Richard Villar - Never a Straight Line: Travels through Chile and Bolivia

Copyright 2018 by Richard Villar

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Published by: Vineyard Press Limited
8. Marylebone Street, London, W1G 8JL,
United Kingdom

ISBN: 978-0-9542203-4-1
ePub ISBN: 978-0-9542203-1-0

About the Author

Richard Villar is a travel writer, and surgeon, who lives and works in the United Kingdom. He was formerly a member of the British Special Air Service and is the author of several highly-acclaimed books, including Knife Edge: Life as a Special Forces Surgeon and Winged Scalpel: A Surgeon at the Frontline of Disaster. Richard travels widely, lectures extensively, writes wherever he goes, and has worked in more than 40 countries. These have included Kashmir, Java, Haiti, the desert conflict in Libya, the Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan, Ethiopia, India, Nepal, Central America, and places in between. He has even climbed Mount Everest, though never made the top. He now works extensively in the Middle East, largely on the Lebanon/Syria border but still travels the world like crazy.

Richard has appeared on television and radio on many occasions, is an editor in his own right, with articles appearing in The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, the Evening Standard, Readers Digest, The Independent, and many other publications. His first article was published when he was only 13 years old, for the Church of England Newspaper.

Richard is also the founder of the widely read, long-form travel blog, Never A Straight Line (www.neverastraightline.com). He writes about what he sees, as well as what he does, and may already have written about you.

Contents

To those who cannot join me

Maps

Chile is a long way from London, 7249 miles (11666 kilometres), and not much dreaming en route
(Map data2018 Google, INEGI).

Head north from Santiago and you will get there
(Map data2018 Google).

The route - Never A Straight Line for certain
(Map data2018 Google).

Prologue

I have a problem. I like to travel and when I travel I like to write.

Actually, I need to write, as back home in England there are those who cannot join me, although sometimes it is wont rather than cant. Mind you, I do visit some pretty peculiar places. Mostly, the life of a traveller, a travel writer in particular, is solitary. No one wants to accompany you when all they see is the top of a writers head. Face down, expression furrowed, pen scribbling, keyboard tapping, generally uncommunicative. Writers, at least this writer, can be as antisocial as they get.

So, I have reached an arrangement, maybe I best call it a deal. I wander the planet, on occasion others come with me, but mostly they remain surrounded by the comforts of home. To stay in touch, I write, daily, regularly, 1000 words about this and that, and everything unconnected; events I have encountered, or which have hit me unexpectedly. It is how I report in and involve others in my adventures. It is not a travelogue, not a list of tedious destinations and even ghastlier hotels. I write about events, people, animals maybe, excitements, hazards, and things that actually happen. Is that not why most of us travel anyway, simply to see how we might react?

Should you wish to follow my path, you will find me difficult to track. Travelling the way I do, things are so often around the corner, around another corner, back a bit, left a bit, right on occasion, beyond and out of sight. Somehow my journeys are always an adventure.

My travellers life, and I have wandered since I was tiny, has been by foot, or car, or air, perhaps bicycle, and on occasion even by boat. It has never been a straight line from the very first day I started. How I would hate things to be so simple.

So why Chile, or for that matter Bolivia? Easy. I was there, they were there, I had a meeting there, and I had heard that far up north was a part of Chile, the 15th Region, that had yet to become tourist-impregnated, and certainly not by fellow Europeans. Plenty went to Patagonia, cohorts to Easter Island, nearly two million annually to San Pedro de Atacama, but Arica, Chiles most northerly city, was comparatively ignored. That was all it needed, a sense of the original, the idea that I was on the road less travelled.

So, meeting over, it was off with the exclusive suit, on with the dirt-rag fashion, and out with notebook and pencil. My plan? To travel overland from Arica in Chile, through Bolivia, to Chile once more, and San Pedro de Atacama, a 25-day journey. I would finish where most others thought to start. And as I travelled, I wrote, daily, 1000 words or longer, to keep those who could not join me up to date.

In the pages that follow are many stories, plenty of which I wager are unique. They are how I keep in touch with the folk back home and when read together tell what I trust is a fascinating story. I challenge you to follow me if you can. These lands will not disappoint you. Nor will the people they contain.

But remember, Never A Straight Line is what they call me, Never A Straight Line is how it is done.

DAY 1

The British Airways Dreamliner

Location: Somewhere over Cayenne, French Guiana

They call it a Dreamliner, do they? Well you could have fooled me. I know it is big, I know it is light and I know it flies extraordinarily high. But believe me, sleep did not come easy on my 14-hour, British Airways flight to Chile.

I tried, honest I did, but all that happened was my head began to loll, my tongue flopped sideways and I started to attract bemused looks from passengers nearby. The bloke beside me, somewhere in his early forties, balding, with his remaining hair cut stubbly short, probably was in Dreamland. Mouth open, head back, BA headphones in place and snoring, he was well away. And oh, boy did he snore. No one was falling asleep near Mr Stubbly.

I think I dozed off at one point, but rapidly dreamt I was being attacked by an alien with forked tail, horns and halitosis - an alien who breathed out flame - and awoke after barely ten minutes, panicking because I had lost my glasses. I have reached that era when nothing much is feasible without them. I patted my pockets - nothing. I shook my glasses case - nothing. I searched my seat - nothing. I looked in the diddy-little-drawer by my feet - nothing. I had to be creative.

My only hope was a steward. There seemed to be plenty of those. The guys definitely outnumbered the gals on this occasion. An airplane, a Dreamliner especially, is full of many tiny crannies that can hide anything, from a mobile telephone, to a pen, to a calculator, to a camera, and to glasses, perhaps? An authoritarian voice had already announced earlier in the flight that if anyone lost a mobile down the side of their seat, they were not, not, not - there could have been four nots rather than three - to do anything other than remain stationary, barely breath, and summon help immediately. It was one of those orders that, as the ex-soldier within me, I knew I should rigidly obey. So, a steward it would have to be for my delinquent glasses. I could not have been the only traveller to have lost his specs.