August 5, 1998

The Mother of all Road Trips

U.S. Team members bounce, ski, climb and kayak through South America on a bid to win the Camel Trophy.

By Melanie D. Goldman

Santiago, Chile; Aug. 5: Before sunrise this morning, 40 yellow Land Rovers were driven into the city from the Sheraton San Cristobal Tower,  led by a Chilean police escort with sirens and flashing lights. There were alternating Freelanders and Defender 110s, each pair belonging to one country. The U.S. cars were fifth in sequence, and I sat in the back seat of the Freelander, nose pressed to the window, as our caravan snaked through the dark streets of Santiago.

The vehicles -- brand new, recently shipped here from Great Britain and topped with mountain bikes, kayaks, snowboards and skis -- were a comical contrast to the drab winter day, the black taxicabs, the old men with worn faces peddling bicycle carts of produce. Gardeners stopped raking, janitors stopped sweeping the sidewalks, construction workers took off their orange hard hats and they all stared at our parade. The scene from inside the car was Hands Across Santiago, and as a media extravaganza, it was a perfectly calculated opening ceremony for the Camel Trophy, an event dubbed the "last great adventure on earth."

Over the last 18 years, the German-born Camel Trophy has evolved from a paramilitary road rally to an event that puts the elements of an expedition into competitive form. For the next three weeks, 20 two-person teams -- each representing a different country -- will compete to reach as many of more than 100 designated checkpoints as they can. Each team has been given the coordinates of the checkpoints and will use GPS -- a satellite navigation system -- to devise its own route. Those with the best strategy and the fewest mistakes will win. Imagine a Goliath-size treasure hunt, where each team combines Land Rovers, skis, snowshoes, snowboards, mountain bikes and inflatable kayaks as transportation modes to reach the treasures. On Aug. 26 all the teams will again come together -- fate willing -- in Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city on the globe.

There are six people in the U.S. party: a freelance photographer, a television producer, an automotive writer, the two competitors, Dean Vergillo and Greg Thomas, and me. Dean is a 30-year-old stay-at-home-with-his-toddler dad from Duvall, Wash., who admittedly sometimes acts like he's 4. For him, taking apart and fixing a vehicle or a bike comes as naturally as stacking Legos. Greg, 33, lives in Santa Cruz, Calif., and has competed three times in the Eco-Challenge (an adventure race where competitors are on the go practically 24 hours a day for eight days), as well as in numerous triathlons and marathons.

My raison d'être as I travel through the Chilean and Argentinean mountains with the U.S. team is to test the vitality of my laptop in sub-zero temperatures. I also will support the team by helping with off-road driving, snow melting, water filtering and general bonding. Journalists also are expected to fill in for competitors who have been injured and can no longer compete.

We arrived at Mapocho Centre, an old train station in the center of the city, and event organizers spent 30 minutes lining up vehicle tires for the festival in the plaza. A rope separated the public from the teams; Chileans on their way to work and school stopped to wiggle their way to the front of the rope. At 8:30, each competing country and its two competitors were announced: Austria, Argentina, Canary Islands, France, Japan ...

"Dean Vergillo and Greg Thomas of the U.S." Dean and Greg carried a huge U.S. flag out to our car and posed for pictures. Then came the jugglers and fire breathers and the man on stilts spraying confetti on the spectators. Greg was the first of 40 competitors to start dancing with the natives, one in particular with six-foot feathers coming out of her back and a beaded string bikini. Whistles erupted, passersby hollered, drums beat and dignitaries onstage smiled quietly.

The festival continued as cars lined up again and caravaned to Valle Nevado, one of Chile's largest ski resorts about 90 minutes outside Santiago. Greg and Dean sat in the front and I shared the back with a photographer. A rubber duck hung from the ceiling by Velcro.

"Ducky won't be right-side-up anymore until we get to Tierra del Fuego in three weeks," Dean said. "We decided when we put him up here that we're keeping all four wheels on the ground." Our duck is a good luck token we found in June while training for the competition on the Colorado River. We were thrown out of a raft in a section of the river called Rodeo, and after all of our orange life jackets bobbed to the surface and we were breathing again, we found the duck sitting on a rock. So here he is with us in Chile, and the idea is that if he is right-side-up in the car, implications are bad for the passengers. I laughed nervously at the image of us rolling the car and watching our mascot bath toy tumble.

To reach Valle Nevado, we followed 72 hairpin turns, which ended up looking like a drawing of intestines on the GPS receiver that sits on our dashboard. The satellite navigation system tracks our path, tells us the exact time of sunrise and sunset and, most important, will direct us toward those 100 locations whose coordinates we enter as our Camel Trophy checkpoints. Valle Nevado is all dirt and mud; this is the season when it should be packed with skiers, but it will close next week because the winter has been so warm and dry. But alas, nothing is spared for some Camel Trophy pictures; snow was made last night so competitors could ski with their country's flags, and helicopters blew dust around and captured it all on video.

By 4:30, we were headed back down out of the Andes -- finally! The Andes we'd fantasized about for six months, the Andes that were supposed to be snow-covered but weren't, and that you can barely see from Santiago because the pollution is so bad. Back in the city, we were stuck in evening rush hour among yellow Volvo and Mercedes-Benz buses that are "ecologico" -- using natural gas. More honking at our cars, more flashing headlights, more feeling like we were celebrities in the streets of Santiago.

And then, the most celebrated moment of all and my first of many reminders that boys will be boys, especially on the mother of all road trips, in a vehicle stocked with all the toys they could possibly want. An hour into the event, away from other teams and local television reporters in leather pants, we recorded the first passing of gas and the first pissing into a bottle by our U.S. competitors. With that, the 1998 Camel Trophy had begun.

Chanco, Chile; Aug. 7: I woke up this morning to my 27th birthday, lying on the side of the road with the Russian and Japanese teams. It wasn't a bad camping spot, and we were quite entertained watching the Russian journalists drink Stoli and smoke Marlboros before bed and eat meat and crackers for breakfast before all the teams rushed off to reach kayaking, biking and skiing sites. It certainly wasn't as noisy a camping spot as the night before last, when I awoke (throughout the night) to a starry sky and a chorus of dogs, roosters and cows. It's simply not true that a rooster wakes up the farm animals every morning; I'm convinced they just don't sleep at all. We also had the metronome of a snoring Russian journalist who is traveling with the U.S. team for a few days.

Yesterday, we left our camping spot at sunrise and headed down the village's dirt road, en route to a spot where Dean and Greg would have to bike in the foothills of the Andes. The main drag at about 7 in the morning makes Santiago rush hour look tame. In the middle of the road, we found a bicyclist pulling a horse on a leash, children walking to school and a collection of chickens, pigs, dogs, sheep and goats that were as raggedy as a chest of stuffed animals with too much love. The U.S. team, especially vocal on the all-team VHF mobile, is already known for detailed farm animal reports. "We have cows in the road ahead," or "Large pig on your left," or "Chickens crossing, and we don't know why."

We spent about 10 hours in the car today, driving to checkpoints in the Andes, the Coastal Hills and in between, covering several hundred miles. There were fewer farm animals in the towns than there were on the mountain roads, but towns had their share of wild dogs and Chilean carabineros in olive uniforms. We were caught going the wrong way on a one-way street in the town of Constitution, and we spent five minutes telling the officer we don't speak Spanish. He responded that he doesn't speak English and promptly decided the language problem made it too difficult to ticket us.

Outside Santiago, it's rare to find a Chilean who speaks English, and their Spanish is fast and clipped and nothing like the tapes I studied this summer. I took an eight-week class to prepare, and I am excellent at asking for directions to the campground or telling someone I'm a journalist. I've quickly become the resident translator and team representative when it comes time for local interaction. Greg made a feeble attempt at studying his Spanish-for-the-tourist book on the plane to Santiago last week; key phrases included, "May I kiss you," "No, I'm not ready for that" and "This is my wife, please keep your hands off her."

As I'm writing this, I'm sitting in the back seat of our Defender, loaded with waterproof bags, food for three weeks, spare tires and athletic gear. Greg and Dean are biking to a point in Reserva National Federico Albert, and several other journalists and I are waiting for them to return, passing time by filtering drinking water and preparing food. And here I sit, with my antique Macintosh PowerBook on my lap. There are cows fenced in to my right, horses fenced in to my left and a gaucho wearing a sombrero standing in the street. Within five minutes of setting up my workstation here, a group of seven teenage boys gathered around the open back door to marvel at my computer. With my limited Spanish, I answered some of their questions ("What is the price of that (computer) in the U.S.?" "Where are you going?").

The ringleader is 16-year-old Jorge Letelier, dressed in a worn gray and black knit sweater and gray trousers, his school uniform. He's taller than the other boys, but all of them have the same shiny black hair and huge, wonderful, dark eyes. I just showed him his name on the screen, and he smiled, embarrassed in front of his friends. He asked me my name and then told me it's "bonito." I blushed. On my 27th birthday, I'm sitting in a car next to cows flirting with a 16-year-old. Oh, my.

I ask Jorge where he lives. "Ahi." Over there. He points to the other side of the cow field to a cluster of dirty charcoal-colored shacks with no windows and clotheslines that stretch four times the length of each house. Jorge and the boys quickly return their gaze to my laptop, entranced by my fingers dancing on the keyboard.

Any minute now, Greg and Dean will bike back to the cars, and I'll throw the PowerBook into its waterproof, airtight, hard plastic case, help put the bikes on the roof and assume my position in the back of the Freelander. We'll drive away in a cloud of dust, in a hurry to reach another checkpoint before sunset, but leaving Jorge and his posse to wonder about the North American woman in the yellow car with the small electronic machine and what it all means. And for a moment, as we rush away, Jorge and I may be thinking the same thing.

Tolhuaca National Forest, Chile; Aug. 8: It's 4 a.m. Today isn't really today yet because we still haven't gone to sleep from yesterday. So my birthday entertainment continues. After driving from mountains to coast and back to mountains this evening, we turned onto a windy dirt road that eventually brought us here, where we'll wake up close to a checkpoint in the morning (albeit, it's already morning). Several hours ago, we were cruising along these narrow, one-lane farm roads at about 25 mph, listening to the Chieftains' folksy "Santiago," and we saw cows ahead of us. Not in the distance or on the side, but right smack in front of the car, evenly spaced so we couldn't pass them (there was barbed wire fence on either side of the road).

Three brown-and-white cows and one black-and-white cow continued walking calmly, even as we started tailgating. We sped up, they sped up. We honked, they started to trot. They even bucked occasionally, stopping every few minutes to turn around and acknowledge us with an evil cow eye.

At one point, our photographer ran out of the car and tried to round up the cows himself, but it became evident that the cows had their own agenda. Eyes still wet with laughing tears, but feeling defeated as only humans stuck behind cows can feel, we sat in the car, inching along, and watched our headlights on four commanding tails. Thirty minutes later, our personal bovine escort was finished. At last, man and machine proceeded past animals, into the Chilean mud.

Pucon, Chile; Aug. 10: At 2:30 this afternoon, I took my last upward step onto crunchy, perfectly blinding white snow at 8,780 feet, and I knew I'd reached the summit of Volcon Villarrica. There isn't a line or a sign or any indication that you've reached the top of the mountain; maybe reaching the summit simply means being able to see over the top. If you're a seasoned mountaineer, you know when you've reached the summit, and you take the obligatory pictures and chalk up another mountain conquered.

But for me, I only knew I had reached the summit when I had the balance and composure to turn around for the first time in six hours, since starting my ascent. When I did turn around, my view from the top of the world was blurred by a heavy stream of tears that had accumulated with every steady step up the mountain. I cried uncontrollably for 10 minutes before I looked out again. In front of me and down below were purring clouds, sparkling Lake Villarrica, the resort town of Pucon and several other volcanoes in Chile. To my right were mountains that lay half in Chile and half in Argentina, covered in snow and striking against the blue sky. Several feet behind me was the crater rim of one of Chile's most active volcanoes; a look inside the crater reveals an ongoing show of minor explosions and fireworks shooting up as though there is a fire-breathing dragon inside. I spun around and inhaled the brilliance, squinting at the sun reflecting off the snow the way it does only once a year atop Villarrica.

I set out to climb the white volcano this morning among experienced climbers -- all the Camel Trophy competitors and many of the event journalists. The U.S. team was guided by Victoria, a strawberry blond Chilean who curtly told us, "In Chile, we speak Spanish." With crampons, ice ax and gas mask in tow, I set out with the team, sans any formal instruction on how to climb. Greg told me to kick my toes into the snow to secure my footing and to use the ski poles to distribute physical demands between my arms and legs with each step. Two of our journalists decided to stop climbing about halfway up the mountain, but I continued, and Dean and Greg stuck with me, even at my snail's pace. As the ascent became frighteningly steep, Dean said: "Don't look back and don't look forward, Mel; just concentrate on where you're placing each foot and how you reach the next turn."

I learned that you climb a mountain single file, and each step is indeed a coup. I repeated in my head, "Right pole, left foot, left pole, right foot," with hesitation and focus before each movement. The rhythm was what kept me going, but it also made me crazy: Which step comes first in the sequence? The monotony of it made my elementary thoughts run together, and then my mind wandered for a split second to anything -- anything -- but the slow-motion crunch of snow with every step, hour after hour. I always caught myself quickly when this happened, using a mental choke chain to set my mind back on track. Time after time, the diversion was accompanied by the slightest sway, undetectable by anyone else, but which sent me into a panic as I imagined leaning a bit farther and tumbling down the mountain.

All day, I cursed peripheral vision as I saw grapefruit-sized snow chunks -- loosened by climbers above me -- shooting down the mountain like an inverted skeeball game in the corner of my eye. I would stop, balance, look down at my snow-covered boot and coordinate my muscles and joints to lift a foot for the next step. Our group stopped for a couple of five-minute breaks, where I devoured salted peanuts and chocolate and drank liters of water, feeling my veins ravenously soak up the fuel.

I followed Dean's advice to the extreme. I used every ounce of energy in my body to not look anywhere but one foot in front of me. Out of pure fear, I banked on these steps with my life. In the last two hours, Victoria was directly in front of me, making baby steps in the snow and ice for me to follow. I kept asking how far we were from the top, because I refused to look up; I desperately didn't want to lose my balance, and I didn't want to fall, so all I could do was step.

When I finally took that last step, when I stopped climbing frozen stairs and felt flat snow under my boots, I lifted my gaze, and I froze. My process of climbing up the mountain was so intense that I never imagined how majestic the prize would be. And that's when I started shivering with relief and joy and disbelief, and at 8,780 feet, tears froze on my cheeks.

SALON | Aug. 18, 1998

Freelance writer Melanie D. Goldman will be sending further dispatches

to Wanderlust from the Camel Trophy road.