Adv #7 Continued: What's my working life like in Chile?

(Photo above is quite out of order. My buddy Dan (on left) just came down to visit his son for a couple of weeks here in Chile, and fortunately had time to hang out with the baldest guy in Santiago...your's truly!)

So I have to explain: I've been slacking on writing this blog for a couple of reasons. Firstmost, is that I am extremely busy in Chile with work, and after a long day....I have to admit.....the blog just hasn't been a priority. Secondly, it's just been kind of weird to write this now, cause it's just about what I'm doing with my working life down here. When I started this thing, I was traveling constantly, from one end of the U.S. and Canada to the other, and eventually through country after country by motorcycle on my way here to South America. And that seemed worth writing about, right? Well now, I'm honestly a bit more "settled" into the working life again (had to after a while) so it just seems a bit strange to still keep the blog going. Well....I guess.....as long as I'm outside the U.S. and having fun (which I am) maybe I can still squeeze out a blog post here and there. Hope you enjoy this one.

This posting will just be a summary of the kinds of things I've been doing since I started work with Moto Rider. As you saw in the last post, I was originally hired to be a tour guide by motorcycle, but the owner had recognized that I come from a strong background in marketing & sales, as well as a good sense for what it would take to make a motorcycle-tourism company successful.

So after my "scouting mission" through Bolivia, we thought I'd be down here in Santiago for about 3 weeks or so....then returning north with some motorcycles to start our renting business in Antofagasta. Well, 3 weeks here turned into 6, and then 12, and long story short: I'm still here in Santiago after 6 and a half months! (And that makes a total of about 1 year now that I've been in Chile!)

Jaime Roessler (the original manager of Moto Rider) ended up having to leave the company after my first month working, and the owner found another American, Rick Stephen to step in and fill Jaime's role as a manager for us. Rick is originally from Cedarburg, Wisconsin (what are the chances......about 30 miles from my hometown!) but he grew up much of his life in California and spent the last 17 years living in Chile with his wife and 4 kids. He has a long history of work in adventure tourism here in Chile, speaks fluent Spanish, and has been a lot of fun for me to work with.

ANYWAY, my job has been absolutely packed with a variety of things to accomplish since I started. What have I done? Well, imagine all that goes into starting a motorcycle touring & renting company, and that might help paint the picture. For example, (shown below) one of the first things I did after the Bolivia trip was to go through some training with the guys at BMW-Chile. That's Pedro Navarro along with me in the shop, walking me through some of the basics on the bikes that I might eventually have to fix while we're out on a tour. (Tough thing down here is that we don't have "Dealer Networks" or shipping infrastructures like back home in the U.S. or in Europe. If I'm on tour with customers in the middle-of-nowhere-Bolivia, and one of our motorcycles has a problem, we're pretty much on our own to fix it!)

Aside from working in the shop and trying to learn about these bikes, we also have lots of motorcycle races to go to in hopes of promoting our business around "the right" crowd. Enduro races here make for a great atmosphere I just love being around. It's like having the chance to tailgate every weekend!

And who was one of the racers I ran into? My buddy Roger, who I hadn't seen in about 6 months made a strong showing this day with his race partner, until the blew one of the engines and dropped out of that 2nd place finish they had locked up. Great to see you though Rodgie Boy!

Also shown here is a group shot of all my main buddies from BMW. Claudio on the right (congratulations on your engagement, pal!) has been a constant source of laughter since he so generously lets us make jokes about his sister at every occasion.

Remember Jose from other blog posts, too? One weekend we headed down to the SuperBike races in San Antonio, and the next weekend you'll see us below testing out two of Moto Rider's new F800GS's. Yep, that's a fun part of the job, too. Going to BMW to pickup two brand new bikes is a great experience, and I didn't exactly have to "beg" my buddies to help me put the first 1000 break-in kilometers on them!

More work is shown here in the pictures below as I went through BMW's "Rider Training Program" at their Enduro Park just outside of Santiago. Mauricio Vergara (on the right, in charge of the motorcycle operation here in Chile) has been through the same rider training that my buddy Peter Fischer does in Germany, and now BMW offers renditions of that training to their customers here in Chile. So a group of us all headed out of the city on Friday in the springtime (November here) and spent a day going through some basic riding training to enhance our skills. Obstacles, strange hill climbs, balance tests, etc......it's an all-around riding challenge that helps any motorcycle be better an safer out there.

(Above, Mauricio helps Rick get over some tough rocks. There were alot of crashes that day on mostly brand-new BMW bikes!)

And of course, the end of our training is followed by what? In Chile, it's a catered barbeque of course. A long day's workout followed by a first-class barbeque like this one.....stories and laughs about "who fell" and which guys quit early cause of the heat. What a way to spend a Friday (group shot at the bottom of our riding class.)

SPEAKING of Peter Fischer.....he finally showed up again in Chile, about 9 months after we said goodbye at the end of our journey through Latin America together! It was absolutely great to see my buddy again as he was traveling through Peru and Chile with another group of tourists en route to Ushuaia. A couple of nights full of laughs and pulling out great memories from out trip was great to enjoy. (Sorry for the dark cell phone picture.)

More pictures below show life around the many weekend races we went to, again thinking of exposure for our company. Instead of showing all the motorcycles in action, here's just a few pictures of the characters I get to hang out with. Like Rick's 3 boys and Pedro and Claudio from BMW......(that's Rick's son Augustin jumping over the ditch, and Claudio doing an impression of himself passed out after too much to drink.)

Sometimes we have to move a few bikes around on our trailer, giving Augustin and his brother Mateus the chance to feel what it's like riding the R1200GS BMW (need a couple more years, guys : ) And the other picture below shows us at Oktoberfest at Club Manquehue later that night when Mateus is feeling confident enough to hustle down some beer while Mom isn't paying attention.

Picture of Rick and I below on the company truck.

What a great event those Red Bull Challenges are! Alfonso Araya (a buddy that works in our office building) and Cristian and I rode up into the Andes Mountains for this much anticipated Red Bull sponsored motorcycle race back in December. The "Red Bull Los Andes" was set at high altitudes in the mountains, drawing a world-wide pool of riders together, and ended up being a blast to watch. The very nature of the Red Bull racing series is that many portions of the 20 or so mile loop might be considered "impassable" by most racing standards. Not even 10 seconds into the race, we saw guys rolling head-over-tire down a hill, crashing and getting stuck and causing a bottleneck of bikes trying to get through.

The race was actually re-routed at one point because of a portion of hill that no rider could make it up. So the officials had them cut across this mud field, and look at how deep the mess was that every rider got stuck in! (Buried wheels completely.) We saw guys digging their bikes out for over 10 minutes in this extremely physically demanding race. The eventual winner, Cyril Despres from France has won the Dakar Rally in the past (and went on to do so as you'll see in coming blog posts this year.)The photo below is just a quick shot of one of those days in the office when Daniel, Rick, and I were grinding out everything we could think of to make Moto Rider a succcess. All the duties and work-related fun stuff I wrote about above is only one portion of why I like my work here so much. It's an absolutely great experience I'm getting also, learning the business side of not only a start-up company, but one that deals with motorcycles and toursim (thought for the future?)

And of course, after about 4 month separated, I finally got back up to Antofagasta to bring home my old pal Julius! That's right.....4 months just sitting there, and all I did was touch his start button quickly, and he jumped to life like it was any other day. Sure, these BMW's I'm working with are great bikes. But there's certainly something to be said about the machines KTM is making too.

The big news of the moment is that I leave for Ushuaia in 2 days. Yep, Daniel and I thought it would be a goode thing for me to get to know the south of Chile, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, and eventually Ushuaia. The routes, the scenery, and everything about it is a major portion of my adventure that is still missing. Shortly after I arrived in Chile last year (at this time) the weather turns so bad in the south that I missed my chance to see it.

So the idea is that I'm leaving this Thursday to plan a tour route that we'll be selling for the 2010/2011 summertime here. I'm taking one of the company BMW's down instead of Julius, which actually leaves me with some mixed feelings about how to finish my ride to "The End of the World." Part of me says for sure, I should finish it on the bike I started with. But another part of me can't pass up the opportunity to take a company bike and avoid the cost of using my own. Either way, I'll end up in Ushuaia in a few weeks, and will post pics of this journey soon! (It's about a 5-week trip, so hang tight.)

Adv #7 Continued: Work, work, work ..... scouting routes and riding "The Road of Death."

Forrest Lange says: "Now, because I'd been a salesman, an adventure tour guide, a world traveler by motorcycle, and an overall pretty decent guy, the folks at Moto Rider Ltd. got together and offered me a ..... fine job." (Cut to Eric riding around in circles on a motorcycle.)

So that's where we left off last time, right? After touring Bolivia with Daniel, we agreed on a plan to have me work for his new company: Moto Rider Ltda. Briefly explained, we're a tourism company buying new BMW motorcycles, and making them available for tourists to rent or use on guided tours we'll be organizing throughout Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru. (I've got a job working with motorcycles now?)

Aside from these countries having incredibly under-developed tourism potential, the world all over has seen a huge increase of motorycle tourism and travel in recent years. (I guarantee Peter and I are not the only guys that have ridden from the U.S. to South America this year.) Add to this trend the fact that the famous Dakar Rally is now held annually here in Chile and Argentina, and I think Moto Rider has an incredible future as a business making the BMW motorcycles available for people to witness these beautiful countries. Be sure to check out our (unfinished) website at http://www.motorider.cl/ and you'll see more about the company, including a chance to read the "who we are" part about your favorite bald motorcycle rider!

Having driven the company truck down to Santiago in late July, the plan was that I'd be there for at least the first couple of months helping to get the company started......and especially from the sales standpoint, that seemed like a good idea for all of us. (At this point, only Daniel and Jaime Roessler were working on starting this. Both Chileans that speak English quite well, but if we're marketing ourselves mainly to English-speaking countries, a native-speaker might be important?)

Those plans for me to start in Santiago changed rapidly though when we had a sudden need to give a bike to a customer up in Antofagasta, and after just two days in Santiago, I hopped an early flight back north to coordinate a motorcycle rental. Daniel, Jaime, and I had talked about things, and it was decided that we'd best plan a specific tour route, step-by-step before we go marketing it. So that was my first major assignment on the job: Starting in Antofagasta, I left my KTM parked at the hotel and set out with one of Moto Rider's new 1200 GS's on what was supposed to be about a 3 week journey searching routes and hotels in Northern Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru.

(Below is a photo of "my office" for the first month on the job with Moto Rider. Not bad, eh? Getting paid to ride a new BMW through South America and plan tour routes?)

From Antofagasta, climbing up the western side of the Andes, I spent one night in San Pedro de Atacama and started all my research on which hotel options best fit the types of tours we wanted sell. (That was kind of a nice change, too. I've been camping and living in some pretty down-trodden places for 14 months at this point, and now I'm being paid to seek out and stay in the 4 and 5-star hotels?) I spent one night at the Alto Atacama resort there in San Pedro, having been greeted by my fellow KTM rider and friend Alvaro who is the manager of this absolutely beautiful hotel. Would have gladly stayed there longer, but I had to keep moving onward with my mission by crossing the border at Paso Jama on the way to the stunning Purmamarca, Argentina. See below one small portion of the incredible twists and turns at the finish of that ride over the border!

(Below, scenery of the "Mountain of 7 Colors" that surrounds the small town of Purmamarca.)

The turn north from Purmamarca took me to the border with Bolivia at La Quiaca where another on one of those typical border crossing stories took about half of my day. Keeping in mind that this was still the middle of winter in August and extremely cold at 12,000 feet all the time, I hustled all the way to Tupiza, Bolivia on awful dirt roads and found this neat little town. Pictures show how the city stays alive with people playing tennis and using pool tables outside near the center of town. There's definitely a neat vibe about Tupiza.

It proved important to be seeking out these tour routes and know exactly what to expect before actually taking tourists along for the ride. Does the road exist like the map says? What conditions are the "road" in? Are there river crossings like the one in the picture below? I made it through this washed out road just fine, but that's something to think about if we're going to return with what might be some more "hesitant" tourist-riders.

These were some long, tough days of riding for sure. Riding all day long with GPS, yes I was. But it's GPS here with very little use, cause there's basically no mapping information available on Bolivia in such remote areas. Each time I made it to the next city, I had to hustle around town figuring out which hotels were the best, asking directions, talking with managers, building a profile on each hotel.......and all in Spanish? After that of course I had to unpack everything, organize all the details of the ride that day, organize the profiles on the hotels.....whah, whah, whah....I know. But it was a challenge, I swear.

Arriving again in the UNESCO World Heritage city of Potosi, Bolivia, I again had the chance to spot some more of the city and of course some interesting people and faces (Like this one below)

"Ma'am, I don't care how good you looked on those posters 134 years ago, it doesn't make me want to buy your bread." ------------------- "What? That's your daughter? Well.....now that you mention it.......I am kind of hungry.........."

Headed further up into Bolivia from Potosi to the nation's capital of Sucre, I noticed all these people gathering in what must have been about a 200-person town. Chatting with the locals, apparently I had just stumbled across their annual "Carrera de Burros" (Burro Race) and I arrived right in the middle of the action. Way out in the distance, the jockeys were working away on their burros, as the whole town laughed and cheered them on and I snapped off some action-shots : ) You can see the winner below arriving back at the staging area and folks gather to see the champ. Not to get all sappy, but there was something really heart-warming about seeing such a small town gather and such a simple thing entertaining folks.

I continue to be impressed by the scenery in Bolivia and I promise you will not be disappointed if you ever get the chance to visit. So unfortunate though is that seemingly all of the countries down here still don't have any kind of control over waste disposal or any "care" to keep their lands clean of it. Not only to people just toss whatever they want out of their car windows, but you'll also find pits like this one just outside of the cities along the road where people just start throwing their trash. One day after the next, more cars and trucks just show up and dump their trash, letting it blow all over with no control. I mean, it doesn't stop some of the locals (below) from enjoying it.......but come on Evo Morales........your country is too beautiful for this!

So finally, I got to see La Paz! The largest city in Bolivia is quite a site, described to me once as being like a "giant ant hill." I tell ya, it's about that crazy of a place. Imagine the busiest city you've ever been in and then increase the congestion and chaos about 10 times. (It made NYC look spacious from a pedestrian standpoint.) Taxis, buses, motorcycles, and people running all over the streets with virtually no control by traffic lights or police, and EVERYONE is honking their horns.

A main reason we want a tour route that includes La Paz is because it allows us to ride the famous "Camino de la Muerte" or in English......"The Road of Death." THIS WAS SO COOL! Do a little Google search for those keywords and check out some of the pictures out there that turned out better than mine (I was there on a very foggy day.)

Holding the title as "The most dangerous road in the world," this ride starts up at 16,000 feet in the clear thin air, and slowly drops about 10,000 feet over a winding narrow path down into the Bolivian jungle. It's reputation as "the most dangerous" devloped over years because of the extremely high percentage of people that die falling over the edge trying to pass this road. In it's record year, 320 people fell to their death, which is an extremely high number considering the small numbers of people actually trying to pass it. Like I said before, my pictures are few because it was such a foggy day, but you could also check this YouTube link for a good overview of what it's like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtUaherTC50

The Road of Death is absolutely stunning with low-hanging clouds and mountain-lined landscapes all the way. Near the start, you'll see mountain bike tour guides briefing their tourists on the rules of the road. Rules like "the traffic flows on the opposite side." Meaning, those of us riding down the mountain actually have to do ride on the left (the cliff drop-off side) so that car and truck drivers have better visibility to keep themselves from running off the edge.

Another guideline we have to follow is that you never......ever look off the cliff into the abyss below while you're moving. It doesn't matter how good of a biker or motorcycle rider you are, the natural tendency we all have is to follow where our eyes are looking. (Ex: Don't stare at the rock in the middle of the road, cause you'll end up hitting it probably.) Same was true here, and I admit......I almost got "caught" looking while riding at one point. Not only is this road very narrow to begin with, but with almost no warning it'll lose 1/3 of it's width because of a washout or rockslide, and if you're riding down the cliff-side like you're supposed to.....that means the road before you can pretty much disappear! Did I mention that it's reported to be over a 1900 foot drop straight down in some parts of the road? Again, too foggy the day I was there to see, but wow does that make for one beautiful atmosphere descending down into the Bolivian jungle.

(Below, mountain bikers posing for a shot pretty close to "the edge.")

The next couple of pictures show one of the many memorials for the thousands of people who have fallen to their deaths here. I zoomed in as far as my 18x zoom camera would go, and sure enough........way below this memorial.....you could still see the wreckage of a car or truck that once went over.

For sure though.....the stunning scenery combined with a bit of fear makes for one great experience.......and if you're going to be in Bolivia, don't miss the chance to ride The Road of Death!

(Near the bottom of the Road, a Dad is taking his girls to school in the town of Yungas.)

So after La Paz, I needed to head further westt to Copacabana, Bolivia .... right on the shores of Lake Titicaca. It's a short half-day ride, and part of that time is spent on a lake ferry that is the only way of reaching Copacabana. Costs about one dollar, takes about 20 minutes, and sure is a fun way to continue all this travel. Guess I haven't been on a boat at this point since the Cap Blanche (aka Jeanne) all the way back in January?

Anyway, more hotels and research was in store for me there in Copacabana, and I had yet another incredible sunset to watch from a balcony looking over Lake Titicaca. Sure have seen alot of these since I started travelling. Never gets old to me......

So after Bolivia, I needed to head back to the northern edge of Arica, Chile before crossing into Peru where I would search routes for Cuzco and Macchu Piccu. I knew that because of registration and ownership of the motorcycle, we needed to return to Chile for paperwork reasons before going to Peru. In a funny coincidence though, just a few hours before I crossed the border into Peru on a Friday morning, a story came out in the newspapers. The story detailed how 800+ cars had left Chile in the year prior and never returned from Peru. (An obvious concern for importing/tax reasons.) Because of this news, all the border officials for Peru were immediately reminded of their own law that nobody had been enforcing, and requires some extra paperwork steps to prevent the illegal importation of vehicles.

Anyway, after sitting around a few more days there in Arica, (waiting for the weekend and a holiday to pass) Daniel, Jaime and myself eventually said it was too much paperwork trouble for me to get into Peru at that point, and there were plenty of other things I could be doing in Antofagasta. The tentative plan was for me to end up living there in Antofagasta and start getting business going for us while it was still winter time and very cold in Santiago and places further south.

So the final picture below shows how I ended up back in Antofagasta, getting our office situation straight and doing things like getting our motorcycle storage container positioned at the rail yard near our office. Ana Maria (back to us in the picture) had just been hired to act as administrative support for us there in Antofagasta, so at least I wouldn't be working alone.

Well this has been another long post, but hey........it's been over 2 months since I updated this! And of course, more has changed since this final picture with regards to where I'm living and I'll have to explain more of that soon. The delay in the blog post is partially because of technical issues Blogspot seems to be having, but also because it's weird for me to just write a blog about my working life and career instead of all the travel I'd done up to this point. Well then again....I guess my job still fits into the same category of "travel and adventure," and as long as I'm living outside the United States, I'll consider my life exactly that : )