JOEL GRIFFETT

Pre-order ‘Long Road to Nowhere: The Lost Years of Richard Trevithick (Part One)’ now, HERE.

I think I live here now. Looking back, I might have been born in Pucón and I’m certainly going to die here. I genuinely struggle to remember what I did before I arrived here. Why am I Chile? Wasn’t there something else I was supposed to be doing much further north? All these whispers that crept around the back of my mind turned into shouts in my dreams. You’ve fallen off the trail. Get back on your mule and start riding into the desert. As soon as I wake up, I am afflicted by the same amnesia once more. What did I do before? Do I live here now? Everyone keeps telling me I live here now, maybe they’re right?

I’ve been in Pucón for at least 3 weeks now beginning to define my continued presence here as trapped. For reasons unbeknownst to me, my bank decided to block my card. I unblocked it by entering the PIN at an ATM but and then every time I tried to use the card to pay for something they would block it again. I used the card once, to take money out at the cashpoint. Every other time I tried to use it, the card I signed up for specifically for travelling, it didn’t work. Ideal isn’t it?

It’s starting to feel like the Hotel California; I keep checking out but I can never leave. I’m pretty sure I will die here. I might even have been born here. My new card has allegedly left the UK; for the last week the Royal Mail tracker has simply said ‘In Transit’. I am starting to lose my patience but I’m sure my other bank are loving it, raking in all the fees on every transaction I do.

In hindsight I should have ordered the card elsewhere although I’d rather be stuck here than a shit hole city. There are worse places to be trapped and really Pucón is the perfect place to be stuck…until it rains heavily for 24 hours straight and I start to get very restless. I need to move on. I’ve been off the trail for 3 and a half weeks now and my card still shows no sign of appearing. I need to move on for my own sake, not just for the purposes of the book – this currently isn’t travelling. I’m living in Pucón at this point. If it doesn’t come tomorrow I’ve maxed out the limit of nights I can stay in two separate hostels in a town the same size as Truro.

When I checked out of the last hostel everyone I’d met told me that this was my new home now. None of them were convinced I’d ever leave. If I had no overarching plans I would be hunting round for a touring bike and embarking on a zigzag cycle route all over the Chilean lake district. As I said in the last article, it’s a generally lovely region.

But I have an overarching plan. It’s a stupid one, but I am here for a reason. The fact that Trevithick probably didn’t come to Chile at all should spur me on to head further north, stopping in the Atacama desert briefly where other Cornish pards ventured a generation or two after Trevithick didn’t, then up into Peru WHERE HE ACTUALLY DEFINITELY WAS LIVING FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS.

It will be nice, I hope, for this adventure to not feel futile as it currently does. For there to be some benefit to me flying halfway across the world to search for a bunch of stories that might have all been made up by a man so desperate to not be perceived as a failure that he created his own legacy, very successfully. For all I know in this moment, he could have done nothing remotely interesting during his 11-years here, much like most other miners. It befits the territory, but come on Don Ricardo, you’re supposed to be bucking this tedious trend.

All is not lost, this is just a short rainy day vent from an increasingly restless man. I should have signed up for all 3 or 4 of the travel bank cards on offer in the UK but isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing. I will sign up for each of them, and the friends flying out to Peru for a Cornish Christmas Celebration will each be tasked with transporting one of these empty cards with them, keeping it safe until we unite somewhere near Lima.

If I have 4 cards, one of them is bound to work right? Right? RIGHT?! Empty void…please answer me.

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