T A B L E_T A L K Have you lived abroad? Would you do it again? Share tips and tales on the expat way of life in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y The truth about guidebooks By Dawn MacKeen That 1998 guide has all the latest information, right? Wrong. (08/17/98) Salon Exclusive: Everest debate, Round Two By Weston DeWalt The co-author of "The Climb" counters Jon Krakauer's claims and questions the role of media in high-risk, extreme sports (08/14/98) Salon Exclusive By Jon Krakauer Everest controversy continues: Jon Krakauer rebuts Weston DeWalt's response (08/07/98) Salon Exclusive By Weston DeWalt Everest controversy continues: Weston DeWalt responds to Jon Krakauer (08/07/98) Over Africa By Maryalicia Post An open-cockpit ride in a reproduction 1935 plane (08/06/98) Browse the Wanderlust Postmark archives		THE MOTHER OF ALL ROAD TRIPS | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Chanco, Chile; Aug. 7: I woke up this morning to my 27th birthday, lying on the side of the road with the Russian and Japanese teams. It wasn't a bad camping spot, and we were quite entertained watching the Russian journalists drink Stoli and smoke Marlboros before bed and eat meat and crackers for breakfast before all the teams rushed off to reach kayaking, biking and skiing sites. It certainly wasn't as noisy a camping spot as the night before last, when I awoke (throughout the night) to a starry sky and a chorus of dogs, roosters and cows. It's simply not true that a rooster wakes up the farm animals every morning; I'm convinced they just don't sleep at all. We also had the metronome of a snoring Russian journalist who is traveling with the U.S. team for a few days. Yesterday, we left our camping spot at sunrise and headed down the village's dirt road, en route to a spot where Dean and Greg would have to bike in the foothills of the Andes. The main drag at about 7 in the morning makes Santiago rush hour look tame. In the middle of the road, we found a bicyclist pulling a horse on a leash, children walking to school and a collection of chickens, pigs, dogs, sheep and goats that were as raggedy as a chest of stuffed animals with too much love. The U.S. team, especially vocal on the all-team VHF mobile, is already known for detailed farm animal reports. "We have cows in the road ahead," or "Large pig on your left," or "Chickens crossing, and we don't know why." We spent about 10 hours in the car today, driving to checkpoints in the Andes, the Coastal Hills and in between, covering several hundred miles. There were fewer farm animals in the towns than there were on the mountain roads, but towns had their share of wild dogs and Chilean carabineros in olive uniforms. We were caught going the wrong way on a one-way street in the town of Constitution, and we spent five minutes telling the officer we don't speak Spanish. He responded that he doesn't speak English and promptly decided the language problem made it too difficult to ticket us. Outside Santiago, it's rare to find a Chilean who speaks English, and their Spanish is fast and clipped and nothing like the tapes I studied this summer. I took an eight-week class to prepare, and I am excellent at asking for directions to the campground or telling someone I'm a journalist. I've quickly become the resident translator and team representative when it comes time for local interaction. Greg made a feeble attempt at studying his Spanish-for-the-tourist book on the plane to Santiago last week; key phrases included, "May I kiss you," "No, I'm not ready for that" and "This is my wife, please keep your hands off her." As I'm writing this, I'm sitting in the back seat of our Defender, loaded with waterproof bags, food for three weeks, spare tires and athletic gear. Greg and Dean are biking to a point in Reserva National Federico Albert, and several other journalists and I are waiting for them to return, passing time by filtering drinking water and preparing food. And here I sit, with my antique Macintosh PowerBook on my lap. There are cows fenced in to my right, horses fenced in to my left and a gaucho wearing a sombrero standing in the street. Within five minutes of setting up my workstation here, a group of seven teenage boys gathered around the open back door to marvel at my computer. With my limited Spanish, I answered some of their questions ("What is the price of that (computer) in the U.S.?" "Where are you going?"). The ringleader is 16-year-old Jorge Letelier, dressed in a worn gray and black knit sweater and gray trousers, his school uniform. He's taller than the other boys, but all of them have the same shiny black hair and huge, wonderful, dark eyes. I just showed him his name on the screen, and he smiled, embarrassed in front of his friends. He asked me my name and then told me it's "bonito." I blushed. On my 27th birthday, I'm sitting in a car next to cows flirting with a 16-year-old. Oh, my. I ask Jorge where he lives. "Ahi." Over there. He points to the other side of the cow field to a cluster of dirty charcoal-colored shacks with no windows and clotheslines that stretch four times the length of each house. Jorge and the boys quickly return their gaze to my laptop, entranced by my fingers dancing on the keyboard. Any minute now, Greg and Dean will bike back to the cars, and I'll throw the PowerBook into its waterproof, airtight, hard plastic case, help put the bikes on the roof and assume my position in the back of the Freelander. We'll drive away in a cloud of dust, in a hurry to reach another checkpoint before sunset, but leaving Jorge and his posse to wonder about the North American woman in the yellow car with the small electronic machine and what it all means. And for a moment, as we rush away, Jorge and I may be thinking the same thing. - - - - - - - - - - - - Tolhuaca National Forest, Chile; Aug. 8: It's 4 a.m. Today isn't really today yet because we still haven't gone to sleep from yesterday. So my birthday entertainment continues. After driving from mountains to coast and back to mountains this evening, we turned onto a windy dirt road that eventually brought us here, where we'll wake up close to a checkpoint in the morning (albeit, it's already morning). Several hours ago, we were cruising along these narrow, one-lane farm roads at about 25 mph, listening to the Chieftains' folksy "Santiago," and we saw cows ahead of us. Not in the distance or on the side, but right smack in front of the car, evenly spaced so we couldn't pass them (there was barbed wire fence on either side of the road). Three brown-and-white cows and one black-and-white cow continued walking calmly, even as we started tailgating. We sped up, they sped up. We honked, they started to trot. They even bucked occasionally, stopping every few minutes to turn around and acknowledge us with an evil cow eye. At one point, our photographer ran out of the car and tried to round up the cows himself, but it became evident that the cows had their own agenda. Eyes still wet with laughing tears, but feeling defeated as only humans stuck behind cows can feel, we sat in the car, inching along, and watched our headlights on four commanding tails. Thirty minutes later, our personal bovine escort was finished. At last, man and machine proceeded past animals, into the Chilean mud. - - - - - - - - - - - - Pucon, Chile; Aug. 10: At 2:30 this afternoon, I took my last upward step onto crunchy, perfectly blinding white snow at 8,780 feet, and I knew I'd reached the summit of Volcon Villarrica. There isn't a line or a sign or any indication that you've reached the top of the mountain; maybe reaching the summit simply means being able to see over the top. If you're a seasoned mountaineer, you know when you've reached the summit, and you take the obligatory pictures and chalk up another mountain conquered. But for me, I only knew I had reached the summit when I had the balance and composure to turn around for the first time in six hours, since starting my ascent. When I did turn around, my view from the top of the world was blurred by a heavy stream of tears that had accumulated with every steady step up the mountain. I cried uncontrollably for 10 minutes before I looked out again. In front of me and down below were purring clouds, sparkling Lake Villarrica, the resort town of Pucon and several other volcanoes in Chile. To my right were mountains that lay half in Chile and half in Argentina, covered in snow and striking against the blue sky. Several feet behind me was the crater rim of one of Chile's most active volcanoes; a look inside the crater reveals an ongoing show of minor explosions and fireworks shooting up as though there is a fire-breathing dragon inside. I spun around and inhaled the brilliance, squinting at the sun reflecting off the snow the way it does only once a year atop Villarrica. I set out to climb the white volcano this morning among experienced climbers -- all the Camel Trophy competitors and many of the event journalists. The U.S. team was guided by Victoria, a strawberry blond Chilean who curtly told us, "In Chile, we speak Spanish." With crampons, ice ax and gas mask in tow, I set out with the team, sans any formal instruction on how to climb. Greg told me to kick my toes into the snow to secure my footing and to use the ski poles to distribute physical demands between my arms and legs with each step. Two of our journalists decided to stop climbing about halfway up the mountain, but I continued, and Dean and Greg stuck with me, even at my snail's pace. As the ascent became frighteningly steep, Dean said: "Don't look back and don't look forward, Mel; just concentrate on where you're placing each foot and how you reach the next turn." I learned that you climb a mountain single file, and each step is indeed a coup. I repeated in my head, "Right pole, left foot, left pole, right foot," with hesitation and focus before each movement. The rhythm was what kept me going, but it also made me crazy: Which step comes first in the sequence? The monotony of it made my elementary thoughts run together, and then my mind wandered for a split second to anything -- anything -- but the slow-motion crunch of snow with every step, hour after hour. I always caught myself quickly when this happened, using a mental choke chain to set my mind back on track. Time after time, the diversion was accompanied by the slightest sway, undetectable by anyone else, but which sent me into a panic as I imagined leaning a bit farther and tumbling down the mountain. All day, I cursed peripheral vision as I saw grapefruit-sized snow chunks -- loosened by climbers above me -- shooting down the mountain like an inverted skeeball game in the corner of my eye. I would stop, balance, look down at my snow-covered boot and coordinate my muscles and joints to lift a foot for the next step. Our group stopped for a couple of five-minute breaks, where I devoured salted peanuts and chocolate and drank liters of water, feeling my veins ravenously soak up the fuel. I followed Dean's advice to the extreme. I used every ounce of energy in my body to not look anywhere but one foot in front of me. Out of pure fear, I banked on these steps with my life. In the last two hours, Victoria was directly in front of me, making baby steps in the snow and ice for me to follow. I kept asking how far we were from the top, because I refused to look up; I desperately didn't want to lose my balance, and I didn't want to fall, so all I could do was step. When I finally took that last step, when I stopped climbing frozen stairs and felt flat snow under my boots, I lifted my gaze, and I froze. My process of climbing up the mountain was so intense that I never imagined how majestic the prize would be. And that's when I started shivering with relief and joy and disbelief, and at 8,780 feet, tears froze on my cheeks. SALON | Aug. 18, 1998 Freelance writer Melanie D. Goldman will be sending further dispatches to Wanderlust from the Camel Trophy road.