The most wonderful time of the year

I bet you hoped, like I did, that as I shut my laptop and headed up to bed at 3am that the one-man party was over. We couldn’t have been more wrong. Juan kept going, by himself, till 5am before finally leaving. At least I thought I would get a good three to four hours of sleep now. But that also wasn’t meant to be. At 7am, a crowd of people came into the garage. We heard bottles opening and loud conversations as they milled around Ruby. Then someone spotted the speaker. It was now 7.30am and the music was back on full blast. All around us people were shooting aguardiente (a local spirit) and shouting. I have no idea why, but apparently that’s what was happening. No earplugs were good enough for this scenario and we hid in our camper until mid-morning before emerging tired and disgruntled to the remains of the party.

I assume that this was the after-party as they were all pretty hammered. We were surrounded by drunk people asking questions and waving beers at us. It’s hard enough to understand sober Chileans and this was definitely too much. Boris shoved beers at us while a particularly drunk girl slurred out “gringos!!” before collapsing in a heap. This was about the only entertaining thing, watching someone utterly wasted embarrass themselves. She did all the stages. The slightly aggressive name-calling merged into crying and then she fell asleep upright in a chair. From somewhere, they magicked an inflatable mattress and upended her face-first out of the chair onto it in the middle of the garage floor. There she remained as her friends continued to drink.

Nights (and days) like this were one of the reasons that we were not particularly productive. They partied here relentlessly. I am not good with a lack of sleep at the best of times and this was getting silly. While I hadn’t done as much as I would have liked, I had fixed our exploding side panel. It took nearly 2kg of filler and about three days of sanding to get it looking good enough, then I primed and painted it with some spray cans we had brought with us. We knew the colour wouldn’t match, and so we decided that instead of trying to hide it, we’d make it a feature. I planned to paint a world map over the top where we could plot our route. We thought this would be a nice addition, as well as hiding the not-perfect paint. The only problem was that I didn't have enough red paint to properly do the base and so it sat in a semi-finished state now, with that type of paint not available in the town. I moved onto the other side, also in dire need of repair. At least if it was filled and primed then the metal underneath wouldn’t get rusty.

The cat situation had also escalated. One of the two kittens had looked a bit sickly one day and had never been seen since. We had a horrible feeling it had died. The other had firmly attached itself to us. We tried very hard not to get attached but it was all over us, just wanting a bit of love and a lot of food. This was also made harder by the fact that we couldn’t shut our rear door. The engine was hanging from a big piece of wood over the rear engine hatch which stuck out past the door. The kitten had figured out that it could climb up the engine and then claw its way past the cushion we had tried to jam over the hole. Aimee was surprisingly tolerant while Lexi was very angry. It wasn’t just the kitten; word had spread. I now counted 12 cats that came regularly to eat food outside the van. We got through a kilo a day trying to feed them all and were saddened to see the condition of some. One had huge scabby wounds down its flank that never seemed to heal or improve while we were there. Even worse was another big male; it seemed to be the father of the kitten. It was nearly blind, an untreated eye infection by the looks of it. It was sad to see these animals suffering when something as simple as a course of antibiotics would have probably restored them to full health.

Christmas was also fast approaching. Seeing from our tracking information that our parcel appeared to be stuck in customs, I had messaged FedEx. They said the problem was that they weren’t able to contact us and that they needed a phone number to discuss the matter. When I told them we had no local phone, they said they needed a photo of my passport. They had my email on the order and Lord knows why they couldn’t have just asked for this, but we provided the relevant documents. We still had a slim chance that it would arrive in time and we decided that if it left Santiago by the 21st then we might just make it. Seeing that it still hadn’t moved in two days, I sent another stroppy email. The reply I got was that the process could take a long time and I shouldn’t expect it to move today either. Needless to say, this just made me angry and also confirmed that this year, for the first time, it would be a garage Christmas. We resigned ourselves to our fate.

We had expected to spend Christmas alone, sitting in the garage. Not a particularly exciting time or enjoyable experience. It was therefore a nice surprise when we got a message from Christine and Horst. They were a German couple travelling in a firetruck and had a clutch problem. They wanted the garage to have a look at it and would most likely stay for Christmas too. That would be nice; at least we wouldn’t be alone. As it was basically the last working day before Christmas, we decided that we would buy some beers for the guys. As we were staying free, we thought it would be a nice way to say thank you. Boris lent us his car and we drove to the shop to pick up some Coronas. On our return, the Germans had arrived and Boris was very excited to meet some more travellers. They couldn’t really speak Spanish though, so everyone looked relieved when we pulled up and could translate. As it was Friday the 21st, the chances of them getting parts was pretty slim this side of Christmas and so they moved their truck inside to stay for a few days.

I suppose we should have known what would happen if we bought two crates of beer for them. It was going to be another party night. We probably should have stayed up with them drinking and then maybe if the beer had run out sooner they would have left. As it was, it turns out that 48 beers lasts until 7am. Our new German friends were also not very impressed by their first night in the garage. They looked a little horrified when we said that this seemed to happen about 2–3 times a week. At least they had a vehicle with sound insulation; try sleeping in a tent.

With only a couple of days to go, we started getting in our Christmas shop as best we could. We knew that the Germans would want to celebrate on Christmas Eve and so we made a simple frittata to eat alongside the huge hunk of meat they would be preparing. For Christmas Day, we planned out our own meal. It took several bike rides to get everything we wanted in stock and despite the limited size of supermarkets in town, we did pretty well. By Christmas Eve, we were very well stocked and ready to celebrate with our new friends.

It turns out that we’d also be joined by another person. Dave from Switzerland messaged and asked to join us. He didn’t need the garage but didn’t want to be alone and so he pitched his tent outside the bathroom and then sat at our table making guacamole while the Germans roasted their meat. That evening, all four of us sat around our little table and enjoyed a candlelit dinner, surrounded by the skeletons of project cars.

We enjoyed some homemade Baileys, which I highly recommend making, as well as a chocolate chip lemon drizzle cake.

It was nice to have company and a distraction from our delayed parts. Towards the end of the evening Boris turned up and now it was our turn to stay up late drinking. Lee had already gone to bed as he didn’t feel well, and so it was just Dave and I who stayed up until about 4am chatting to Boris. Even then, when we insisted we were going to bed, he still looked disappointed, but for me that was quite enough.

The following day was our day to celebrate. We spent all day slowly cooking ourselves a nice three-course meal. The one advantage of being here was that we had hook-up, and so the Remoska ran all day making roast carrots, potatoes and the like. For starter we made a mango ‘ceviche’, which is basically mango, onion and lime. It’s a great fresh starter though, especially with the lovely mangoes we had found here. For main we had a huge Sunday roast-esque meal. We had honey-roasted carrots, roast potatoes and red cabbage with apple for the veg, accompanied by my homemade seitan and finished off with a red wine sauce. Overall, pretty great effort. I also made us little ganache chocolate tarts, but we were so full we didn’t even eat them.

As everyone was back to work the next day, we finally had a quiet night. Lucho, the older mechanic here, had assured me that they were only partying this hard as it was December. The rest of the year, he said, it’s not like this. We were sure New Year would be a huge event though and we hoped we could leave before that and hide out at our nice little beach spot. In the meantime, we went for Christmas cooking round two and cooked ourselves a feast. This time was possibly even better. For starter we had baked camembert, into whose molten depths we drizzled honey and dipped bread. For the main course, we had fondant potatoes, pigs in blankets and some more veg. Then finally, we shared one of the ganache tartlets for pudding. We had done pretty well with the Christmas Day menu in the end.

With the parts stubbornly remaining in customs, we tried to finish off some jobs. I had been carrying around new fans for our heater matrix since my parents left and it seemed like it would be an idea to finally put them on the heater. I bought a big plastic chopping board to put under the whole system to shield the fans and the core from water. Juan and Boris eyed me hacking up a plastic chopping board in the corner of the workshop with interest. What was the weird gringa doing now??

While I busied myself with this project, Lee pressure-washed under the van. It was ridiculous the surface rust we had accumulated since crossing the Salar and I suspect our camping out in the Atacama had also had a pretty high salt content. The floor around us glistened in the sun once it dried, hard with the presence of salt crystals. We would need to get some protective paint under there as soon as possible, but once again it wasn’t something you could buy here. We visited the ferreterías fairly regularly to buy gas to cook on, our Wallas still also waiting on a new glow plug from Argentina. They didn’t have anything fancy in there like anti-corrosive paint.

Our new friend Dave had been back to Antofagasta and had spent some time searching for the right paint for us to finish the side panel. He had felt sorry for us, he said, as he produced two new cans. This was good as I could finish off painting my map. I set about completing the countries in cream and then outlining them and adding the borders in black pen. When I could find a silver or a gold pen, I planned to plot our route over the top. For now though, I was pretty happy with the finished result.

The other side we planned to add just our name too, but for now it too was sprayed red. The colour wasn’t really anywhere near the same and that’s why we had decided to add designs to both panels and then we could say it was ‘part of the design’.

Time continued to tick away and our parts continued to remain where they were. The problem with how Christmas and New Year fell meant that the weekend became three days where nothing could possibly happen. For a second there was a glimmer of hope: the parts cleared customs. However, for the next two days, they just seemed to bounce around Santiago. Friday came and went and once again we resigned ourselves to staying here again.

I have never been one to go crazy on New Year. My parents and I often saw it in with a glass of champagne, watching the London fireworks. When we lived in Birmingham, Lee and I would do a similar thing and watch the various displays going off around the city from our vantage point at the top of the garden, again armed with champagne. Last year, we were both far too upset with the disappearance of Lizzy to even bother. This year, all I hoped for was that the party didn’t go on all night. We had bought ourselves a bottle of champagne, but now it was my turn to catch the nasty stomach virus bug thing that had befallen Lee and so I was not really in the mood to drink it. Boris was heading to the city to celebrate, which was a blessing in itself.

Maggi from upstairs, who had been lovely to us since the day we arrived, had invited us out to the party in the town square. I wasn’t really in the mood to celebrate, but I was delighted to hear that the party was in the town square. Hopefully this meant everyone would go over there and I could go to bed. The New Year seemed to be looking up when indeed everyone headed out and left the garage in silence. You would think they would have got to celebrate the countdown, but they all left around 1am instead to go and party. Still, I didn’t care—1am was an early bedtime these days and I actually had a great night’s sleep. New Year’s Day was deathly silent with everyone sleeping off their week-long benders. With this day gone, it was business as usual and we consoled ourselves that with the parts out of customs, it could only be a matter of days before they arrived.