Why I Travel, Part I (Peru Retrospective)

(On the Inca trail en route to Machu Picchu) It's the Brits more than the rest of us who see the hilarity of spreading Fanny Jam on their Bimbo brand bread, but we all laugh anyway, as we do almost constantly at every meal break. A young goat wanders our camp and sniffs at a mother turkey and its chicks. In the morning the chicks keep warm beneath the mother's skirt of feathers, she practically purrs out a tender gobble. A rooster, at 5am, an hour before sunrise ascends the steps leading to our camp, crows, and then struts back towards the farmhouse. An old woman crushes maize with a semicircular stone, rocking it back and forth over the corn. A gang of campesino men drink chicha, a corn beer, in a dark room.

Its chilly that night. I had forgotten a sleeping bag and I sleep fitfully in hour intervals dreaming in Spanish, sweet Peruvian dreams.

Posho

Argentine Spanish, especially in the vicinity of Buenos Aires, is so unlike any dialect in the rest of Latin America or Spain that I'm afraid I won't comprehend the simplest statement. The ll and y are pronounced with a "sh" sound. Instead of ordering an empanada con pollo (po-yo) I need to remember its "posho." And after all this time conjugating verbs in the standard manner, I have to relearn it using vos instead as the Argentinians do. Perhaps it will be in vain since the accent is notoriously difficult to understand, even for those with a decent grasp on the language. Not me.

If this weren't enough, I recently discovered a new twist on the language in case I wanted even more of a challenge. According to this article, word inversion (think: pig latin) is quite common in Argentina. Taking common words, the ones I managed to learn, and flipping them into unrecognizable ones that can't be looked up in the dictionary or phrasebook. Not only will I be seeking directions to the nearest bano, but also the "nabo." My morning copa de cafe is also "feca." Hmm...maybe it has something to do with the coriolis effect.

On Resigning

It was easy. My supervisor took it well. He even congratulated me. The letter, as of yet, isn't written or filed away. A few lines of official sounding drivel printed out this weekend, tossed on my bosses desk, and that will be the start of the anticlimatic end of my four year tenure at the factory lab. The emptiness that looms ahead, like any emptiness, is incomprehensibly thrilling in its possibilities and leaves me excited and breathless, and for the same reason terrifies me. It must be the same feeling that a skydiver experiences the moment before he pulls the chord erasing the momentary doubt that he will fall into oblivion.

Trip Stats (Preliminary)

Time to travel from Flagstaff, AZ to Buenos Aires: 25 hrs. (layovers not included)
Total days spent in Argentina: 78
Approximate miles I may cover: 7000
Hours of bus time: 223, more or less
Average speed of tranport: 31 mph
Other countries I may visit: Uruguay, Brazil, Chile
Countries I'll come close to: Paraguay and Bolivia
Total number of stops: 13-15+
Oceans and seas: 3 (S. Atlantic, S. Pacific, Scotia Sea)
Projected espresso consumption: 80-100 cups
Hours spent up past my bedtime (bedtime=00:00): 50 or so.
Penguins I expect to see: too many to count.
Scoops of Helado: in the hundreds
Empanadas from street vendors: close to a hundred
Steaks consumed from a parilla: at least 50.
Gallons of mate sipped through a bombilla: one, perhaps.
Bottles of Mendoza Wine: 6-12
Miles of Buenos Aires street walked: 80 at least.
Cafes to while away the morning/afternoon: a dozen or dozens.
Trekking mileage: a hundred, maybe more.
Mountain biking mileage: yeah, about a hundred.
Tangos witnessed: Thousands, I'm guessing.
Tangos attempted: ??

The days are melting away like so much Argentine helado

Everything, my bookings, my finances, my mental state, is on target and on a steady course. I’m two weeks from resigning, and this will undoubtedly be a watershed moment. Yet another burden will be released and my self assurance will ratchet that much more skyward. I bought my third backpack for the occassion. I needed more space to stuff rain gear, cookware, a trowel, my sleeping bag. I strapped on my tent and I’m stuffing long underwear and fleece into any space I can find. I’m discovering new bits of information which are nudging my plans, such as they are, this way or that. Iguazu has been reduced to a trickle. I’m still going, of course, but my expectations are adjusted accordingly. Bariloche is a South American mountain bike paradise, so I’ll have to cram a jersey and some shorts into my pack. Single track, chocolate, and mountains will make it difficult to leave the Lake District after a week. But there is plenty to draw me out of my stupor such as calving glaciers, diving whale and waddling penguins, not to mention Chile, and the Torres del Paine circuit.

My books are boxed. My car battery is dead. I need to make a stop at the drug store for all those miscellaneous things that drug stores are good suppliers of. For all my life, I have used duct tape fewer times than I watched American Idol (twice out of morbid curiosity and mind numbing boredom), but its recommended universally, so how can I buck that? I’ll pick up a bottle of Dr Bronner’s soap to clean my body, my hair, my dishes, to lather into shaving cream…I don’t think it works as laundry detergent but I’ll read the sermon on the side of the bottle more thoroughly to make sure. Within a week I need to start tranferring what’s left of my stuff into storage. Very soon I’ll eat my very last piece of cake at work and ride my bike up the mesa without a second glance. The friends I made there, though, I’ll keep for as long as I can. Written 8/19/06

Cinco Meses

These days I stockpile all the beans, rice and canned tomatoes that will fit on the cupboard shelf. My cereal is poured out of plastic bags and portrays a mascot that my inner child reviles as being the wrong one, a friendly enough looking but strange wide eyed animal that has no relation to the usual gang that has sat on my breakfast table for the last umpteen years. It feels a bit like contortion. I’m stretching and turning rituals on their head to save a few more bucks. But at the same time it is a cleansing process. It must be amongst the reason the priesthood survives and the Amish carry on and Budhist monks are so happy. As I simplify and organize my life in order to save, my mind both absorbs and reflects this change and I gradually shed anxiety.



I’ve managed to cut my food bill in half, almost instantly, and I thought that would be the hardest thing to save on. I’ve budgeted between $2500-$3000 for this trip and I’ve already saved half of that with barely a month of serious savings. As soon as I receive payment for my travel book work, I will immediately spend a good portion of that money for a plane ticket and all but seal the deal. As it stands now, a 7k mile bus trip around the whole of Argentina, through the pampas, into the tropical Iguaza Falls region, across the north into the desert, then following the spine of the Andes into wine country, Mendoza, to the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere, Aconcagua, continuing to the Lake District, Bariloche, across into the famous Fitz Roy peaks, hiking the Torres Del Paine in the Chilean Patagonia, witnessing the calving of the Moreno Glacier, standing on the southern tip of the continent, Tierra Del Fuego, turning back north, looking for right whales in the South Atlantic, bumming on the beach in Mar del Plata, and absorbing the culture of Buenos Aires. Written 5/1/06

Taking out the Trash

I sorted out my mess, filled bags and bags full of clothing, tapes, movies, papers, love letters (not really), you name it in an attempt to get the physical clutter out of the way that was feeding into my mental clutter. It worked. I feel free and and relaxed and a bit more confident. I did a few rough calculations and the savings I planned for seems quite within reach, but its going to take a bit of discipline and lots of beans and less meat and almost no take out burgers or restaurants of any sort or nights out.

I hung up a world map and an Africa map right next to it on my mirror with a thin strip for looking in just to make sure I don’t resemble Alfalfa on any particular day. Though I had little doubt that I’d be able to bring this thing together, this weekend put the “how” into perspective. All the methods that I’m using to save feel like a wonderful game with the reward already predetermined. It does not feel like sacrifice at all. I get a kick out of inventing another set of meals out of what I have at hand instead of making a shopping trip. My bike trips into work, as I’ve already mentioned, are a blast. Even at work I watch the hours pass and think of how a couple of hours is going to fund another day in Argentina. When I go into overtime, I can taste the bittersweet mate pouring into my gullet. Written 4/16/06

Bricklaying

Though money will be an issue up until the day I achieve true financial independence (read:pipedream), things are definitely looking up in the last week. I found, as of today, 2.5 k that I didn’t know existed. That should be enough to fund my trip and I should have plenty left over to reintegrate myself back into the humdrum workaday life that we all must live, within reason.


As I plan and obsess over it, I’m seeing that this trip is fully manageable and it grows less and less of a risky venture the more I plan. Its coming together as a theme now: If I want it, there are ways to make it happen. I have told only one friend about the full extent of my plans. My parents have the idea that I’m doing the usual two week jaunt. But I feel a need to get enough of the details of this straight and as solid as they can be before dragging my parents into what they will almost certainly see as the begining of my descent into lunacy. Written 4/12/06

Out of the Smoke

The curative for my major anxieties, the relatively minor ones will always be there, is simply that I’ve done this before in a different form. Several years ago I moved here, to Flagstaff, from across the country. I had meager savings. I had no prospects, no living arrangements. I had no source of income. I wanted to do it and sick of being in situations in which my life controlled me and not the other way around. I reserved some storage thirty miles out of town, loaded the moving truck and took off with few regrets.

I stopped at a hostel in Santa Fe, NM and even from that distance I could see several large plumes of smoke from the horizon. The Southwest was suffering its worst wildfire season in a long time and I was driving straight through the maw of it. A large black cloud loomed closer as I crossed the Arizona border and I was in the thick of the haze soon after. I was wheezy and fully cured. I tasted of ham. As soon as the road lifted out of the basin and climbed over the Mogollon Rim I also rose above the low lying plume to the clear mountain air of Flagstaff.

I looked for an apartment while squatting in The Grand Canyon Hostel for two weeks. The hostel television switched between World Cup Soccer and coverage of the inferno that several hundred thousand acres of the White Mountains had erupted into. I secured an apartment and a temp position that turned perm in the nick of time, right before I ran out of funds.

I don’t recall ever being in a panic. In fact this was one of the happiest times of my life. I set out to do what I want for once in my life and I was doing it. I felt an uncharacteristic bravado. I was realizing the truth in the idea that if you simply do what you want with your life the rest will eventually come into place. And its true. Its not just the plot of the feel good movie of the year. So I will take that flimsy logic into the coming months and straight into the glaciers of Patagonia.
Written 4/10/06

A step towards frugality

I dusted off the mountain bike on Friday and took advantage of the waning winter weather to ride to my job. The snows are winding down after just winding up in March here in Northern Arizona after a long dry spell. Right around two inches for almost the totality of the winter and fall seasons when normally close to one hundred inches accumulate in that time. I want to bike into work and put the Corolla up on the ol’ metaphorical blocks for a few months, driving it just enough to flush out the cobwebs.

If I can keep up the auto-abstinence, that’s an extra three hundred in my pocket right there. And I found a prettier, more adventurous route back home as well. A jeep trail climbs the side of a mesa into a small patch of Ponderosa pine trees in the back of where I work. It was a bit of a grunt up a steep bank and over some black, jagged volcanic rock, but once I get my lungs and legs back it should be fun going. I look forward to tomorrow morning when I can buck and weave my way down those same rocks and into my otherwise tedious day.

Who says frugality can’t be fun? Written 4/9/06

The Motorcycle Diaries

“At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of his own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly–not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice.”~Ernesto (Che) Guevera



I sat at work today eating pasta out of a can and sipping bad coffee reading The Motorcyle Diaries and thinking about my true vocation. Something about that moment was strangely titillating, to read somewhat subversive phrases during the work day with the VP sitting across from me waiting for his TV dinner to heat in the microwave. Then it was back to the cold efficiency of the factory lab in which I must have everything timed down to the last second to make the best use of my time in order to make a deadline.

I find myself doing all I can to occupy my senses to the fullest, and while doing my job quite well, escaping its numbing effects. I have my iPod filled with hundreds of songs and do a subtle dance around the workplace in an effort not to be nullified and deadened. There is nothing stimulating about the way I spend a good chunk of my life. What I do is not a craft and, in fact, is becoming more and more automated by the day. But now, at least, I have my dreams to lift me above the routine, into the stratosphere. Written 4/6/06

As of Today...

The largest task at hand is taking each individual fear and quelling it. If I face whatever is there with the frame of mind of the survivor I know I can be, there is nothing really to be aprehensive about. I can save the money, easily, not just for the trip, but for a few months worth of safety net. I can find a new job when I get back. In fact, my old one was leading me nowhere, worse than nowhere, towards a miserable existence in which I stopped growing. The six months I plan to put up with that is probably six months longer than I should put up with it, except that now the money I earn is going towards a good cause.

The feeling that I must have everything in order before I leave is a fiction. I should have enough in control that my life isn’t in total chaos upon my return, but so what if everything isn’t spelled out to the letter? No. Its just another dimension of my fear, the very thing I wish to quash through my travels, through my lifestyle.

For now I’ll work on the basics. Getting a backpacking stove so I can hike Patagonia. Brushing up on my Spanish well ahead of time, so I can have decent talks with Argentinians. Reviewing logistics, keeping an eye on ticket prices. And for the long run, getting in the mind set that this is how I want my life to proceed from here on out: my job is a means to gather resources for my traveling and not that my traveling is a way to recuperate so I can exhaust myself in the workforce again. I hope that my job and my writing and my traveling will all be intermingled in mutually supporting ways soon, but for now its just a thought. Written 4/5/06

Early Travels

I got out the map and routed my journey. The first place I ever wanted to travel was not Nepal, or Morocco or Peru, it was Salisbury. Not the Salisbury in England, but a small nondescript suburb just across the political boundary of the industrial town I grew up in. I was ten, or thereabouts, and wanted to see what was on the other side of that imaginary line on my county map.

I set out for several miles that day, passing blocks of row homes, across the lumpy sidewalks, uplifted and crumbling from the maple tree roots growing underneath. I got to the park and laid my map out on the grass to double check the rest of the way. There was one potential hazard, but, or so I thought, I had successfully contained it when I was planning the way. Hamilton Street was a dangerous throughfare. It may as well have been a storm swollen river. The map, and why would it be wrong, showed the highway narrowing and dribbling out to an ordinary city street which I would simply cross.

I came to the intersection and found my map reading skills lacking. One tributary of the highway indeed did transform into a lightly trafficked city street, but the main way veered to the left. There was no way around it. I would have to cross. To make matters worse I would have to do so illegally. A no pedestrian crossing sign was clearly displayed.

I took a deep breath and continued. I got to the other side. I like to imagine that in doing so I set the stage for what I would become. In some alternative universe good sense would get the better of me and I would fold up my map, head home, make it in time for dinner, do my homework, meet a nice girl, get married and set up a plasma tv with surround sound in the rec room. Fin.

But I got to the other side and the last several blocks were predictably anticlimactic. I crossed the road, that I vaguely remember as East Texas Blvd, that demarcated the end of the city and the beginning of Salisbury. The weather, the culture, the look of the houses, the make of the cars, everything was virtually the same on this side of the boulevard, but I was elated anyway. I made it. I was somewhere else. And if I were not already late for dinner, I would have continued on to the next imaginary line on my map. Written 4/4/06

Origins

What started as plans for just another sensible, but ridiculously harried, two week vacation to a foreign land, grew. I looked at a map of Argentina spanning the depths of the Southern Hemisphere from the rainforest to Antarctic seas and I knew I’d need a month. I tried the thought out, took it for a ride, felt the goosebumps bubble up, sensed the wildness in my eyes, and knew that it had to be two months, maybe more.

This will be my first extended trip. I can’t think of any practical reasons why, but this decision is about as right as any I’ve made in my life. Its a risk. I’m burning the candle at both ends. I’ll be spending a chunk of money while earning none. I’ll be dumping a stable job and a steady paycheck and wiping the slate clean. But I felt the vibrations in the air, turned out the lights, stopped the music, cleared my mind and listened, and had no doubt that this was right.

I’m six months out, but sense its time to start building this thing. I’m gathering resources, budgeting, nicking away at hard rock, dreaming of penguins and gauchos in pampas, googling ticket prices and laying the foundation for something much bigger than a trip to Argentina. I’m setting out on the very first leg of what I was meant to be. I’ve flirted with it all my life, stared at it from afar, came closer dipped my toes in it, then rushed back to what was safe, but miserably banal. But I’m ready now. That niggling feeling in the back of my head months ago is coming into fruition, starting to resemble something palpable and I’m, finally, brave enough to follow. Written 4/3/06