Dakar in San Rafael
Years ago, a strange excitement rippled through San Rafael, as though the town itself was catching its breath. Locals murmured something that sounded like “Du-kuh” I couldn’t quite catch it at first, their pronunciation was hard to decipher.
But then it came clear: Dakar. An off-road race, legendary and brutal, that draws racing teams from the farthest reaches, testing every scrap of endurance they have.
One day, the Dakar caravan was coming through, winding across the desert, skirting the Andes on their route through Chile. Our tractor driver told me this with a glint in his eye, like a kid talking about the circus coming to town. The locals, eager as kids on Christmas morning, lined the dirt road that stretched to the airport, sipping on maté as they waited.
At first, it was a low hum, then the sound built, rolling in waves. Motorcycles, cars, enormous trucks—it was the sound of dust and diesel and adventure itself. The support vehicles, enormous RVs engineered to keep pace, thundered close behind. It was a whole caravan, a line of modern beasts on wheels tearing across the dry earth. We gawked through a chain-link fence as millions of dollars in racing gear, coated in grit, settled on the dusty ground.
The riders looked like something out of Lawrence of Arabia, wrapped in dust from head to toe, as though the desert had claimed them as its own. The kids stared wide-eyed, their faces reflecting something more than awe—a memory being etched, a piece of the world that would stick with them forever. That day, Dakar t-shirts—knockoffs and all—sprang up around town as if they'd grown from the ground.
Then, at first light, they were gone, kicking up plumes of dust as they tore away from San Rafael. The quiet settled back over us, leaving only the memory of those reckless turns. Sometimes, in places like this, the world can feel as small as your own backyard. But then there are days when the world rolls right through, and for a moment, you understand just how wide and wild it really is.
