Getting Out Of Chile
So at four o’clock in the afternoon I left the squalid house in Taltal. I took everything that I owned related to my bike to the “workshop”, dumped it there, and I then headed for the bus station. No one asked me where I was going so I never told them that I was abandoning the bike along with all of my bike related belongings.
I did consider telling them what my intentions were but to be honest because of the way that they had behaved towards me in trying to wring as much money from me as possible, I decided not to tell them what I was about to do. I knew that once I did not return then my bike, my bags, and all of my bike related possessions would become their problem to deal with and not mine. Although I should have felt guilty about that I did not.
I then went to the bus station and took the bus to the only place that I was able to buy a ticket to which was the city of Copiapo which was about 250 miles away to the South. I arrived in Copiapo around ten o’clock at night and I spent the night in a cheap but clean hostel not far from the main bus station.
The next morning I headed back to the bus station to buy a ticket on the overnight bus to Santiago which lay about 500 miles further to the South. As the overnight bus did not leave until eight o’clock that night I then had to amuse myself in Copiapo for the next ten hours.
I wandered around the city for a few hours and I got something to eat but by about mid day I was thoroughly bored and I had to check out of the hostel by one o’clock. The hostel had a seating area near the reception which the staff were good enough to allow me to sit in whilst I fended off the boredom until it was time to get the overnight bus.
I got on the bus at eight o’clock and settled in for a long night hoping to get some sleep but I did not. I arrived it Santiago at about eight o’clock the following morning very tired but I just jumped straight in to a taxi and headed for the airport.
Now at this point anyone reading this would reasonably wonder how was I going to be able to leave the country without my bike as this fact should be detected by Chilean immigration at passport control when I tried to leave.
Fortunately for me I had noticed that my passport only contained an entry stamp for me but there was no entry stamp for my bike. When I had entered the country the immigration and or Customs staff had omitted to put a vehicle entry stamp in to my passport!
Now the only danger that I faced was if the Chilean Customs and Immigration systems were linked because if they were I was going to be caught for attempting to leave the country without taking my broken bike with me.
However having now lived in this part of the world for about fifteen months I have come to understand that each Governmental agency acts like its own little kingdom and they seldom talk to each other and then only if they really are forced to.
I therefore knew that the chances of the Chilean Customs and Immigration systems being linked were very slim so I decided to roll the dice!
I bought a ticket to Buenos Aires in Argentina and I then headed to passport control. As the size of the queue went down my stress levels went up.
Then the moment of truth arrived and I handed my passport over to the immigration official. My passport was scanned and then the official looked at it for a few moments before reaching for his stamp and banging it down on to the appropriate page.
Once in the air and heading for Argentina I was relived to have escaped from Chile without having to pay thousands of Dollars in order to leave a broken bike behind but at the same time I was also a little disappointed that my trip to Patagonia on my bike had not happened and now will probably never happen.
I did consider buying another bike in Argentina in order to complete my trip to Patagonia but I knew that if I did buy a bike and then I subsequently wanted to leave Argentina to go to any other country with it then I would then be just placing myself back in to the same situation from which I had just very fortunately extricated myself from and this I did not want to do.
I have now accepted that my bike trip in South America is over and that it has not turned out how I had imagined that it would have. The fact that my trip has come to such a sudden and unexpected end is something that I never imagined would have happened with a relatively new bike which I took care of by maintaining to a high level and on which had only ridden just over 12,000 miles.
My recent experiences of riding alone through large expanses of uninhabited desert have now made me realise that this was perhaps not one of the smarter decisions that I have ever made and whilst I enjoyed my time riding my bike in Colombia I definitely did not enjoy my time riding my bike in Ecuador, Peru, or Chile.
With regards to my time riding in South America I know that this may be a controversial statement for some people but for me the only good parts about this trip were seeing some of remnants of this continents Spanish colonial past that still remain.
It is quite clear to me that if it were not for the Spanish colonist and what they built during their time here then most of these places would probably still be in the dark ages as what they left here so long ago is slowly being allowed to slide in to greater and greater levels of decay by those who are now in charge of these countries.
The only exception to this is the city of Buenos Aires where I write my final blog post from.
This city is still very impressive, very European like, by and large well maintained, clean, and apparently safe although somewhat expensive even by European standards.
However the other South America that I have seen on this trip has been almost identical to what I previously saw during my trip through in Central America which is that the place is one giant shit hole to which I shall never return.
End of part two.