailer.   We decided to unhitch the trailer and see if we could get the van moving without it.  We managed another 75 metres of so, then the van stopped as well.

We were just contemplating what to do, when we noticed a car, on the other side of the roadway in the same boat. 

I decided that we might as well go and help them.  We really didn’t think they could do much for us, but at least we would be doing something productive, while we pondered our predicament.  It didn’t take much to get them out.  The car was fairly light and they were not as deeply stuck as we were.  Once they were back on firm ground, it was time for them to help us.  First they looked at the trailer, but I told them that we should probably work on the van first, since the tires on the trailer were not actually turning.    It took some hard pushing, but with the help of our “friends”, we managed to get the van back onto terra firma.  Then we were on our own.    Now what to do about the trailer?  We thought about trying to tow it with our tow rope, but it was not long enough, and we would have had to tow it through a fairly deep puddle, in the ditch.  That didn’t seem hopeful.  Kevin thought we should just leave the trailer where it lay and go back to town and find a lot of rope to try to tow it, then empty out the trailer and pull it lighter.  I thought, we should try emptying it first and then see if we could move it, if not go back to town.  That is what we decided to do.  Even empty though, it was not going anywhere unless we got the tires rolling again.  So we had to pry the glommed in mud out from between the fenders and the tires with our hands mostly.  We could move it then, but soon the wheel wells would fill with mud again and it would stop.  Sara decided we should put some pieces of wood under the tires, to prevent them from rolling in the muck.  Sounded good, but we only had a few short boards that we use to level the van at night with, that we could use.

So we began a very slow game of roll the trailer a few feet, move the boards, roll the trailer a few feet.  Slow, slow, slow, slow!!!  We scavenged some plywood from the trailer (used to keep things divided) and the job went marginally faster.   We had long abandoned our shoes, they were just filling up with mud and we had to keep crossing the large deep puddle in the ditch, so at times we were up to our knees in muddy water and mud.  Finally, finally, finally, we got the trailer back to more solid ground and then we could approach it with the van and hook up again.  But the job wasn’t finished yet.  Next we had to haul all the stuff that was in the trailer, through the muddy ditch and back up to the road, so we could repack the trailer.  All together, it took us about 2 1/2 hours to free ourselves.  After that, the washboard road looked pretty good!  Anything was faster than STUCK!!  So by the end of the day, we had gone a whopping 100km…5 hours of driving!! 

We called it a day at about 4pm.  We found a dried up “sort of” salt flat and parked there for the night. 

Before we actually parked though, we gave the kids a chance to drive the van around.  They were not really up to switching gears, so Kevin did that part of it and they just steered and worked the gas pedal.

Neither of them hit anything, but really, what is there to hit?!