Van Life in South America

Two years ago we took our first steps on a journey that, even though we had been planning it for a long time, I could never visualize what each footfall would look like. My husband and I spent most of 2017 traveling through South America in a beat up 1982 VW van, equipped with a couch that morphed into a double bed and a two burner stove, on which we cooked almost every meal. Push aside that glowing mental image of the modern van-life; a couple wearing bohemian outfits, color-coordinated with the van interior. We had no refrigerator, very little storage space, a finite amount of gas and sporadic opportunities to refill, a limited supply of potentially poisonous water, a pot, a wok, a tiny frying pan, half a chopping board, and a very blunt knife. There were no bells, or whistles, or even a functioning horn. Other than the painfully unachievable dream of driving from Santiago, Chile to Seattle, Washington in seven months, without missing a thing in between, we had nothing pressing to do but survive. The daily realities of “survival” on a continent whose culture, structure, and language we had only the shallowest grasp of, forced us appreciate the beauty of simplicity and embrace the power of our personal resilience.

Let me tell you about our van. She was built in 1982 in a Mexican Volkswagen factory. Whether it was original or not, when we bought her she was the color of a foamy latte with a white poptop, front bars and hubcaps. Behind the cockpit was a complete house. Smaller (by a few square meters) than our last apartment, it provided all the essentials of a home, pared down to their base functions. When I slid the door open, one step would land me in the kitchen. To my left was a tall, narrow cupboard door that hid our pantry. It had two tiny shelves for dry goods and a makeshift hammock for our fruit and vegetables. To my right was a dollhouse-like freestanding oven. The cuteness of the tiny oven was a huge selling point in our purchase of the van. It was old, slightly rusty, and I loved it. In my mind having an oven took us from camping vagabonds to homeowners. Beside the oven sat a single comfy chair, back to back with the driver’s seat. For at least 85% of our seven-month trip, this was where I sat and prepared our sustenance; both emotional and physiological. I would twist sideways in my seat to pull up the table that hung down against the wall beside me and stand it precariously on its single leg. This fastened me in for the duration of preparation and consumption. My husband sat on the couch across from me, handing me the necessary items from the pantry when called on. When we got home I had to re-train in “stand up cooking”. After every meal we loaded our dishes into a fluorescent green plastic tub. Whether we washed them or not depended on time and mood, and often we let them reach critical mass. Our very first night, we nestled our house next to a line of dumpsters on a quiet hill overlooking Valparaiso, Chile. We also made ourselves at home on seaside cliff tops, high above sea level in the Andes, on a bustling cobblestoned street in Peru, multiple mechanics’ yards, the middle of the Bolivian salt flats, above the clouds in the hills of Ecuador, and at the edge of Lake Titicaca.

We didn’t want to be your standard tourists, sharing hostels, sitting on buses loaded with Western faces, bonding over mutual acquaintances from back home (more often than not New Zealand is exactly as small as people assume it is), and eating and drinking in places you’d never catch a local. I loved being the singular Caucasian female at the daily markets buying armfuls of fruits and vegetables whose names I didn’t know; at least not in Spanish, and sometimes not even in English. Not so thrilling was being the ones getting lost on unsealed roads, finding our path cut by a river that didn’t register on the map, or getting stuck for hours on the wrong side of a political road closure. But at least I could make lunch while we formulated our next move. Some days we had the most amazing bowls, overflowing with fresh greens, herbs, jewel-like yams, and fresh peas. Other days I would rejoice at finding one last onion and a few dried mushrooms in the back of our pantry and I would make savory porridge. Either way, what we ate and how I cooked, reflected exactly what was happening at that given moment; the magical, the frustrating, and the inconvenient.

Our plant-based diet was not an obstacle in this race, if anything it was a head start. Each town we visited, the people ate within their means, in terms of physical access to food, time, equipment, traditions, culture, and social standing; because these realities are inescapable. For me, veganism is a commitment to doing just that; confronting the physical limitations of our environment and the boundaries of our conscience. We eat the best way we can that aligns our moral ideals with our physical access to food, time, equipment, traditions, culture, and social standing. When we could, we ate at plant-based restaurants, huddled around shared tables trying our best to have deep conversations in a combination of Spanish and gesture, about the glories of plants. Otherwise we ate practically every meal out of two clay bowls that I purchased in our first week on the road. The majority of our meals were one pot wonders or fresh salads, made up of ingredients found en route and combined as best I could to feed our bodies and our spirits. There were a lot of days when we needed the comforting powers of pasta or the warming love of hot soup. But when you haven’t seen kale in over a month, you devour it in its purest form; rubbed down with salt and olive oil, lining the bottom of your bowl like a nutritionally supportive mattress.

I found a lot of joy in wandering the foreign supermarkets. They are a fascinating blueprint of how people eat. In the giant supermarkets of

Chile and Argentina it seemed like peeking through the window of a mansion at the dinner table of the top 1%. But the further we traveled, and the smaller the supermarkets became, the offerings simplified and mapped out a diet based around simple starches, seasoned with herbs and warming spices, decorated with what vegetables could be found. Even the processed foods show the tastes and textures people crave. The basic canned, boiled beans I am used to couldn’t be found in any supermarket. Instead there were cans of creamy, flavorful beans, the ones that are not an addition to a meal, but ARE the meal. The ones that you can imagine simmering away on a fire all day to somehow transform inexpensive dried beans into a soporific comfort food. What we demand from the food industry is generally what we wish we could make ourselves; what has been made for us in the past but we have somehow lost the ability or incentive to prepare from scratch in our own kitchens.

From those big, shiny supermarkets we bought the basics; rice, oats, pasta, little boxes of passata, and the perfect little parcels containing a few dried mushrooms and a single bay leaf that seemed to be in every spice aisle. Our fresh plant supplies needed replenishing more often than we stumbled across a supermarket so we made a daily pilgrimage to the closest market. A bustling, overwhelming mess of produce sprawled across rugs on the ground, overflowing out of sacks, or wheeled down the narrow streets on wooden carts. Depending on the area hosting these markets it could be a rainbow of different shades of greens, eggplants, avocados, tropical fruits (including passion fruit the size of my face), and more varieties of potato than a starch lover could dream of. In smaller towns there would be a simple selection of potatoes, pumpkin, cabbage, tomatoes, shelling peas, and a sturdy type of spinach. In the mountains there were sacks of different yams, very similar to what people call New Zealand yams. (Obviously we just call them yams.) They are sweet and starchy, with a little crunch, and come in mindblowing shades of red, pink, and yellow.

Most stallholders did not bat an eyelid as we wandered around taking stock of what was on offer, but as soon as I broke out my feeble Spanish and tried to fill my bag with vegetables, there was much confusion. Where is your kitchen? Do you know how to cook this? Where are you from? Have you tried this? Have some, it’s delicious. On the multiple, unfortunate, occasions we were stuck living outside the local mechanics house, I would visit the same market every day or two. The ladies would giggle when they saw that we were was still there, ask about the gnarled root vegetable they’d sold me yesterday, and offer me something new to try with a very loose recipe that I barely understood every ninth word of.

As well as diving into a whole new world of ingredients, the limitations of our little kitchen meant I had to change the way I cooked. Our gas bottle was proudly Bolivian and would not comply with the standard fittings at most refill spots. We never knew when we would next be able to replenish our precious cooking fuel and were therefore acutely aware of the minutes with the elements ignited. Cooking legumes from scratch was obviously off the table. We tried buying textured vegetable protein but discovered quickly that it did not agree with either of us. The best we could do was soak lentils overnight, leave them to sprout in a colander during the course of the day, and hope they would manage to cook sufficiently in the time it took to pull together a comforting bolognese. This system really depended on the outside temperature; sometimes the sprouting phase took days. The only occasion we were brave enough to use the gas oven was on our fourth week of living in the backyard of a mechanic in Uyuni, Bolivia with a reliable gas dispensary a few dusty blocks away. I roasted a big tray of bright red yams and we ate them like fries while we sat in front of the laptop watched a movie. One perk of a mechanics was they usually let us steal their power too.

For the sake of sustainability and cost efficiency we refused to buy water in plastic bottles. We were always on the lookout for spots to fill our six liter containers with potable water. Due to the often suspicious water sources, our foreign tummies, and the logistical chaos that would ensue if either of us got sick living in this bathroomless house on wheels, we always had to boil our water. This meant that every pot of porridge started with a vigorously boiled base stock. Some days I caramelized banana and cinnamon in olive oil before pouring the water in. To satisfy my savory breakfast cravings I would fry onion, garlic, nuggets of dried mushroom and a bay leaf then douse it with water and a decent pinch of salt. Oats were then feverishly added in a two-pronged attack: he stirred and I sprinkled. The time it took to reach the boil was also problematic. In the spirit of the South American starch-centric diet, both lunch and dinner tended to include two carbs. Potatoes or sweet potatoes were cooked slowly in the salted water on its way to a boil. Ensuring they got a minute at the rolling boil to kill any potential pathogens, these were delicately fished out and replaced by rice, quinoa, or pasta, depending on what was required.

The time it took to prepare a meal was my time to process the events of the day; digesting the beauty and wonder of a new place or coming to terms with some fresh logistical nightmare. We could snuggle back into our comfort zone; clouds of steam and the white noise of simmering washing away the day. As untethered as we were, the fresh produce we bought and the meals we created grounded us; tying us in the moment so we weren't blown away on the breeze. There were days when we felt alone and unwelcome in a world we could not understand, communicate with, or meaningfully participate in. There were also moments when we felt so connected to it all that we curled up in our van feeling just as at home as if we were permanent residents of the neighborhood. On our third night living on the street outside a second Bolivian mechanic’s house, a woman knocked on our van window. From what I could gather from our disjointed conversation, she just wanted to make sure we were doing alright. She gave us a parcel of whole fire roasted potatoes wrapped in newspaper and a tiny plastic bag of vibrant green herb salsa. It was a small offering from a poor woman, but it was so emotionally satiating; a smoky, starchy cuddle with an optimistically bright herby dipping sauce to bolster us for another day of being lost. Food may physically sustain us, but the sourcing, cooking, giving, and sharing of food connects us to the present moment and fosters a feeling of belonging like nothing else. r

Words & Photos by Tess Shawbeautifulsubsistence.com Instagram: @beautifulsubsistence