| Outwardly,
I was joyous – Ben and I exchanged high fives and let loose some celebratory
yells before posing for photographs. Soon we were back in Ushuaia, and
once ensconced in my soft hotel bed, I quickly fell asleep.
The next couple
of days were spent taking in the tourist attractions and making plans for
the trip back to the U.S., before which all I had to do was sell my car
and buy a plane ticket. This however, did not prove to be easy, and set
the stage for one final, crazy bout of endurance driving that was to push
both Ben and I to our limits.
The problem
was as follows – there are not only special importation and tariff
laws for Tierra del Fuego on the books, they are actually enforced. After
talking to several locals and car dealers, I had heard the same story repeatedly
– that no one would buy the car from me there because they would not be
able to legalize it. My list of options was growing short, and I was briefly
entertaining the thought of taking the plates off of my car and dumping
it in a ditch when one morning a helpful official at the port of Ushuaia
advised me to travel north to Paraguay, notorious for its shadow economy,
where in his words “I could buy or sell anything at all that I wanted.”
Inspired
by his helpful advice, and seized by a desire to finish the mission,
Ben and I took off fully loaded and packed less than two hours later at
11:30 in the morning – our destination drawing us north like a beacon –
Paraguay, the mythical land of contraband where we hoped some enterprising
soul would hand us a wad of cash for my car, no questions asked. What follows
is a partial transcription of a tape I recorded on at intervals while driving
north from Tierra del Fuego to Paraguay, a trip which should have been
a leisurely cap to a great journey, but one which for reasons I cannot
fully explain turned into a non stop full speed gonzo style rush for the
border. The tape, while raw, provides a partial window into the experience
and emotion of such driving:
“…now it’s
10:12 pm, we’ve been on the road for eleven hours. We have gone a total
of 512 miles, and just passed Piedra Buena, where we got gas and had something
to eat. The road is long and hard. I did about a 360-mile turn, and now
Ben is driving. We should be to Puerto San Julian pretty soon and then
it’s a long stretch without gas to some village. I don’t know what town
comes after that, might be Comodoro already. I’ll check the map…we’re making
good progress Ben, maybe we should just say ---- it and go all the way
to Paraguay…”
“It’s hour
16 of the road journey, it’s 3:25 in the morning. We’ve done 838.9
miles. We just gassed up and now Ben’s behind the wheel. I’m pretty tired
and am going to get some sleep now. Good luck Ben driving. Please don’t
kill us.”
“Well,
it’s Nov. 23rd. We are just hitting the 20th hour of the road trip to Paraguay.
We’ve done 1086.5 miles; Ben’s been driving for a while. We just hit a
bird and I woke up about half an hour ago after a couple hours of sleep.
Nice and sunny out. We’re closing in on Puerto Madrin. Paraguay awaits,
and we’ve made a good bit of progress. It’s 7:01 am.”
“We’ve been
driving for more than 26.5 hours… we’ve gone 1,459 miles so far. We
just stopped to eat at some little place in the middle of nowhere at the
junction of 251 and 22. It was only 4 bucks for the two of us. Now we’re
on the road to Bahia Blanca, it’s about 60 miles away. From there we have
to take a left hand turn go up north on… route 31 is it? Or 33, then 11.
So far, so good, we’ll see if we can make it to Paraguay.”
“We’re at
hour number 32, we’re cruising on our way to Rosario through northern
Argentina. Lots of green plains and ponds and birds and cows and road kill,
and all that ----. Lots of bugs on the windshield, getting more difficult
to see. The car seems to be holding up all right, as are we. We have done
1,796 miles so far… uhhh… I don’t know six, seven, eight hundred more to
– who knows? And lots of cows, I am looking at a big herd right now. It’s
7:14 pm.”
“Nov. 24th,
it’s 7 o’clock in the morning. Hour number 44 of driving. We’ve done 2,433.5
miles. I’m starting off my driving turn after Ben drove through the sunset,
it should be about… sunrise rather, it should be about three more hours
to Asuncion. I drove for a while last night, pretty tired, there were lots
and lots and lots of bugs – so many that it sounded like a heavy downpour
hitting the windshield and made it nearly impossible to see. We have no
more cleaner and the entire front of the car is covered in a quarter inch
of sludgy insect guts… it was otherwise uneventful, and now it’s time to
get to Asuncion.”
“Well, we made
it to Paraguay, and are now screwed. It’s been 50 hours since we left Ushuaia,
and we covered 2,705 miles. We have no cash because the Paraguayan border
guards extorted it all from us. Not surprisingly we cannot find a working
ATM that will accept either of our cards. I am feeling giddy and think
it’s been way too long since I slept… what do we have to eat? Oh great,
f---ing Kit Kat Bars, peanut butter, and some water. Where the hell are
we going to park anyway?”
The recording
ends there, but the story has a happy ending. Just when all seemed
lost, inspiration struck me – what sort of hotel would let someone sign
in without paying? A luxury hotel I reasoned! Ben was skeptical of my plan,
but we quickly located one of Paraguay’s finest hotels, right in the center
of Asuncion, and boldly drove my filthy, US licensed car right up to the
front entrance, parking it for all to see. As I swaggered toward the front
desk I noticed that in addition to the mass of bugs and mud plastered over
my truck, there was a good sized bird sticking out of the radiator.
Fortunately
my bluff worked, and the hotel manager, convinced that we were some odd
breed of deranged and wealthy foreign adventurers rather than a couple
of nuts on the verge of collapse, without further questioning showed us
to a luxury suite that was one of the nicest hotel rooms I have ever stayed
in. Our initial efforts to fall asleep failed, as we were too tired, too
on edge. A call to room service, a steak meal and a bottle of wine each,
and we both passed out into a deep sleep and didn’t awake until the following
day.
The Argentinean
customs official had been right. On my first day of looking in Asuncion
I found a chop shop willing to pay me $800 in cash for my car and all its
parts. I told them I’d come back later - I thought their offer was low,
and I couldn’t bear the idea of my beloved 4Runner being torn apart. Fortunately
there was a home for my car. On the second day of my search, while walking
around a Japanese used car store, I ran into a middle aged Paraguayan man
who by chance was also a Toyota fanatic. Once I learned that he owned a
ranch outside of Asuncion on which he had built a 6-mile off road course,
I knew I was in luck. Less than an hour later we had finished negotiating,
and that same evening he handed me an envelope of cash, and then in what
was a climatic moment, I handed him my keys, marking the true end of my
adventure, and the last time I ever saw the 1988 Toyota 4Runner.
The next
day I flew back to the United States, covering in less than a day a
distance that had taken me so many months and miles to do by land. I followed
the plane’s progress on the monitor in front of my seat, astonished at
how quickly each country went by. As the faces and places passed without
feeling or context from my metal skinned perch 35,000 feet in the sky I
was reminded of why I had thought up such a trip in the first place, of
why I had wanted to see the land and everything in between rather than
being whisked from one world to another. Sighing, I gripped a shell I had
found on a beach in Costa Rica as the stewardess announced our descent
into JFK airport in New York.
The articles
below are Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV of To The End Of The
World by Charles Ragsdale:
To contact Charles
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