Last Week

These days are running together. I try to call Melissa and its hard to get a hold of her, not a promising sign. I try payphones and locutorios, indoor phone booths, to no avail and then I go back to email. I set up a date, an appointment she calls it, and the distancing has officially commenced. We meet in San Telmo at a mediocre café and it feels a little off. It may be the persistent crick in my shoulder that is healing very slowly and putting a damper on my mood. Or else it could be the stale medialunas and disappointment, mine, her’s, or me sensing and reacting to her’s. Nevertheless I get the feeling that this will be the last afternoon I’ll be spending with her and that’s the correct notion.


We take the subte to vast and snooty Palermo District and to the modern visual arts museum, LUBA, where she can’t get enough of the crazy shit pasted and random scribbles framed and put on the walls, and I have a hard time understanding, but I’m in no mood for debate, so I politely agree. We head to the museum gift shop and I look over her shoulder at a nude photo book of stars and prostitutes until the movie begins.




Rio Arriba, a documentary about Iruya highlighting the exploitation of the sugar industry there, is genuinely affecting and one of the best things about the museum that day. The shaman and spokesman for the people of Iruya who I met a month and a half earlier is highlighted in the film. I met him in the San Isidor cultural center that day and drank coffee with him in Iruya. My time in Argentina is unifying strangely. The story is an old one: the gringo stealing the land from the peasants and renting it back them with the sweat of their labor, hardship and blood.

The traditional farming terraces, with their tenders working the plantations, washed away in tremendous mudslides, erosion events known as volcanoes to the people. They were indebted to the company store and grew even more dependent on the sugar plantations once their former livelihood was washed down the river. Technology eventually made the slave labor obsolete and the people returned to their diminished land and diminished futures.


We take the subway back and say some compulsory goodbyes with a promise for a future meeting that will never happen. So it goes.

I return to LUBA a couple of more times to buy a Rio Arriba CD and to watch a silent Western in the auditorium accompanied by a live band playing the background music. I watch a few movies of varying quality. Little Miss Sunshine is a black comedy gem. The Secret Life of Words is sad and reminds me of the recent history of Argentina with its torture and executions, and I feel the undercurrent of sadness that must still be alive here.


I chronicle the stencils and graffiti along the streets passing more Pizza cafes and parillas then would seem supportable even in a giant city like Buenos Aires, but they almost always have a decent crowd. For the most part the weather is stifling. I find a percussion performance one night on Sarmiento, off of Corrientes in an industrial yard. The music is infectious among the crowd which includes a sizeable hippy following.




Sometimes I’m bored, sometimes frustrated with the pollution and the traffic and throngs. I never find myself in the mood for one of the adopted national dishes, Milanesa. I’m being antisocial at the hostel. My heart isn’t in it and I need to conserve money regardless. The soccer championship passes and I watch the waning minutes with Boca faltering, just as they did two months ago, but even this seems like a depleted experience. I’m merely waiting out my time. I’m getting a little restless to move on to the next step in my life, wanting it to be a true step, not one that is disingenuous to myself.

Through the motions

For the first time during many days at this hostel, I make it up in time for breakfast. I reacquaint myself with the streets of Buenos Aires. I head back to Palermo walk for a while, but I feel tired and vaguely ill and not in the mood for exploring. I have no plan, and though this often leads to the best kind of adventures, today it is leading no place in particular.


I go to what some consider to be the best pizzeria in the city, which is saying a lot, on Corrientes. Old men stand by counters with knife and fork, eating a rarity in Argentina, pizza by the slice. I choose to sit down and the pizza is very good indeed.


My shoulder is still stiff and in pain and I’m walking around like a whiplash victim. I make it another early night and save quite a bit in beer money, but not having much fun, really, and starting to question why I arrived in the city so early when I could be relaxing on a beach.

A long, cramped ride

I attempt to find a position I can sleep in and put a good crick in my neck and shoulder from contorting in the seat. The AC is cranked way too high and I brought nothing warmer in my pack than my safari shirt. An old, somewhat befuddled, gentleman boards at some vague juncture midway up the coast and removes a styrofoam cup jammed in the vent, the only thing separating me from hypothermia. I suffer through it cursing the blameless codger and finally stuff my hat inside the hole to quell the flow.


A sublime sunset looms out my window with clouds lit up like embers. Storms rage in the distance, every crack of lightning visible over the fathomless pampa. We catch up with the rain, and a rivulet of water flows through the bus.


The old man leaves, mercifully, in Bahia Blanca, about the time to sleep. In the morning we pass thousands of head of cattle and almost at the point where the estancias end, Buenos Aires begins and it feels like a kind of home. Its warm, but not as stifling as I feared. I check back into Che Lagarto and in my room are naked people in bed and it’s a strange sort of symmetry with my very first night in the city. I stop at a café and eat more pizza and then sit down for a very nice dinner in San Telmo. I return to the hostel and start catching up on sleep.

Norte a BsAs

I ask to quiero pagar and instead the girl at the desk asks my name and wonders why I’m leaving so soon. I like her instantly and has me questioning beyond reason why I AM leaving so soon. There’s nothing more on earth, though, I want to do here. She phones for my bus ticket and I go back to my reading.

I buy food for the ride and finish up some last minute chores. I’ve been eating a great deal which makes sense considering my recent physical stress. I still haven’t fully recovered as I’m reminded every time I climb a modest hill or some steps and feel the burn.

As I walk back towards the hostel, I meet the desk girl on the road. She says goodbye and gives me the customary kiss on the cheek and a nice hug and we chat for a bit and she hugs me even tighter, and by this time I do feel like staying longer, if only momentarily. I arrange my stuff at the hostel and leave and an older Dane in my room does the same.

He went on an Argentina trip 28 years ago, when he said that the country looked much the same except that there was a palpable tension in the air. It was the height of The Dirty War. He met a family with a small child and became close. She found him recently through the internet and urged him to come back and visit. The child is now a mother of her own child. The woman that he met is now the director of the theater in Buenos Aires and has colaborated in creating a play about 1978, Matri, based on generations of women dealing with the crisis.

We are in Rio Gallegos again, back to the refugee camp. It is going on evening and much warmer than my first visit, and I only have to wait a couple hours. I board the bus for my first sustained trip North in a month. The seats in front of me crank way back, but I relax and spread out as much as possible and read the final chapters of Moby Dick. It’s a dull read for me, but it passes the time, and there are thirty hours of traveling remaining. The movie is a bad drama about Flight 98, and seeing it makes me feel slightly ill.

Amazing sights, but I must go...

I wake up too early. Two South Africans I met the day before join me for breakfast of toast, dulce de leche, marmalade and even a scoop of cereal.

The glacier is huge, booming and calving sometimes in dribbles and other times whole boulders of ice tumble into the ice clogged corner of the lake. Other, relatively rare times, whole sides of the glacier cleave off and collapse and everyone rushes to the fence, telephoto lensed cameras in hand. Its large and amazing, but hard for me to enjoy. I want a quiet corner without the bustle, the cooing and striking of poses, but that’s impossible.

I sit my butt down on a rock and eat and watch and wait and eat and get up whenever something promising happens glacierward, then fade back again, and repeat until it is time to board the bus again. We take the long ride back to El Calafate and I’m tired and realizing now that its time to make the longer than seems sane ride back to Buenos Aires. I walk town again, cook ravioli, read Moby Dick and turn in early.

El Calafate

Omar calls me through the bathroom door. My bus is not picking me up at the hostel, as I thought, but three blocks away and I have five minutes to get there. I take off running with two full and heavy packs, but I make it. Customs, this time, is relatively smooth since we are going to Argentina which is not as strict as Chile. El Calafate is a pleasant if not particularly notable town. I walk up the dirt road to a nice hostel and its finally warm again.


The main drag of town is as touristy as advertised but pleasant nevertheless with a boardwalk and chalet like facades. I eat my umpteenth mozzarella pizza and drink yet another Fanta, and find a bus ticket to the Perito Moreno Glacier the following day. I try to find a quiet corner of the hostel to read and relax. My trip back north is scheduled to begin in two days, but with the ticket office closed until Monday, this isn’t written in stone.

Recovery

Today I chill out and do laundry and take a much needed rest after one of the most strenuous weeks of my life. I find a nice, if gringo oriented, café and eat a cheese and avocado sandwich on artisan bread and sip a doble in a narrow yellow ceramic cup. I browse an English rock magazine highlighting the comeback of the NY Dolls and Bjork plays on the sound system. I spend the afternoon reading and watching movies like American History X and Twelve Monkeys. Its time for bed and El Calafate tomorrow and the end of my Odyssey through Patagonia is within sight.

The sun appears as I leave

I heat up cup after cup of Milo and soup. I compact my food and throw away, trying to make it an easy hike out this morning. I dry all my things in the sun that finally emerges this morning. In combination with the wind, this doesn’t take long and I feel revived even if my feet feel iredeemably soggy and cold.

The Torres make one last appearance, and it isn’t from the perspective that I had hoped, but I felt blessed all the same. I start down the road towards the Lago Amarga station where I began. I spot large cat prints in the sand and follow with caution.

A wilderness guide from Minnesota who I greeted briefly at Perros is also waiting for the bus at Amarga. Soon a middle aged German with an earring who gave in after a day, joins us. Despite his lack of tenacity this time, he has been trekking and bike touring worldwide. It feels good to be on the bus, though it takes a while for the engine to turn over. We pass untold numbers of rhea and guanaco on the way through the pampa. I return to Omar’s hostel and take a long and lovely shower and go out to eat a full meal and some fruit salad. I drink a beer. I return to the hostel and drink more beer while I watch Return to Neverland with female Finlandian hostelmates and then The Big Lebowski with a group of American and Canadian guys who also completed the circuit that day, starting, untypically, at Lago Pehoe via ferry shuttle.

Hobbling in Rain and Gales

The light, but persistent, rain this morning makes it difficult to get up and start the day. My plans to go to Camp Chileano to the base of the Torres will be waylaid by the afternoon. The wind seems to have abated compared to the day before, but as I approach the next refugio, this proves to be a false assumption. The trail passes a lake with colors one rarely sees away from tropical lagoons, but this was anything but. The ferocity of the wind compares to that of a bonified hurricane. I crouch to wait out the onslaught, but once or twice the gusts catch me off guard and I am knocked down into the bushes. While walking up a hill the wind lifts me up a steep embankment. I am close to flying.

The cold rain fallls harder and I duck into a refugio for the first time on the circuit with the pretense of buying camera batteries. I bask in the warmth and marvel at working toilets before moving on. I don’t want to be spoiled by comfort. After laying dormant for several weeks, my injury sustained in Mendoza resurfaces. Its what I feared most the whole journey, but at least I am only a couple hours this time from completing the circuit and being safe. I can barely walk on it, though. I sit and stretch it out as well as I can and not wishing to be stranded, I limp on. A group of Israeli students ask me how far it is to the next refugio oblivious to my predicament.

My knee loosens to some degree, then came back in full force along with the rain and the cold. A young American guy sees my limp and asks "estas bien" and offers to carry some of my load. It is only one hour to camp and I estimate that I will make it there. I pass by the crossroads, with the alternate trail leading to Chileano and the base of the Torres, but the weather and my condition make the choice a no-brainer.

I pass the immense hosteleria and I’m tempted for a few moments, to check in, even as I look like a wet rat, but I know how expensive it probably is and hobble on. I walk to a campsite full of exuberant high school kids gathered around a big pot of food. They have a big fire stoked and I want to be a part of it. I start setting up the tent. A high school girl gives me a sweet hola, and I ignore the warning signal. One of the leaders, I presume, warily asks me "Necesitas ayudar?" Oblivious, I reply "no, gracias" and continue setting up until my weather and fatigue addled brain comprehends that I don’t belong here. I check the signs to confirm this and stuff my dripping tent back into the bag while a gracious student offers me food, and its tempting.

Everything is wet as I set up camp in earnest. I flop myself inside the tent and light up my stove going through the arduous and ultimately futile task of drying out. The camp host comes by to collect fees and she notices that my fly is being held to the ground tenuously by rocks. In the hasty process of setting up, I bent my stakes trying to penetrate the hard ground and she comes by with her own stakes and puts me back in business while her little boy directs her where to place them. Even in sogginess and disappointment, I sleep very well that night.

Pulling my tent out of the sky

The Americans take off earlier than I do, but I get the feeling I’ll see them again that day. The pack feels good today after two days of lightening the food weight, not to mention a full day’s rest.

Its a lot of up and down once again, but nothing to compare with the previous leg. This is the start of the shorter, and much more popular, W route and backpackers and daytrippers are around every turn with metal hiking poles clacking and taking up the entire trail. They don’t yield, and after a few incidents I barrel straight towards them.

The wind kicks up in a big way. In exposed areas I’m fighting to stay on the trail and I often don’t, pivoting my foot off of rocks and banks to recenter myself on the trail. My American cohorts come wandering back onto the trail after straying onto a side trail and we’re together again.

As I go down the valley towards Lago Pehoe, the wind is especially persistent. The lake looks like a sort of turquoise jewel in the distance. It burgeons into a full blown lake, a large ranger station and a luxury hotel on the shore. A crowd of backpackers queue up in the bluster by a fairy stop. I get temporary respite from the wind behind the ranger station and eat another cookie lunch. The Americans join me not long after and the pilot calls me a show off. He estimates the wind at 50 knots and asks noone in particular if anyone has ever seen water picked up off a lake like that.

I leave them and continue on to Italiano through occasional showers and the imposing and truly majestic backdrop of peaks. The hiking goes quickly and I cross a bridge over a turbulent mountain river carrying glacier water from the famously scenic French Valley and I walk into Italiano.

Now that I’m no longer burning calories at tremendous rates, I feel the cold aided by the howling winds. I get the poles into my tent in a wrestling match of sorts and I weigh it down by placing stones inside the tent. Regardless it takes off like a kite and I catch it before it enters the tree branches. With the aid of much heavier rocks, I erect the tent and hunch down inside and cook my dinner there forced out only when I run out of water and need to piss.