The bus station in Santiago of Chile is one of those places where time is suspended between the heat and the coolness of the night. When from any bus appears a new face, this immediately triggers a sudden excitement, typical of those little tricks of daily living. The bus station is always a fork in the journey of endless choices. After a brief consultation to decide whether to continue the travel toward the green and southern Switzerland, toward Concepcion and the legendary University of Bio Bio, toward Puerto Montt and his project of sustainable city (district heating, heat pumps especially from Baumann technology and an innovative composting system for organic waste through the work of earthworms), we decided to turn our eyes toward the north to the Atacama Desert. We leave Santiago slowly, hampered by a colorful procession of malabaristas, street artists who protest against the ban to exercise their art in the streets of downtown Santiago. We meet to party and discuss in the typical Peñas, places where you can listen and dance some cuecas of Violeta Parra and Victor Jara’s ballads, perhaps accompanied by delicious empanadas, pastel de choclo with humitas and Chilean wine. The meeting is for the next day in front of La Moneda, the historic headquarter of the Chilean president. Place where you will find all the protests of the country, a symbol of the military coup that overthrew Allende in 1973 and led to the long dictatorship of Pinochet.

From Valparaiso the Pan-American highway runs fast alongside the Pacific Ocean, the coast is interrupted by infrequent fishing villages, the coast is bent by the majestic power of the ocean. Distant to be seen, Easter Island lies at the mercy of the currents. In the bus we travel with a young Chilean family, a young woman with three small children, all beautiful. We talk about each other’s differences and we think, a gulf seems to divide us, but then we take a break for lunch on the road and they order a large plate of fries, which they call chorillana, with a huge glass of cola. The world nowadays is liquid, perhaps even more than predicted by Bauman at the dawn of the digital age.

• Through the window Brazil, Argentina, Chile
• Mazatlan and Mexican friends
• Lima and Manual del Pendejo
• Hermosillo, Mexico
• Guaymas and Bahia de San Carlos

Santiago de Chile looks like a long strip that stretches from north to south, sometimes unformed, a small copy of the entire Chile, with its characteristic threadlike shape. So deeply varied and contradictory. Santiago is alive and pulsating.

• Chile on the road
• Where the atacama desert begins
• Santiago de Chile: poetry, recycling, arts
• Medellin, Botero and Pablo Escobar
• Mazatlan and Mexican friends

The last American week, once more and so short to seem already ended: the travel through Peru, fantastic but perhaps lived less intensely regarding the adventures in the other Latin American countries. Coming from the uncovered coast of the Pacific Ocean, Lima appears as an enormous and dusty strip of desert, at first sight quite unattractive. The traffic congests this big city reducing the historical center (around Plaza de Armas) to a funnel of smog, nothing romantic. People shout in order to sell goods of any type, from food to the most unthinkable objects. An old man shows us his product, saying “asì me gano la vida“, the Manual del Pendejo, that is expired daydreams and holy water… life in Latin America is never banal neither sweet, just demands a lot, maybe too much creativity.

The Yuyanapaq.Para recordar museum (in memory of the two decades civil war, 1980-2000), remembers through an intense audiovisual exposition, that tragic period in Peruvian history and the sad genocide of the Andean people, a season of ideological contrasts that kicked up a big wave of terror in the country. As always, those who paid the worst price in this war were the indigenous people, particularly in the region of Ayacucho. Overwhelmed by a spiral of violence and terroristic actions, the country lost the conscience and suspended its own history.

• Trekking in the Cordillera Blanca
• Travel from Chachapoyas to Cajamarca
• Nomadic travel’s Slideshow
• Nomadic Travel’s Mosaic
• Mazatlan and Mexican friends

During the last few days we are making strange encounters… it can happen while we walk along the streets, while we seat down at a restaurant or while we drink a beer, but the strategy is unfailing: we just wait for someone approaching us! The rest is in the hands of the Mexican colorful behavior. Preferably our friends are in couple, but there are no rules of age, sex or social condition; they are always good drinkers of Tecate or Modelo (popular Mexican beers),. Everytime it sounds like we find long-term friends, who make us feel completely relaxed: questions result more and more frequent and personal, but so natural that they are never fastidious. When we see that the issue “Italy” (and relative salaries) becomes the main one, we try to put again the discussion on exotic themes. Successively, following a typical Mexican social scheme, a disturbing element arises to definitely brake the atmosphere of complicity.

Even if these experiences generally last the short time of a night, we know that only the people met in this way will colour our travel of memories and funny stories. And Mexico seems to be very, very promising in this direction.

• Hermosillo, Mexico
• Guaymas and Bahia de San Carlos
• Goodbye, Hermosillo
• Bahia de kino
• Zacatecas

A short bus travel took us away from our preferred ghost city, through the pacific ocean. We decided to stop in the portual town of Guaymas, where we were welcome by a hot sun and the usual desertic landscape… soon we moved from our accommodation to the beach: the village of San Carlos, dominated by two twin peaks over the ocean, was our target from many days. To be honest it is not a paradise, but it seemed to us a quiet and pleasant place, where the beautiful beaches of sand and pebbles are touched by a calm, hot and emerald colored sea. The ideal place to swim just before sunset, when also entire Mexican families move from their homes to the seafront. Here the national sport seems to have a swim wearing jeans and t-shirt, obviously with a cold beer (the unfailing Tecate) within easy reach.

• Hermosillo, Mexico
• Goodbye, Hermosillo
• Bahia de kino
• Mazatlan and Mexican friends
• Zacatecas

It was nothing special, but Hermosillo has become the place where we spent the longest time, till now. A quite prison where we alternated happy, boring and sad moments, in a typically Latin American mix. We met a lot of local people, no tourists and we lowered ourselves in this new Mexican life… we are definitely ready to become nomads, once more. We will smile thinking about the 50 degrees of the first days and about the floods of the last ones. In the meantime, the super-salted “carne asada”, the tasteful juices of our friends (“La Resaca” restaurant, ask to local people about it) and the totally unreliable information we received in the street. We say goodbye to the cacti, we need green forests to breath again.

• Hermosillo, Mexico
• Bahia de kino
• Guaymas and Bahia de San Carlos
• Mazatlan and Mexican friends
• Zacatecas

Mission completed! As the local newspaper says, we have been successful in bringing the water in the desert, too: “¡Tormenton! Una lluvia extraordinaria de setenta milimetros en la capital Hermosillo. Desde hace cuatro años no caia una precipitacion tan fuerte”. Coming the clouds from New Mexico, as we did, they probably followed us, we should resign ourselves… now it is still raining and many people thank us on the street. As the last two weeks, we are still in the Northern Mexico, waiting for news and collecting information before leaving through the south, in a few days.

• Goodbye, Hermosillo
• Bahia de kino
• Guaymas and Bahia de San Carlos
• Mazatlan and Mexican friends
• Zacatecas

A beautiful sunset, but unfortunately nothing more…

• Hermosillo, Mexico
• Goodbye, Hermosillo
• Guaymas and Bahia de San Carlos
• Mazatlan and Mexican friends
• Zacatecas