The Remains of the Van

After blogging about our 10-month campervan journey, I was left with a lot of unedited writing that didn’t make it into the official blog

You can find all sorts of guides and how-to websites on preparing for a road trip down the Panamerican Highway. Some will remind you to forward your mail to a relative’s address. Others tell you how to learn basic Spanish in the space of three weeks. Still others give you solutions for all the bathroom-related problems that will surely present themselves along the way.

In a dream, the perfect picture of the Panamerican road trip features you lounging in a hammock, tied between your spectacular van and a palm tree overflowing with coconuts. Your beautiful bikini-clad girlfriend turns you on between surf sessions, and a local beach bum, who has befriended you, provides the tropical chronic. All this reassures you that you are more than a tourist. You are the nomad adventurer who has strayed off the beaten path where even the mochileros rarely go, and your house is never far behind.

The Rainbow’s route was partially planned before we set off: drive south. We planned most of the itinerary on the road with impromptu decisions to go this or that way, depending on seasons, visas, and time. To cover the many thousands of kilometers in the time you have allotted is not easy. The continent’s wonders pull you in multiple directions. As a rule of thumb, travelers set aside at least one year for North America and one year for South America. We had already traveled all over Colombia and Chile, so we settled on 10 months for the rest of South America, but didn’t visit Bolivia, Brasil, or Venezuela. Few will cover an entire wish list, or visit every national park, or sit on every beach. For this, you need a lifetime or maybe you need a retirement.

If done right, getting lost is a good thing.

In the van, water doesn’t come from a pipe in the ground and fall in your bottle when you turn on the tap; you have to search for clean water, fill the tank, and then you have to pump the manual faucet just for a drink of water. In the van, the furniture has multiple uses, is constantly in motion and goes from passenger seat to dining room to bed. The baby chair, backpacks, jackets, toys, and shoes are all on the move. It doesn’t matter how big your rig is, life-in-a-van means constantly doing things, and eventually this doing of things hopefully rubs off on your children. Having extra hands makes it that much easier.

In the Rainbow, we share everything from practical things, like driving and cooking, to the more disgusting aspects of vanlife like pee-pee bottles and the smelly socks. Despite our differences, eventually you share it all, too much stuff, too little space, time, and of course, the bed. Clothing is used for days on end while children kick and scream on yet another four-hour drive, and you have nowhere to go, at least not until you park the house. Then after a few thousands kilometers, when you are sure you are going to make this work the baby falls asleep, you hear your favorite song, and our differences become mere inconveniences: small and easy to ignore.

When we spend time with our children, we push ourselves to be better examples and hope we have provided the kindling and the spark to allow them to burn bright. A baby perceives her location-essentially her existence-in reference to her mother’s physical location. When mamá is nowhere to be seen, the brain is doused in fear juices, and baby goes into survival mode. To a similar degree, this is what happens to a three-year-old in the thick of potty training. Once the bladder is full, alarms go off, panic ensues, and nothing is familiar, except the warm comfort of urine dripping down the leg.

Your children are like baby whales. It is your job to push them along the path and up for a breath every once in a while. Elisa once told us the best thing about the campervan is trying new things. Lucia said its being outside.

Mami, I like living in the Rainbow, but I also like painting my nails, Elisa said one night when the winds were howling. In a van, your possessions boil down to your most important things: I have climbing gear, the girls have their favorite toys, Ignacia has a hand-held food processor. Everybody has a couple pairs of shoes, jackets, a hat, and gloves. As far as fingernails go, clippers are important. Even Mino has claw clippers packed away behind his bed. For a pair of little girls, nail polish is vital.

Igna has her oils. She also has her pills, and some creams, ointments, magic potions. She does what she can, casting sana sana, poto de rana spells to heal all of our campervan wounds and cuts and bruises. When Lucia fell face first into a skate park ramp; when Elisa stubbornly turned away from her mother and ran into a supermarket shelf; and the bug bites, the hundreds, nay, thousands of bug bites we accrued between Colombia and Chile. She even heals the friends we meet. I’ll never forget a seven-year-old English boy named Sam with a skinned knee who made me laugh and appreciate Ignacia in a new light when his mother went to put a bandage on his knee, he cried:

Mummy, I want Ignacia, because you don’t know what you’re doing. She uses magic!

There are sick children, and the wait for them to get better. There are sick vans, and the delay for them to get better. We spent several nights in a garage, none in a hospital. There are nights on the side of a road, a village, the unplanned stops that are necessary to reach the destinations ahead of schedule. It may take a day or two to get a SIM card, another day or two to get some cash, or a week to find a windshield.

I talk about a flexible spine, but this kind of travel requires a flexible mind.

I have come to accept that travel is an all-day activity, morning to night. When not organizing the van, cleaning the van, fixing the van, or driving the van, the long-term traveler, and overlander are adept at mastering the art of doing all the things you would normally do, but inside your van: help with your kid’s homework, go to the playground, fix dinner, watch the news, read a book, go to bed. To this, add van maintenance, planning, and executing the perfect itinerary. After several months on the road, you loosen your grip on the idea that if you were living in an apartment, your time would be spent doing more.

The journey provided plenty of lessons about family and life in a small space, but also allowed us to show our children how the world is interconnected, how language and culture defy borders, and how geography shapes human societies.

South America without yerba mate is like Ethiopia without coffee; Italy with no basil; or Mexico without the jalapeño.

The refugee knows nothing of destinations and estimated times of arrival.

Nothing can console us as we expertly distract ourselves until we are satisfied to death. We would do anything to prevent us from thinking about ourselves. Travellers are the martyrs of modern society, the tragic heroes discontent with the mortal condition of an existence between four walls, who have shed their attachments, protested the soul-sucking commute, and denounced the deleterious traditions of their ancestors.

Perhaps, the real problem lies in all these so-called main streets, a superficial name that reveals the profound meaningless of civilization. Main Street pays homage to nothing and nobody, blank spaces in cities that have everything to do with beehives and ant colonies and nothing with culture.

It’s useless to ask a wandering man advice on the construction of a house.

One story Elisa told several times was about a moth who wanted to look like a butterfly. So the moth went to the store to get colors and brushes and painted her wings with beautiful designs. But when it started to rain, all the paint came off, dripping yellow, red, and green. She drowned in a flood of vanity.

Why was gold so important? Elisa asked one day in Peru.
Because, they had no plastic, I replied.

How we talk is just as important as what we say. And in the end, our words absolutely shape our identity.

Have you ever wondered what a certain corner of the globe might look like? Have you always wanted to reach a place so far flung, the geography is a puzzle and its name as ominous as a never-to-be-seen galaxy.

As 2019 and the second decade of the century comes to an end, we have much to ponder. On first glance we the world’s societies are distancing ourselves from each other, hiding our vulnerabilities in extreme ideologies and egocentricity. Inequality continues to reign, especially in Latin America. But there are reasons to look forward to 2020 with optimism: On the larger scale, people are more united than every before, interdependent on one another for most of our basic needs. Our cultures overlap, languages meld, and we are more biologically entwined than we think. I’m convinced that this is the future of humanity. If we can recognize the same relationship with the earth, we just might save us all.

From time, there is no escape.

Originally published at https://nicoparco.com on April 18, 2020.