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 won’t rather than can’t. 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 writer’s 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 traveller’s 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 15^th 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, Chile’s 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.