I Drove 2,100 Miles to the World Cup with a Caravan of Facebook Strangers

We were supposed to form a single 800-car fleet, a monumental caravan that would convey thousands of fútbol fans from Chile to Brazil for the 2014 World Cup. For the first time since 1978, the most important rite of the world’s most adored sport had returned to South America. Chile’s national team had qualified. There was a pilgrimage to make.

But this grand plan ran into trouble with a more permanent presence on the continent: The Andes. Two storms blew through the mountain range in four days, piling snow faster than herds of plows could clear it, and shutting every eastbound crossing a thousand miles to the north and 500 miles to the south of Chilean capital Santiago.

I’d heard about a caravan and was looking for a ride to follow along with when the storms hit. Once it became clear the only way to leave Chile would be to detour deep into the Atacama Desert, adding 1,300 km to a journey that was already expected to put 10,000 km on odometers when all is said and done, the caravan’s Facebook page went crazy.

Hundreds lamented and then opined. Organizers, who had painstakingly mapped out every day’s journey and every night’s stay for the three-week trip, ferociously tried to put together a contingency plan. On Facebook, factions formed over when to leave and what detour to take.

“Wouldn’t it be best if we all left tomorrow night together from the Lampa tollbooth????? That way we all leave together from Chile and we don’t lose the feeling of a convoy,” said one commenter. “What if we go through Peru?” asked another.

Organizer Alberto Schmidt called an emergency meeting of the trip leaders. Last October—as soon as Chile’s national team qualified for the mundial—Schmidt and his wife had decided to take an overland journey to see the games. They proposed the idea on Facebook in hopes of rounding up a few friends to join them.

Within months they had also rounded up thousands of strangers, and now claim to be the largest single caravan to head to the Cup, a claim that, even with the flood of South Americans entering Brazil this week, doesn't seem unrealistic.

They organized, built a website, registered cars, held meetings with Chilean federal ministries. Schmidt took two trips to Brazil to seek out stadiums, campgrounds, and race tracks that could provide tent space and bathrooms for several thousand of his compatriots, either for free or close to it.

Most of those ruteros don’t have a ticket to even one of the three games Chile will play in the first round. Many are spending their savings on the trip. Schmidt said some had outright quit their job because they couldn’t get the time off otherwise. Weddings had been postponed, he said. I talked to several students who had taken the semester off because their exam schedule didn’t mesh with the trek.

“There’s people who have $20 to their name, but they’re going to the mundial anyway,” Schmidt told me.

Of course, this isn’t just a Chilean phenomenon: People from Baja California to Patagonia are taking trains, planes, and automobiles to see the beautiful game up close. Thousands are taking buses, which have been sold out for months. Tons are hitchhiking. A few are biking.

Most of these voyagers, when asked why they are sacrificing so much to go to the World Cup, respond something like Jorge Garate of Santiago, who told me solemnly, “I am on this trip because I am truly passionate about football.”

To placate this passion, Garate and his fellow Chilean caravaners had to find a way across the Andes. After deliberating with the organizing committee, Schmidt announced by Facebook that the official convoy would be leaving 24 hours early, and encouraged those who could to do the same.

Others—including the crew I wound up traveling with—would leave on time, but would need extra long days to make up for time lost to the detour through the Atacama. We were told to find our own accommodations for a few days and reunite with the caravan at a racetrack in Posadas, Argentina that had agreed to provide us with free camping. From there we would cross into Brazil together.

The concept of a single convoy gave way to the reality of hundreds of intersecting and mutable fleets, loosely connected by Facebook. Many carried hand radios to communicate between cars, though social media was full of complaints that the old technology wasn’t working.

But with everyone going the same direction on the same roads, the oldest of communication techniques ruled: World Cup-destined Chileans found each other in gas stations and border crossings, in restaurants and on the side of the road, pissing out Cristal, the Bud Light of Chile. Many joined forces for a while, and then separated again when whim or need for a bathroom break took hold.

The pilgrims were easy to spot: Chilean flags ornamented cars, wigs, shirts, sunglasses, top hats. La Roja shirts abounded. Some vehicles were covered in decals of Chilean soccer superstars Alexis Sánchez and Arturo Vidal. Most had painted or taped signs announcing their point of departure—Valparaiso, Talca, Pucon, Santiago—and destination: Brazil. All the way up the country, we were cheered and given blessings by Chileans who would be watching the games from their homes.

“I feel like a rock star—everyone honks and waves and cheers us,” 30-year-old Mariana Merino Palma, one of my three travel companions, told her mother by phone on the first day of our journey.

Enclosing yourself in a car with other people for days on end—even a car with rock star status—can be dicey business with friends; with total strangers, it has potential for discomfort of ruinous proportions. But fortune was kind when I got a text from 27-year-old Jessi Garcia Jorquera saying that she and her friends had a spare seat in their Jeep if I wanted it. The very next morning we were tying down our luggage together.

They were all easy to like: Mariana, a no-nonsense and good-natured nurse at the public hospital in Valparaiso, was encyclopedic in her knowledge of Chile’s soccer history. Broad-shouldered and impeccably gracious Cesar Colipi Camelio, a 32-year-old construction engineer who builds roads for a living, peppered us with trivia about our route. Jessi, a diminutive and warmhearted graphic designer with a wry wit, took charge of our festooning our carriage, wrapping the Jeep in flags and continually adorning it with crude masking tape signs.

The three grew up on the same street in a pueblo outside of Valparaiso and interacted with the coziness of people who have known each other their whole lives. Jessi christened our team “Team Sin Poto"—Team Assless—a nod to the numb state of our extremities after hours of sitting. She later taped Auspicios Hemorroidín (Blessings of Saint Hemorrhoid) on our bumper.

That first day we covered 1,350 km, entirely driven by Cesar, occasionally with a beer in hand. We stopped to pee every few hours, and for dinner ate greasy steaks at a diner a local had promised was the best in town. We finally called it a day after 2 AM and set up our tent among other road-trippers on a urine-drenched cement pad at a truck stop in Antofagasta.

A few hours later, after a breakfast of beef and avocado sandwiches with Fanta, we began climbing eastward through the llama-specked desert and into the Andes at last. By the time we reached 16,000 feet we had headaches that not even the local favorite remedy for altitude sickness—a cheek full of coca leaves—could cure.

At the border we were told that 678 people had come through Paso Jama the day before, and hundreds more had beat us to the pass that day. We stood in line with 56-year-old Jorge Muñoz of Santiago, who was on one of 22 busloads of Cup-bound Chileans that had come through the border so far. He hadn’t originally planned to go to the World Cup, but friends and family had badgered him into it.

“Me gusta fútbol  mucho. Pero mucho, mucho, mucho,” he said. Muñoz likes soccer so much that everyone in his life couldn’t believe he wouldn’t go to see Chile play in Brazil. He didn’t have the money for it, so his parents, children, siblings and friends all donated enough to send him and his wife to Brazil by bus.

Also at the border was 50-year-old Hernan Vidal, who was traveling with his sons and their friends in a van. His sons showed off the Chilean flags they’d shaved into their heads. They had paid for Vidal’s trip because it was the last time in the foreseeable future it would be so nearby—2018’s cup will be in Russia, 2022’s in Qatar.

“By the time it comes back to South America, I will be an old man, so my sons wanted me to come to this one,” Vidal said.

Vidal and Muñoz both vividly recalled Chile’s most infamous moment in World Cup history, when the team played Brazil in a 1989 World Cup qualifier. After it was clear Chile would lose the game, goalie Roberto “Condor” Rojas deliberately injured himself with a razor and faked that he was injured by a firework thrown by a fan, in an attempt to nullify the match and perhaps get Brazil disqualified from the World Cup.

The scheme failed when cameras caught him in the act. Rojas was ousted from soccer for life and Chile was banned from the 1994 World Cup. “That was our team’s most shameful moment,” Muñoz said.

Chile has since recovered from that shame. That night, as we passed through a moonlit salt flat, nurse Mariana turned to me and said she’d been thinking about something I’d said: that it was tough to conceive of this caravan taking place in the US, that I doubted whether thousands of my compatriots would band together to convoy to an international sporting event.

“I don’t think this would have been imaginable in Chile a few years ago either,” she said.  It had taken a long time for Chile to revive from the Pinochet dictatorship that had crushed its spirit through the 1970s and 1980s. But recent events—a strong recovery after the devastating 2010 earthquake, the rescue of 33 trapped miners later that year, a student protest movement over the quality of education that has animated the nation—have changed that.

“Only recently have we realized that it’s not so difficult to do things for the good of all of us,” Mariana said.

Cesar agreed. “For a long time Chile looked always outwards. Everything foreign was better than whatever we had here,” he said. “Maybe only in the last 10 years have we realized that Chile is an extraordinary country.”

Mariana noted a second reason the convoy wouldn’t have happened 10 years ago: It was organized almost entirely on Facebook, allowing people across the beanpole nation to gather information, connect with each other, and to adapt quickly to changing plans. Soccer fandom, like everything else, has been transformed by social media.

By the next morning, we had exchanged the erect cactuses of the desert for the spongy grasslands of the pampa. In San Salvador de Jujuy, a labor movement's protest had taken over the highway. We ended up followed a speeding Chilean SUV with better GPS than ours over potholed dirt roads across the Argentine prairie until the highway was liberated again.

Cesar finally ceded the wheel to me and attempted a nap. We were all exhausted: Three days of continuous sitting had sore backs and foggy brains. Our only exercise had been walking through service station aisles and squatting over ghastly toilets. But we were in miraculously good spirits. We gave each other back rubs. We sang along to music; my Chilean companions knew Bon Jovi lyrics as well as they did Bersuit’s. Cesar spent an hour in conversation with his iPhone, trying to convince Siri to marry him.

It was past 3 AM when we finally arrived at the racetrack at Posadas. It had taken 3,500 kilometers and three days, but there we were, at last united with the official caravan. We joined a small city of Chileans in tents and trailers, and despite our late arrival we found many awake, barbequing and drinking to loud cumbia music. Every few minutes someone would start the ceachí, Chile’s national soccer chant: Chi, Chi, Chi! Le, le, le! … Viva, Chile!

Optimism burned through the night. Nearly everyone I asked about Chile’s chances to reach the second round nodded buoyantly. “We have a chance for the championship,” was the common refrain. Mariana, eminently pragmatic, noted that much of this sentiment was swagger, especially since Chile—like the US—will have to navigate their way out of an exceptionally tough first grouping if they want to advance.

“Most people think we’ll probably get knocked out in the first round, but nobody wants to say that,” she said.

We will find out soon enough. The caravan left the racetrack a few hours later; from there it crossed the Iguazú River and into Brazil. By today, the opening day of the Cup, the convoy should arrive at its first destination: The small city of Cuiabá, where tomorrow Chile’s national team will play Australia. The next goal will be Rio de Janeiro, another 2,000 km across Brazil, where Chile will play reigning champion Spain. The third game, in São Paulo, will pit Chile against the Netherlands, the team that Spain beat to win the Cup in 2010.

Cesar, Jessi, and Mariana are hoping to find last-minute tickets into at least one of the games, but Cesar said he’ll be OK even if that doesn’t happen.

“All I want is to be where the fiesta is. To be in the scene. Just to be in a bar in Brazil filled with Chileans rooting for our team, that would make me happy,” he said, adding that he never considered flying to the games. As soon as he heard about the national caravan, he wanted to be part of it. “There’s no gracia, no magic or charm in flying,” he said. “Road trips involve more grief, but more gracia.”