Blog, South America
Colombia, vanagon maintenance
Lost in Transmission
As soon as I knew what it was to want, I desired nothing more than to be the commander of an intergalactic space shuttle. Later on I decided that I would make a better commercial fishing boat captain. For a short time in 5th grade, my best friend Nick and I decided that we wanted to be nefarious gang members. We even went so far as to form our own gang called The Bloody Devils; we designed a logo that we intended to get tatted on our arms (a dagger with dripping blood), and declared the Southwestern corner of the Heritage Middle School playground as “our turf”. My mom, ever the supporter, bought me a red bandana so there would be no confusion as to the level of my bad-assedness.
During recess we would defend our turf by staging shirtless wrestling matches against our rival gang members, who weren’t even prepared enough to have a gang name, a logo, or a turf on which to stage their own turf wars. However, after a few weeks of prepubescent territorial squabbling, our aspirations shifted to the NBA and our turf fell into the hands of Eric Seeley and his nameless, logoless cronies. These last few weeks I’ve been wishing to be Barbara Walters, or some other tough-talking interviewer. I wake up in the middle of the night waiting with anticipation for the Colombian mechanic to answer my question; why did you do it? I tried to get away from these mechanics, but they wouldn’t let me go. Why didn’t you just leave me alone? Answer the question! WHY DID YOU DO IT?!
We had left El Cocuy feeling that we had just experienced the greatest highlight of our trip thus far. What we hadn’t realized, however, was that we were driving in a ticking time bomb.
We followed James and Lauren out of town, intending to reach Villa de Leyva by evening . When we reached the town of Guacamayas I thought I smelled a coolant leak, so when James stopped his truck to take a picture, I ran out and smelled his engine. As I leaned over to stick my head in their wheel well, my eyes were drawn to the stream of oil gushing out of Nacho’s belly. I flashed back to my days as a gang member, and remembered that liquid gushing out of the belly could only mean one thing. Nacho’s nizzle had been shizzled.
Oh no – shizzled! My brain went into analytical mode to try to figure out what was happening, but my body took over and bolted like a newly dead chicken – a flurry of uncoordinated arms and legs. While I flailed around my brain tried to make sense of my train of thought: Nacho bleeding! Dark oil between engine and transmission. No oil trail – must have started when I stopped. When I stopped I turned engine off. Must restart engine!
Sure enough, restarting the engine caused the oil to slow down, and revving it to 3,000 RPM caused it to stop leaking. I wasn’t about to be stuck in the middle of the remote Colombian mountains – 9 hours from a big city – with a major mechanical issue. I would just have to keep the engine speed above 3,000 RPM until we could get to our next stop, where I could set up shop for a while to fix whatever was wrong.
Forty five minutes passed and everything seemed to be going okay. On occasion I would stop and run out to see if the leak had worsened, but it seemed to be holding. As we began descending into Chicamocha canyon, the transmission made a funny sound. Actually, there was nothing funny about it. The transmission made a sound scary enough to make a grown man wet his pants, but only just a little bit. I admitted defeat and pulled under a shade tree next to a grove of prickly pear cactus. A small stream of transmission fluid coated the dry grass while I sat staring out of the windshield. Sheena knew better than to ask what I was going to do. No, by now she knows that these moments of silence are my time to come to terms with the fact that I have no idea what to do.
By now it was clear that the transmission, and not the engine, was bleeding out. A small feat of German engineering called the “oil slinger” was keeping the oil from pouring out of what was probably a failed transmission oil seal – but it only worked above 3,000 RPM. What had caused the seal to fail was anyone’s guess. I decided to use our reserve of gear oil to refill the transmission and try to get to Villa de Leyva. We had long since, and perhaps foolishly, waved James and Lauren on, promising to meet up with them at the campground.
After the transmission refill – a procedure that takes close to an hour on the Vanagon – we finished the descent into the canyon, crossed the river, and then started the switchback ascent up the other side. By the time we reached the village at the top of the climb I was feeling more confident that we could make it. We were done with the toughest part and had reached a more frequently trafficked road.
It was in between the towns of Soatá and Susacón, while I sat there with a smug look on my face thinking I was so damn smart, that Nacho lost all power, came to a stop, voided his bowels right there in the middle of the dirt road, and started rolling backwards. My smug look evaporated and I stared out of the windshield. Sheena knew better than to ask what I was going to do. I cycled through all of the gears, but forward motion was not to be. Nacho had failed an epic fail.
After cursing our luck, we put our friendly hitchhiker faces on and tricked a nice Colombian man into helping us out. We roped up to his truck and settled in for the short three mile haul to Susacón. The alternative was our winchless self-recovery system, which somehow felt far under qualified for the job. Instead we just sat there, Sheena restraining from asking me the obvious question.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Latin-American car mechanics since starting this trip, it’s that 99% of them don’t have the faintest clue how to work on cars. They take things apart really fast until they feel like they’ve sufficiently destroyed whatever it is they were working on, and then they start putting things back together incorrectly, while leaving some things out and then tightening the bolts as much as their fingers or pliers will allow. I recently made a decree not to let anyone who isn’t me touch our innocent little Nacho ever again. A transmission failure, while a much bigger job than anyth