Usually we would not be excited about a 28 hour bus ride, but our trip from Santiago to Arica was going to be different. We had purchased the top-of-the-line “premium” bus seats which meant that we would have seats that folded out flat into a bed. Not only that, but we were traveling on Tur Bus. Tur Bus is always on time. In fact you can pretty much set your watch by their departures. None of this crap like in Argentina where the bus drivers would say we were going to stop for 10 minutes and we would be there for an hour. On Tur Bus if the bus driver says 10 minutes, you had better have your behind on the bus in 9 minutes. The staff on the bus bring you tasty treats morning, noon, and night as well as blankets and pillows. They also have a list of which passengers are getting off at which stops and they will tell you a few minutes in advance to get ready to depart. The bottom line is that out of all of the bus companies we used to travel through South America (and there were quite a few) Tur Bus is the only one I would unequivocally recommend.

This trip was no exception. We left Santiago right on time. We got our snacks from a very attentive attendant. We were not forced to watch the movies that they played all day because this company is hip to this newfangled technology called “headphones” whereby any passengers not wishing to watch Get Smart for the fourth time, the hilarity that ensues when some Wayans brothers disguise themselves as White Chicks, or Eddie Murphy imitating Bugs Bunny playing baseball by playing every character in Norbit, can simply ignore the movies instead of listening to them blaring from the overhead speakers. Or they can read the subtitles in Spanish and end up watching every stupid movie anyway because they are easily distracted.

But the best part was that night when we were getting ready for bed. We hadn’t realized that behind the seats were fold-out cushions that served as mini mattresses. The attendant came in and folded out the cushions for us and, for all intents and purposes, tucked us into bed. We arrived in Arica right on time, relaxed and refreshed and ready to take on the beach.

When we pulled into Arica, the first thing I noticed was the strange, pyramid-type structure of the bus station and the two-story Coca Cola soccer ball planted on an island in the middle of the street. “Is the whole city sponsored by Coke?” I asked.

“Maybe they just got a good deal on a gigantic soccer ball,” Adam speculated.

But the rest of the city is fairly normal. Like the rest of Chile, the grocery stores were fantastic (I was able to whip up some rockin’ chicken wraps and heavenly chocolate covered coffee and cream cheese truffles), the people were friendly, and evidence of the population’s good taste was everywhere as seen in this graffiti that I found on the sidewalk.

We checked into our apartment hotel and were slightly alarmed when we were shown a three bedroom, two bathroom apartment. Were we sharing this place with other people? We jokingly asked the guy at the desk if the apartment was just for us and he assured us that it was. Now that we had this important piece of information, we could relax and enjoy it. Although the furniture was straight out of the Sears catalog from 1983, we had a balcony with a view of the beach, a living room, and a full kitchen. The only thing that was missing was an internet connection. The staff remedied that by bringing a cable up to our apartment on the fourth floor and running in down the side of the building into the reception area where it stayed for the entire week that we were there.

Although Arica is a beach town, it is also in the middle of the desert and one of the driest inhabited places on earth (average annual precipitation is an insane 0.03 inches). Standing on the shore of the beach and looking to the east, you can see nothing but high, sand-covered mountains. It can make you feel a bit claustrophobic.

There were exactly three things of note that we did in Arica. Number one: We climbed up “El Morro” which overlooks the city and has several monuments dedicated to the War of the Pacific. There is also a fine view of the port and an immense statue of Jesus; no South American city is complete without one of those.

Number two: We walked out to the point where the lighthouse stands and watched some impressive waves crash over the rocks. It sounds dull, but it was actually quite mesmerizing.

Number three: We went to the beach. This was our primary activity every day. We sunbathed (responsibly), read, walked along the eight kilometers of beach, watched people surfing and body boarding, and admired the huge pelicans congregating on the water and swooping down to catch their food.

Yes, there are other things to do in and around Arica, but why do them? The beach calls…

]]> http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?feed=rss2&p=469 http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=455 http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=455#comments Thu, 14 May 2009 20:29:53 +0000 Dawn http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=455

One of the biggest surprises of the trip was how much we enjoyed Santiago. All of the travel guides invariably compare it to Buenos Aires. They talk about how much more cultural Buenos Aires is and how Santiago is just another big city. But after spending two months in Buenos Aires, here is my assessment: Buenos Aires doesn’t have any more “real”culture than any other big city. I know this is about Santiago, but I’m getting there. Buenos Aires does place a great deal of importance on its tango heritage. And yes, there are some places where this is still authentic. But mostly it is a show for tourists. Every other restaurant has a tango show. There are tango dancers in the streets dancing and posing for photos for tips. And if we’re talking about the Bohemian culture that is highly visible around the city, well, that’s not anything that is unique to Buenos Aires. My point is that people seem to think that Santiago has no culture and is therefore not worth visiting. We almost skipped it ourselves. But I’m glad we didn’t, because if you take the time to look, there are loads of interesting historical places that give you a very good feel for the country as a whole. Oh yeah, and the city is amazingly clean and gorgeous.

One of my biggest complaints about Buenos Aires was how dirty it was. Santiago definitely has a smog problem due to its location, but it is cleaner than any city of five million people has any right to be. There are pristine parks everywhere you look. The park that runs down the middle of one of the main streets makes walking downtown a pleasure rather than a chore.

O’Higgins park is a vast open space where families go to have picnics, pedal boats around the small lake, go to the amusement park, or relax in the well-tended gardens. The two hills in Santiago house parks as well. There is the smaller but absolutely charming Santa Lucia Hill with its fountains, small squares, statues, and lovely landscaping.

300 meters above Santiago is Cerro San Cristobal or Parque Metropolitano, a huge park that contains a zoo, botanical gardens, swimming pools, and at the very top, a 22 meter high statue of the Virgin Mary which can be seen from all over the city.

Besides the parks, there are numerous walk-streets for convenient shopping, tons of ethnic restaurants, a plethora of exquisite churches and cathedrals, and many art and history museums that tell of the cultural complexities of the city. We were only going to stay in Santiago for a week, but we liked it so much that we ended up extending our stay…twice.

It was Good Friday when we went out for the first time to explore the city; everything was shut down. It was eerie, almost post-apocalyptic—no people, no cars. A city of five million people and no one was out except for the tourists. It stayed like that through Easter Sunday. It was as if all of the residents of the city were in hibernation for the long weekend.

We were hungry for lunch on Easter Sunday, but, as previously mentioned, everything was closed. Everything that is except for the North American fast food chains. We hadn’t seen fast food in a while, and I started to agree with the sign outside of the Kentucky Fried Chicken that strongly implied that I needed a crispy chicken sandwich.

We furtively ducked inside and I walked up to the young guy at the counter. I started to place my order, but I wasn’t sure if he was paying attention. He seemed to be in a sort of trance, staring off into space, perhaps having some sort of visual hallucination. I pressed on anyway, trying to catch his eye. When I got to the part about Pepsi, he noticeably snapped back into focus, typed in the order, and handed me a ticket. As I stood waiting for my order to come up, the woman next to me became increasingly fascinated by the big cardboard buckets that they put the chicken in. “Do they put the chicken in there?” she asked me in Spanish.

“I think so,” I replied, which is my standard answer when I’m not sure if I understood the question so that I can’t be held responsible if the answer is wrong.

Not satisfied, she asked the girl behind the counter who answered in the affirmative. The lady shook her head as if to communicate, “Chicken in buckets! What’ll they think of next?”

My number was called and I looked at the tray with two sandwiches, one fry, and one drink. Sigh. “Um, dos combos?” I asked the girl behind the counter. “Dos papas fritas y dos bebidas?”

The girl looked at me blankly and blinked a few times. She took the receipt, squinting her eyes at it. Then very slowly, as if she was walking through deep water, she moved toward the manager and showed her the receipt. While the conference about my order took place, I looked around and realized that everyone was moving in slow-motion. I rubbed my eyes thinking that maybe I was the one who was hallucinating now, but no. We decided that perhaps the slow-motion people were the only people that they could get to work on Easter.

On Monday everything changed. Like the inhabitants of a disturbed hornets’ nest the city was suddenly swarming with people and cars. All of the stores and restaurants opened and the city was back to normal. It was almost like experiencing two completely different cities, and we were lucky to be able to see Santiago in its contrasting states of being.

Because we kept extending our stay, there wasn’t any sense of urgency to go and see all of the sights. After exploring the city over the weekend, we took Tuesday and Wednesday off to read, write, and generally be immobile. Thursday was going to be museum day.

As we walked toward the center of town, we noticed that there were blockades going up on the streets and police officers were everywhere. When we got to the main square, the museum was closed. What was going on? We walked by the library and it was covered with banners: all museum and library personnel were on strike that day. So everything that we were going to visit that day was closed. Of course, had we ventured out the two days before that, we would have seen that this was going to take place. We literally missed all of the signs. Agoraphobic tourists are always the last to know.

As we walked down the main street looking for something to do, a man started trotting after us and yelling, “Do you speak English? Where are you from?”

It seems that the favorite way to extort money from tourists is to pretend to be interested in them to get them talking and then hit them with information about whatever cause they are pushing. This guy was no exception. He wanted to know all about us—where we were from, where we had been, where we were going. During all of this his wife walked up.

“Honey, they’re gringos!” he said excitedly by way of introducing us.

We had been wondering why no one ever mistook us for locals.

“It’s your eyes,” he confided to Adam.

I knew we would have blended in perfectly if it wasn’t for that.

As soon as his wife walked up, the push for money began. I’m not sure exactly what they were raising money for, but she was trying to convince me to buy a little photocopied poem that she “wrote.” Ha. Nice try, sweetheart. Two other people had tried to sell me that same poem. Once they saw that we weren’t going to part with any cash, they quickly lost interest in us and went off to solicit someone else. As we were leaving, the woman did give us a good piece of advice. “They’re protesting down there,” she said. “Be careful of the police.”

So we walked down as close as we dared to the protest. We stood at what seemed to be a safe distance and watched the police spray a crowd of protesters with fire hoses. We were very careful not to get caught up in anything where we could be mistaken for protesters. Adam hadn’t brought his passport along, and I could just imagine him wet, tear gassed, and ID-less in a Chilean jail. “Don’t worry,” he assured me, “I’ll just show them my eyes.”

After the commotion died down, we walked over to Santa Lucia Hill to see if we could get a better view of what might happen next. As we were signing our names on the registry, we heard an enormous bang like the shot from a cannon. We stopped and looked at each other with eyes wide; were they shooting at the protesters? The woman behind the desk saw what we were thinking and said, “No, no. It’s only that it’s 12:00.” Apparently Santiago has a time cannon that goes off at noon that we were unaware of. Convinced that the city wasn’t about to descend into chaos and relieved that we didn’t have to make a run for the US embassy, we climbed up the hill to see if anything else was going to happen. The large group of protesters had seemingly split up and gone off to smaller protests in other parts of the city. With our plans spoiled and no excitement on the horizon, we went back to the apartment and made cream cheese and chocolate truffles. Did I mention that I love Chilean grocery stores?

We finally did get to go to the National Museum of History, which was small, but quite well done. There was a bit on the Pre-Columbian era, but most of the museum focused on the conquest and finally the independence of Chile. The final exhibit was on 20^th century Chile, and ended with a broken pair of eyeglasses that belonged to Salvador Allende that someone had picked up at the time of the coup. The lone pair of glasses in the stark white case made a powerful final statement.

What impressed me most about Santiago was how relaxed it made us feel. We lounged in our downtown apartment, strolled the streets, browsed the museums, and ambled around the parks. The people were incredibly friendly and fiercely proud of their country and they offered plenty of advice to make sure that we would come away feeling good about Chile. I’ll have nothing but good memories of Santiago and only one unanswered question: Why would they paint a mural of Emmanuel Lewis in the park?

]]> http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?feed=rss2&p=455 http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=443 http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=443#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 03:53:31 +0000 Dawn http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=443

“Estoy convencido de que un paisaje no nos habla o nos habla poco, la culpa es nuestra, de nosotros, que no sabemos verlo, escucharlo.” - Claudio Magris

(I am convinced that when a place doesn’t speak to us or speaks to us little, the fault is ours that we do not know how to see it, listen to it.)

If Valparaiso was a fictional character, it would be Miss Havisham. The former crown jewel of Chile, it sits on the hills staring wistfully at its dusty wedding dress, rotted cake, and stopped clocks, and waits for its return to glory. There is no denying that Valparaiso could be one of the most attractive cities in the world if only the entire place could be refurbished. Extreme City Makeover, anyone? Someone get ABC on line one and Ty Pennington’s agent on two.

From far away the hills do look enchanting with their clusters of brightly painted houses. But when you walk the streets you can see that many of these beautiful 19th century buildings are crumbling and falling into disrepair; it’s a heartbreaking sight. You can see too the few remaining funiculars that run up the hills and imagine what they would have looked like when they were first built—gleaming carriages climbing towards the sky. Now most of the funiculars sit abandoned and rusted. And adding to the already present air of decay is the city’s enormous stray animal problem.

Stray dogs in the less urban, more open areas like El Calafate and El Chalten are one thing. These dogs always seem happy and playful, bounding after birds, playfully nipping at each other or sleeping contentedly under the shade of a tree. They look healthy and robust. City dogs are quite another story, especially when the problem is as out of control as it is in Valparaiso. These dogs are a pitiful sight. Most of them are underweight, some of them have horrible cases of mange. There are thousands of them swarming the streets looking for food and cowering in doorways and in corners trying to get a bit of sleep. All of them look weary and downtrodden. I remember a puppy that we saw several times on the street. It could only have been about 6 months old, but it had the look of an antique stuffed toy that had been worn out. One day we saw it trying in vain to lick the last bit of yogurt from a cup that had been discarded on the sidewalk. It kept frantically licking and licking at the cup and I just couldn’t stand to watch. Homelessness, whether it is of the human or the animal variety, tends to make you feel like you have no right to enjoy yourself while others are suffering.

But down the road about five miles is Valparaiso’s younger sister, Viña Del Mar, who seems to look at Valparaiso and say, “Oh, really. Would you do something to fix yourself up? Put on some makeup and maybe change your clothes?”

Viña Del Mar does not have the cultural background that Valparaiso has, but it is cleaner and has nicer beaches and several very well-kept parks. I think that the main reason that we were attracted to Viña Del Mar was that it was a sort of escape from the big city. We had been staying in much smaller towns and hiking every day for almost two months and then all of a sudden we were smack in the middle of a real city. The beaches and parks in Viña Del Mar were less crowded and a bit more tranquil so we were able to get away from the seething streets of Valparaiso.

There were some bright spots during our time in Valparaiso. We found a fabulous used bookstore called Cummings 1 (only one copy of The Da Vinci Code on the shelves) where we got an unthinkable deal trading in our books. We had a delicious and huge plate of chorrillanas—french fries topped with fried eggs, chorizo, onion, and steak. And every once in a while while we were wandering aimlessly through the city we would find a gem: a little park, a restored building. But for the most part, we were ready after a couple of days to move on. I didn’t understand the rave reviews that the guidebooks gave to this city that was clearly not in its prime. But on the last day Adam wasn’t feeling well and I decided to walk up the hill and take a look at Pablo Neruda’s house. And that changed everything.

Often I have had the experience of visiting a poet’s house and instantly gaining a greater understanding of his poetry: Wordsworth’s view of the Lake District from Rydal Mount, Jeffers’s view of the craggy beaches of Carmel from Tor House. But I’ve never had the current flow the other way, that is that the poetry helped me to better understand the place that it was coming from.

The afternoon sky was a chalky gray and a mist too fine to be rain but too heavy to be ignored was descending from the clouds. I walked slowly up the steep winding street past a hundred colors: the graffiti murals adorning the concrete walls; the houses and store fronts painted bright turquoise, green, pink, yellow; a spray of fuschia hanging lazily over a fence; all leaping out against the gray mist and fog.

Almost in a trance, I continued toward the poets’ corner that memorialized Pablo Neruda and several others. I read on the plaque below the statue of Neruda an excerpt from his “Oda a Valparaiso”:

Valparaiso,

qué disparate eres,

qué loco,

qué cabeza con cerros,

desgreñada,

no acabas de peinarte,

nunca tuviste tiempo de vestirte

(Loosely translated by me)

Valparaiso,

what an absurdity you are,

how mad you are

with your head of disheveled hills

that you haven’t lately combed,

never had time to dress

I paused for a moment to reflect on that and then kept climbing up the street until I reached La Sebastiana: Pablo’s house.

I walked through the gate and peered up at the house and then out at the vista. And just like that the realization hit me like having the wind knocked out of me and it nearly brought tears to my eyes. After almost four days in the city I was finally able to see it, to hear it in the way that Neruda experienced it.

I didn’t go inside the house; I didn’t need to. All of the seething, the longing, the yearning, the veiled beauty that alternately oozes and explodes from his poetry, here it was in front of me. This was not the same Valparaiso that I had been looking at for the past four days. This Valparaiso was not decrepit or sagging, a jilted lover forever brooding on the past. It was vibrant, bubbling over with expectation, waiting for no man. It was as if I had been looking at the city through a pinhole and suddenly the pinhole had burst wide open and a whole vast image had been thrust upon me.

But the pinhole can’t stay wide open forever. These glimpses into the previously unseen have a way of slipping through one’s fingers more quickly than they can be written down or even fully understood. Only an hour later these fleeting, diaphanous insights had retreated to the far corners of my memory leaving me with only a tinge of remembrance. But more important than what I actually saw standing there where Neruda had stood hundreds of times before, was the experience of seeing; that is enough to stick with me, to permanently alter my perceptions about the city.

At first I lamented that this epiphany came so late in my stay in Valparaiso. Wouldn’t I have enjoyed the city more if I had come up here to Pablo’s house first? But I think no. I like the idea of remembering the sight of Valparaiso as if in a hazy dream, exactly the way that I saw it on that placid, gray afternoon.

Getting from Bariloche in Argentina to Pucon in Chile is not a difficult process unless you try to buy your tickets online. I had read several places that there is no direct bus from Bariloche to Pucon and our online searches seemed to confirm that. So we ended up buying tickets from Bariloche to Osorno and then when we tried to buy our tickets from Osorno to Pucon, that particular company wouldn’t allow us to pay with anything but a credit card issued in Chile. Very helpful. When we went to the bus station in Bariloche to buy tickets, I got in a little argument with the girl who insisted that we buy the tickets for the bus that left at 2:50 rather than at noon. She told us that we could not make the noon bus because it takes 5 hours to get to Osorno and we were leaving at 7:00. I realized later after I bought the 2:50 tickets, that she hadn’t been taking into account the fact that the time in Osorno is one hour earlier than in Bariloche.

We decided that it was no big deal. We could have lunch there and explore the town. But when we actually got to Osorno we changed our minds. We saw that the reason that Osorno was not listed in the Chile guidebook was that there is nothing to see in Osorno and it’s not particularly picturesque. Since we had arrived with plenty of time to catch the noon bus, we thought it would be better to take the earlier bus and then have some time to explore Pucon, take care of some business on the internet, and do some grocery shopping. The cabin we had booked was about 30km from the town, and the owner was going to pick us up at 7:00, so we would have a couple of extra hours to spend in Pucon. That would have been a great plan. But…

Pucon is a small town. It doesn’t have a central bus station; every bus company has its own terminal. There isn’t any lobby, there isn’t any baggage storage. Still our plan may have worked if it wasn’t pouring down rain. I mean really pouring. Fan-freakin’-tastic. So I had to do what I have long known I would have to do and have long dreaded: I had to have the phone conversation in Spanish.

I called the number I had written down and an older lady answered. “Parque Tinquilco?” I asked, completely screwing up the pronunciation because I hadn’t really looked at it before.

Then came such a messy, ridiculous exchange of bad Spanish and English that I can’t even duplicate it. The gist of it was that the woman, who happened to live four blocks away, told us to come to her house to wait for her son, who I assumed was the owner of the cabins. I actually had no idea, but she was offering us a dry place nonetheless.

We walked the four blocks and by the time we got to her house, everything that we owned was soaking wet. She fluttered around us like a concerned grandmother, offering us coffee, bathroom, internet. She said that she had called her son and that he would be by to pick us up in 25 minutes. We already felt like huge pains in the ass, but what else could we do? Stand in the rain for three hours?

As we sat having our coffee, she turned on the television to amuse us. She was looking for CNN, but she came across a video karaoke version of “Living La Vida Loca” and she stopped there and sat tapping her toes and looking admiringly at Ricky Martin. After that, she left it on the music channel and when a new video would come on, she would tell us about the artist. We even saw a video by the white-suited ass-clown that had kept us awake on our bus ride to Puerto Madryn, but sadly, she could not remember his name.

I had recovered my Spanish enough after the phone conversation to have a bit of chit-chat in between videos. But as time ticked away, we could tell that she was desperately trying to come up with ways to entertain us. She even took us into her bedroom to show us the hostel next door that she owned and her car that she hasn’t been able to drive lately because of a heart operation. She was really straining, and she kept trying to call her son to see where he was.

Eventually her daughter-in-law came to get us and we were treated to an incredibly bumpy ride over a dirt and gravel road all the way up to the cabin. It was still raining heavily when we pulled up and dragged our still damp things out of the car and into the living room of the cabin. The place was huge—living room, full kitchen, two bedrooms, a wood-burning stove, all sitting on the farthest corner of the property right next to their dock on Lake Tinquilco where kayaks and row boats sat waiting. I was immediately glad that we had booked an entire week in this place.

Because we had already been enough trouble, we told the owner’s wife that we would go into town by ourselves the next day and get groceries rather than have her wait for us. So for dinner we went to the main house where the owners, Carlos and Gianna, have a small restaurant for the lodgers and anyone else who might happen by.

We opened the door to the house and finally got to meet the fabled Carlos who strode over to greet us with a Pisco sour in his hand. The first thing I noticed was his hands which were approximately the size of the paws of a full-grown grizzly bear. He was the kind of man who just seems larger than he actually is. His shoulder-length black hair stuck out in a terribly unruly manner from under his knit cap and flecks of dirt and splinters of wood clung to his pants. He greeted us gregariously in Spanish and we proceeded to have a fairly lucid conversation whereby all parties seemed reasonably satisfied that they had understood the gist of it.

The restaurant was four or five tables in the downstairs part of their house. Next to the serving area on one side was the kitchen, and on the other side was the recreation area with couches and a big-screen TV. While we waited for our dinner, we munched on the most heavenly sopaipillas that I have ever tasted—soft, fried discs of golden-brown dough topped with a zesty salsa of tomato, onion, and cilantro. What gave these sopaipillas their extra flavor was the oil that they had been fried in which they shared with the battered trout.

Carlos and Gianna had company, so while we ate the two couples lounged leisurely on the couches watching some American Idol type show on the big-screen. The couples’ three children played an educational video game intently on a laptop at the next table. Every once in a while Gianna would get up from the couch and pour us some more wine. It was all a little strange, but the sopaipillas made up for any weirdness that we might have felt.

The next morning we boarded the minibus that conveniently stopped right outside the cabins and took a trip into the center of Pucon to stock up on food. When I set foot in the grocery store my heart actually leaped. It was enormous and it had all of the things that I hadn’t been able to find in Argentina: peanut butter, cream cheese (Philadelphia, nonetheless), sour cream, alfredo sauce, thick-cut smoked bacon, you name it. Even Adam, who generally loathes grocery shopping, was strolling the aisles gleefully. We stocked up for the week and merrily headed back to the cabin loaded down with tasty treats.

The next morning we arrived at Huerquehue National Park ready to hike the Tres Lagos trail. It was a little drizzly outside but it didn’t matter because this would be our first big encounter with the monkey puzzle trees. The first time I saw this type of tree was in Bariloche. I fell in love with its quirky, world-of-Dr. Seuss look. At the time I didn’t know what kind of tree it was, but I had read that a type of tree called “monkey puzzle” grew in the area and was just hoping that my new favorite tree would have such a fantastic name. Score.

But the few scattered monkey puzzles in Bariloche were nothing compared to what we found in the park in Pucon. The lakes on the trail were nice, but nothing compared to some of the lakes we had seen so far. That is the problem with hiking so much—you start to be unimpressed by things that you should be impressed by. But the monkey puzzles…they grew in huge forests on the hillsides and along the trail. Walking into a forest of them makes you feel like you are on a planet like Endor and you expect an Ewok to grab onto your leg and start shouting at you in Ewokese. Many of the trees were hosts to a neon green moss that made all of the trees look like they had been silly stringed. When we got back from the hike and I realized how many pictures I had taken of the monkey puzzles, I realized that my fascination may have been bordering on obsession.

*Side note*

I was standing in the bedroom looking at the package of toilet paper that we had bought. I called out to Adam who was standing in the other room, “Why is there a black man in a tuxedo on this package of toilet paper?”

Adam came into the room. “Jeez, my heart started to beat faster when you said that. I thought you were going to say that there was a black man in a tuxedo outside our window.”

“Why would you be afraid of a black man in a tuxedo?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t. I mean my heart started to beat faster because I was excited. We’re out in the middle of nowhere. How great would it be to see a black guy in a tuxedo just hanging around outside? Why would he be here? What would he be doing? Is he going to a party? Is he going to invite us?”

*End of sidenote*

One of the best hikes of the entire trip was the day that we climbed Cerro San Sebastian in Huerquehue National Park. It started off as a standard hike through the forest, but after about an hour we came to a sprawling meadow with monkey puzzle trees growing all around. Suddenly, an enormous, perfectly conical volcano popped up in the distance as if waiting until just the right moment to surprise us. We turned around again and there was another one. Both volcanoes were the perfect shape—almost too perfect. They looked as if they had been built for a school science fair by the overachieving parents of an elementary school child and that if we waited long enough, they would begin to fizz and erupt with vinegar and baking soda.

After we passed through the meadow, the climb got steeper, but the views got even better. Standing on the side of a cliff we looked out into what seemed to be the land that time forgot. I expected to see a brontosaurus calmly munching on one of the trees in the untouched forest or a feel a pterodactyl buzz our heads. Unfortunately, no.

And here comes the part that we’ve all come to expect: the part where Dawn freaks out. The steep climb turned to muddy, slippery, steeper climb, and I had to start using the surrounding trees to pull me up and insure that the trail wouldn’t become a very uncomfortable Slip-n-Slide. As usual, I could only think of one thing: there is no way I’m going to be able to get back down. At times like these, the only way that I can cope is to try to make my mind do something menial, even annoying. This time I began to silently sing the lyrics to the Mr. Ed theme song. Over and over and over. So it went a little something like this:

“Shit, shit, shit!…A horse is a horse of course of course…Holy crap, how am I going to…and no one can talk to a horse of course…What the hell can I grab onto?…that is of course unless the horse…Slipping foot! Slipping foot!… is the famous Mr. Ed.”

…Skipping the familiar part about Adam giving the pep talk and Dawn finally making it up the mountain…

From the top of the mountain we could see no fewer than seven lakes and five volcanoes. I’ll write that again in case you were doing that thing where your eyes are moving across the page but you’re thinking about something else. Seven lakes and five volcanoes. Where to look? I kept constantly spinning around in circles trying to find the perfect spot where I could take everything in at once.

And then, just like that, it was time to head back down. I inched my way down the steep, muddy path so slowly that if Adam hadn’t stopped to wait for me several times, he probably would have been back at the cabin relaxing in front of the fire before I even made it back to the meadow. On the way back we took a loop trail that led us unsuspectingly into…another gigantic forest of monkey puzzles! I started taking pictures of individual trees. So photogenic!

After our hike to San Sebastian, the weather turned against us. We were able to spend about an hour in a rowboat on the lake outside of our cabin before the clouds rolled in and we had to retreat. For the next few days it rained pretty much non-stop, but it was fine with us. We had a wood-burning stove that kept the cabin cozy and an endless supply of wood brought to us every day by Carlos. We had books to read and good food to eat. There was no pressure to do anything but relax because it was pouring rain. That week at the cabin turned out to be one of the most relaxing of the whole trip.

The whole time we were at the cabin, the two large black dogs that belonged to the owners guarded it. Anytime one of them would hear a noise—a cow, a bird, perhaps a sound coming from inside the cabin—they would start barking insanely. So even if our sleep was sometimes interrupted, at least we knew we were safe. However, it was really pathetic when it would rain and they would sit soaking wet in front of the big window and stare at us, willing us to let them in. I don’t really understand the concept of “outside” dogs, so it was heartbreaking for me. I know that they are used to it and that dogs have lived outside for 15,000 years, but I believe that a dog’s place is on the bed snuggled up with me, maybe even with his head on the pillow if that’s what makes him comfortable.

At the end of the week we reluctantly left our tucked away cabin with its view of the lake and complimentary guard dogs and got ready for our next stop. We had a 7:30 PM bus to Valparaiso, so Carlos dropped us off in town at around noon and we went to wander around the town. We had been to town twice to go grocery shopping, but we were in such a hurry to catch the bus back that we hadn’t really paid much attention to our surroundings. Pucon is the kind of town that I could see myself living in minus all of the tourists. Adorable wooden buildings. Fantastic restaurants offering a surprising variety of ethnic foods. A tranquil lake at the edge of town and views of volcanoes. And of course the guide dogs. As we walked toward the lake, a tan, short-haired dog with pale brown eyes trotted along beside us. “Hello,” I said, assuming the voice of the dog, “My name is Pierre and I will be your guide dog for the day.”

We walked along the street until we came to the black sand beach at the lake. At this boundary Pierre stayed behind and I figured that he had come to the end of his territory and that another dog would soon pick up where he left off. Just a moment later a healthy looking German Shepherd who was barking crazily at the sand when we walked by decided that we were worthy of an escort. He followed us along the beach all the way to the end where we turned around and retraced our steps.

There was a couple walking in the opposite direction, a dog gleefully basking in their attention. He looked familiar. “Is that Pierre?” I asked Adam incredulously.

It was. Pierre had not left us because of some imaginary boundary, he had left us for a couple that he liked better. He slunk by us, unable to look us in the eyes. To add insult to injury, the German Shepherd joined them and he and Pierre romped merrily around the beach. Pierre, you are a traitor.

But I had no time to chastise Pierre because we had a bus to catch. Unfortunately it turned out to be an overnight bus with about twenty overzealous middle-aged men who every ten or fifteen minutes would start screaming, “Valparaiso!” But who needed sleep? We were about to arrive in the city that is considered by many to be the crown jewel of Chile. We’ll see about that…

]]> http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?feed=rss2&p=424 http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=408 http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=408#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 20:34:26 +0000 Dawn http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=408 You might think that renting a car in a place like Bariloche would be easy. It just might be if you are willing to walk into the Hertz office and pay an exorbitant amount of money, but we weren’t willing to do that. Armed with a list of companies and their prices from the internet, we set off looking for the best deal to be had in town. Unfortunately, our list was soon depleted. The first place didn’t even seem to exist unless the lawyer at that address had taken to renting cars on the side. At the second place after repeated pounding on the door did not elicit a response, we gave up. The third place quoted us a price way higher than the one on their website explaining that the internet price did not include taxes and insurance.

What to do next? Well, the only thing to do was to walk blindly around town looking for car rental agencies. After several hours and what seemed like hundreds of conversations in Spanish we found a place that quoted us a price a little more than we thought we would be paying, but still pretty decent compared to the others. We decided we still needed to think it over before we committed to anything. As we walked out the door, we were accosted by a woman who reminded me of an excitable chihuahua. She had strapped to her an apparatus that you might use if you were a one-man band, except instead of instruments she had various communication devices hanging from it: several cell phones, blackberries, and wireless headset clipped on one ear. She spoke to us in rapid Spanish. “Are you looking to rent a car?”

We said that we were, but that we had already found one. “I can get you one for 900 pesos for the week. What price did they give you?” she demanded as she whipped open one of the cell phones dangling from her chest.

We gave her a price 50 pesos lower than that and told her that we were going to go have some lunch. At this she produced from some hidden pouch several flyers for local restaurants that she shoved into our hands. “These are good places to eat,” she assured us.

After lunch we ran into her again, still sans car. This time she had a better deal for us. She quoted us a price that was 100 pesos less than the legitimate agency that we had been to. It was such a good deal that it was almost tempting, but I could just see us getting thrown in jail for tooling around the country in a stolen car.

That evening as we drove back to Llao Llao in our legitimate silver Volkswagen “Gol” we were giddy with freedom. We had not been in control of our own transportation since we left Scotland in the beginning of October and at last, after being slaves to planes, trains, and buses, we were now in charge of our own destiny. So…what now?

On our first full day of freedom we took a drive to Villa la Angostura, an adorable town north of Bariloche and close to the Chilean border. The town was tempting, but we had the national park in mind with a hike from the forest to the peninsula passing through Los Arrayanes National Park where forests of several hundred year old arrayanes trees are protected. At the end of the trail that passed through twelve kilometers of unspoiled forest was a tranquil beach, the promised forest of arrayanes trees, and dock where we could see Bariloche and Llao Llao across the vast lake. The drive home was no less stunning. Everywhere were dazzling lakes with high cliffs springing out of them that seemed to say, “Come on! Climb on up here and take a dive into that water!”

Next on the to-do list: climb Cerro Bella Vista. Our first attempt at climbing it was unsuccessful due to the fact that we couldn’t find the trail head. We drove around the area, back and forth, several times and finally settled on a trail that looked as if it might at least connect with the trail that we were looking for. As we climbed up the mountain and the trail quickly became non-existent, I thought, “Well, better luck next time. Better just go on back the way we came and try again tomorrow.”

But Adam was convinced that he could find the trail if we just went over to the other side of mountain. And eventually he did find it, but not until we had bushwhacked our way through several kilometers of poky and spiky things. I was scared that we were going to be lost on the mountain with no one except the golden retriever who followed us down the first part of the trail knowing where we were. I was tired from going up and down and up and down and being speared by branches. The combination of mental and physical fatigue made me think that there was no way that I was going to be able to make it up the actual trail that day. And I was correct.

The next attempt was much more successful in that we did complete the task. However, I was still being, I realize as I look back, a whiny bitch. After being fooled by a false summit and seeing what we were dealing with to get to the actual summit, I went into panic mode, as usual. The summit of Cerro Bella Vista can only be reached by climbing up what looked to me to be a fairly steep trail covered in decomposed granite. Adam continued to remind me that if I took a spill, I was not going to go far, and I finally made it to the top with a good deal of whimpering on my part, and a good deal of coaxing on Adam’s part. What can I say? From the top we had a superb yet different view of the lakes as well as a view of several other peaks that were clustered nearby.

I wanted to stay on the top of the mountain not only because of the view, but because I was still nervous to climb back down. When it finally came time, Adam gave me a demonstration of what it was like to walk down a mountain with a thick cover of decomposed granite. He just let his feet sink into the pebbles and walked down the side, sliding slightly with each step like he was doing a forward version of the Moonwalk. “See?” he called from below, “it’s kind of fun.”

So it was my turn. I cautiously stuck my foot into the tiny rocks as if I was testing the temperature of bath water. I took a deep breath, a few steps, and suddenly I was effortlessly sliding down the mountain. Adam was right—this was fun!

That night I was feeling really lucky to be with someone who so patiently helped me conquer my fears time and time again so that I wouldn’t miss out on anything. But a tiny, nagging voice in the back of my mind asked, “What if that isn’t the reason he’s being so helpful? What if he’s trying to kill you?”

The only way to know for sure was to ask him, which I did that night. “Honey,” I said, “do you want to kill me?”

“Right now?” he asked without looking up from his book.

“Yeah, I guess,” I replied.

“No,” he said decisively.

“Well what about other times?” I asked.

His eyes paused on the page. “No,” he said in that tone that implies that what you mean is not a flat-out “no” but more like “not really.”

So that was that. Once and for all I had ascertained that when Adam pushes me to do things that I don’t think that I can do, it is because he doesn’t want me to miss out on something spectacular—not because he wants to kill me. Good to know.

Our second to last day we drove out to get a good view of Mount Tronador, the volcano that sits on the border between Argentina and Chile. The road up to the base of the volcano is 40 kilometers of bumpy dirt and gravel road, but the car arrived unscathed at the first attraction of the day: the black glacier. Now, you may be thinking, “How in the world can ice be black?” And the answer is: get it very, very dirty. Not that the black glacier wasn’t a sight to see. Of course, I’m partial to glaciers, but standing by ourselves in front of the glacier with its small glacial lake below watching the black chunks that had been cleaved from the face bob in the pale blue water was pretty dramatic.

Next we took a stroll over to some waterfalls, had lunch, decided that we did not like the meat flavored Doritos and we should not buy them again, and got slightly involved in a domestic dispute whereby the husband wanted to continue the walk to the waterfalls and the wife with the screaming child did not. Fortunately my accent saved us from getting in too deep.

The last big attraction of the day was the hike up to Mirador del Valle, which, as its name suggests, gives you a panoramic view of the valley below. I’m not sure how high the view point on the top of the mountain was, but I do know that a year ago if I had been standing with Adam at the trail head and he had said that I was going to make it from there to the top of the mountain in less than an hour, I would have said that he was deluded. But that is what happened. As I looked down at the valley with its foliage turning fall colors and a long, slim river flowing through it, I was content not just because of the fabulous scenery, but because I was finally starting to feel like my physical abilities were improving. I trotted back down the mountain cheerfully, and after snapping a few more pictures of snowy Mount Tronador, we turned back onto the gravel road to take the leisurely drive back.

To celebrate our last night in Argentina we had dinner at a local parilla. I have written before about the quality of meat in Argentina, and this place did not disappoint us. We both ordered the filet and got some mashed potatoes to share and, as usual, the people of Argentina showed us that good quality food cooked simply and perfectly is the way to go. I didn’t even use any of the chimichurri sauce that I love so much.

As we drove back to the apartment, our stomachs full to the bursting point, a sort of sadness settled over us. We were about to spend our last night in the apartment that had come to feel like home. We had hiked every nearby mountain. We had learned every curve in the road between the town and our place. We had become used to watching the colors of the sunset from our window every night. And now we were not just leaving Bariloche, we were leaving the country that we had spent almost four months in. The next morning while it was still dark we dropped off the rental car and boarded the bus for Chile. Although we had no idea what Chile had in store for us, we did know that Argentina had not seen the last of us.

One day I was standing at the bus stop outside of our apartment on my way to the grocery store. As I waited for the bus, an older couple pulled up outside of the boutique across the street. The woman got out of the car, looked in my direction and called out, “A donde vas?”

I did that confused looking around thing that you do when you’re pretty sure that someone isn’t talking to you. But she had to be. I yelled back, “Al mercado,” wondering why the hell this strange woman was so interested in my afternoon plans. She seemed satisfied by this answer and disappeared into the boutique. After she came back out and got into the car, the car pulled up alongside of me. She rolled down the window and said in Spanish, “I’m sorry. You look almost exactly like my friend. Would you like a ride to the market?”

Why, yes I would. I climbed in the back.

Once I opened my mouth they knew that my Spanish wasn’t quite up to par, so of course they started speaking perfect English. The man asked about where I was staying and it turned out that he was friends with Jamie, the owner of the apartment. “Tell him that Juan the painter says hello. He’ll know who it is.”

I tried to ascertain if he meant painter as in artist, or painter as in house painter. I guessed by their dress and their manner that he meant the former.

Later when I talked to Jamie to relay the message, he told me that “Juan the painter” was Juan Lascano, the artist. He said that he was one of the most famous artists in Argentina. I don’t know anything about contemporary artists in the US let alone contemporary artists in Argentina, so I’ll have to take his word for it. But should Argentine contemporary art ever come up in conversation, I can now say something like, “Oh, I just adore Lascono’s Llao Llao paintings. You know, he gave me a ride to the grocery store once.”

We made the trip to Colonia Suiza in order to get to the trail to Laguna Negro. Colonia Suiza was not like my either of my fantasies, but it was pretty damn cute. When we got to the trailhead, the sign said, “Refugio Italia, 14 km.” I didn’t know what the trail was like, so automatically I began to panic. Adam, who has gotten quite good at reading my face even if I’m trying to conceal my emotions, assured me that we would just start walking and check it out and after a couple of hours we could turn around if we had to. Having properly placated me, we hiked for quite some time over very easy terrain through a gorgeous forest next to a storybook stream. This stream which flowed next to us for miles, was one of those that is almost impossible to resist diving into. Only the vision of me jumping into 40 degree water and causing a wildlife stampede with my piercing screams deterred me. Adam kept checking the time and saying things like, “We’ll just keep walking for another twenty minutes and see how things look,” and “Let’s just keep going until we find a good spot to eat lunch.” I knew from the beginning that we were going to go the whole way to the refugio, so I wasn’t really surprised when Adam took off the kid gloves and said, “There’s no way I’m going back now.”

And even though the trail was getting much steeper, I have to say that I actually agreed with him. Of course I lagged about twenty minutes behind him and I did a good deal of cursing along the way, but eventually I made it to the refugio and the lake at the end of the trail and I felt strangely exhilarated. The lake itself was fairly run-of-the-mill, but it was where the lake was that was important. Looking out from the rock where we were perched, I was astonished at how far I had climbed. The ridge lines of the surrounding mountains cut jagged swaths across the sky and everything on the valley floor looked like it was part of a tiny museum diorama.

After lunch we headed back down the trail and since it was Saint Patrick’s Day, I put on my Ipod to listen to Irish drinking songs which are incredibly motivating. By the time we got back to Colonia Suiza I was in a stellar mood. Adam, although he had not been listening to Irish drinking songs, was similarly pumped up. He threw out a crazy idea: “Let’s not wait for the bus. Let’s just walk back.”

By that time we had walked 6 km to get to the trailhead and 28 km round trip to and from the refugio. Uncharacteristically, I nodded my head in assent. What was another 6 km? Woo hoo! I want to party tonight!

About 4 km into our walk back I started losing steam. The sun was merciless and I had run out of drinking songs. Although we were still in high spirits when we got back to the apartment, my desire to party had significantly diminished. Adam had a beer, I had a glass of wine, we read a few chapters of our books and then it was lights out.

Two summers ago I spent one of my two days in Salzburg trying to gain access to my money. The bank had decided after several weeks of purchases and withdrawals from Germany, France, Spain, and Hungary, that Austria was just the last straw, and they froze my account leaving me with no access to cash. You might think it would be a simple phone call to fix such a problem, but it definitely isn’t, especially when you are conducting business from a pay phone with a disposable phone card that may run out at any second. After many frustrating attempts, I finally got someone who said that they could reactivate my account, but first she had to ask me some questions. She went on to interrogate me about my purchases, one by one, from Germany to Austria. “And were you in Nice?” she asked, pronouncing it like the word “nice” instead of “neece.”

“Yes, I told you all of the countries that I have been in”

“How much money did you withdraw in Budapest?”

“Well, do you happen to know the exchange rate? I can tell you how many forints I took out.”

“Would you say it was about $200?”

“Sure. I guess. Whatever. Look, I can assure you that I am in possession of my card and no one has made any purchases with it but me.”

“Alright, I just need to ask you a few more questions.”

After quite some time my card was restored to working order and I headed straight for the pub.

Because of experiences like these, before we left I was careful to call the bank and have them make a note of where I would be traveling and when. That seemed to do the trick, and both my debit and credit card worked fine all throughout the South Pacific and Europe. However, at the beginning of January, my mom emailed me to tell me that I had received a letter from Bank of America that said that my credit card information might have been compromised, so as a precaution, they were going to close my account and send me a new card. Well, you can see the problem with this plan. So I called the bank and explained that we were traveling, we didn’t have specific plans and therefore didn’t have a mailing address, and that I would need to use my card as it was until July. With very little resistance, the woman agreed and told me that I could use my old card until July. “Well, that was easy,” I thought. Yes. A little too easy.

A few days later I tried to pay for groceries with my credit card and it was denied. Back to the phone. I was informed that my account was closed and I needed to use the new card. “But the person that I talked to the other day said that I could use it until July.”

“Well, you can still use it, they will just have to call it in for authorization every time you use it,” was the reply.

I was livid. “I’m in Argentina,” I said. “Even if my language skills were good enough to explain the situation, they wouldn’t do it.”

“They have to do it,” said the service rep, a little snottily.

“I’m in Argentina,” I repeated. “They don’t have to do anything.”

I’m not Argentine law scholar, but I’m pretty sure that there isn’t any law stating that businesses have to call foreign banks for credit card authorizations.

Much later I was offered to have my credit card turned back on for four days. Then I would have to call back every four days to reactivate it. I didn’t think that this plan was very sound and I expressed that to the service representative. She had another brilliant idea. “I could put your mom’s name on the card and she could call and reauthorize it every four days.”

I didn’t even know how to properly express the idiotic nature of that plan, so I just said, “I don’t think so.”

A couple hours and several service reps later, I finally got a manager to agree to let me use the card until we got to Bariloche where I would call and give them the address where they could send a new card. After a week of waiting in Bariloche I finally had my new card and a longing for a simpler time when people just used peppercorns for money.

Cerro Catedral is a big ski resort during the winter, but during the summer the village is still open allowing visitors to take a ride to the top of the mountain on the lift or to hike up to Refugio Frey. According to Adam it would be a great mountain to snowboard, but owing to my very limited snowboarding experience which consisted of an hour long lesson with a guy named “Bear” where I learned to turn only to the right and two painfully long trips down the bunny hill where I perpetually toppled over while three year olds whizzed by me, I had to take his word for it. The first part of the hike was fairly tame—around the side of the mountain with Lago Gutierrez shimmering far down below. The second part was through a splendid forest where we came upon a mini refugio built under a colossal boulder. The last two kilometers were the toughest and consisted of steep, rocky inclines which I fought with as usual, but altogether it was a rather enjoyable and successful hike.

After crossing a small stream and scampering over one more rocky path, we arrived at the refugio. We were in a valley completely surrounded by rough, ragged peaks. On the valley floor sat a nondescript lake and a stunning meadow bursting with shades of green, red, and rusty orange. I looked up at the sky which happened to be a perfectly cloudless sky-blue with the moon still hovering above one of the peaks, and I thought about how amazing it would be to camp there and to see the stars through that gigantic funnel of rock. I was overpowered by a desire to stay. Places like these can truly make you comprehend just how minuscule we are. Carl Sagan described the earth as “a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam,” which means that each of us is just a tiny speck on that mote of dust. Standing there looking up at those peaks and out across that meadow I felt that small. And I didn’t find that at all disconcerting or discouraging. On the contrary, I found it exciting. To be a tiny speck living on a mote of dust in infinite space means that I will never run out of things like this to marvel at.

]]> http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?feed=rss2&p=399 http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=386 http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=386#comments Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:42:37 +0000 Dawn http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=386

Our first couple of days in Llao Llao were spent exploring the national park near our apartment. The walks in this particular area weren’t very strenuous—they were more like strolling trails, but nonetheless, it was gratifying to walk along the several miles of trails through the deep cool of the forest pausing occasionally on the beach of a lake. In the middle of one of these trails was a forest of arrayanes trees which have become one of my two favorite kinds of tree. I am absolutely enchanted by their white and cinnamon colored bark The only disappointing thing about the arrayanes trees is that from a distance they look like they would be slightly soft, faintly furry, even, but they are not. I know because I touched a lot of them to make sure.

Since these trails were so accessible, we passed lots of people who were out for an afternoon walk or heading to the beach to barbecue. Sometimes we would pass by a person trailing perfume and I would remember when I smelled more like that than faintly like hamster.

A few days into our time there, we decided that it was time to stop fooling around with the forest and start going after the bigger hikes up the mountains. There was a bus that would take us to the trailhead of the first mountain we were going to climb, Cerro Lopez, so we went out to the bus stop and waited. And waited. And waited. Apparently this bus didn’t come around as often as the one that ran up and down the coast. Finally we decided that we would just start walking and we could flag the bus down when it came by. Two hours later, we came to the conclusion that the bus was not coming, and that we would not be climbing Cerro Lopez that day. The road was about a 20 kilometer loop and we agreed for my sake that we would just walk the loop, see what there was to see, and try Cerro Lopez again the next day.

The first thing that we came to on our walking tour of “Circuito Chico” as it is called, was the road to Colonia Suiza or Swiss Colony. We ended up bypassing it that day, but I couldn’t help thinking what it might be like. I remembered the mail-order catalogs that we used to get from Swiss Colony around Christmastime, and I imagined a little village where everyone was busy filling baskets with beef logs, cheese balls, and petit fours. Alternately I thought that it could be like The Swiss Family Robinson where everyone was living in treehouses and coming up with crafty tricks to thwart pirate attacks. Ahh. I really had a thing for Fritz when I was little.

The next attraction on the circuit was the Punto Panoramico which was exactly what it sounds like. This particular punto had been hijacked by vendors and tour buses. It’s difficult to be awestruck by nature when there are 75 retirees from Boca Raton trying to get their cameras to work and deciding which authentic handcrafted woven necklace to buy for the grandchildren. We quickly moved on.

The next attraction was a dinosaur park that we had seen an advertisement for, but didn’t know anything about. Of course, when you’re dealing with replicas of dinosaurs verisimilitude is always debatable, but we could see even from a distance that the creators of the dinosaur models that dotted the park may have been working from a 19^th century textbook with missing pages. It’s also possible that they may have been drunk. Pass.

A bit down the road we unexpectedly came across a cemetery where people who had died in the mountains were buried. Cemetery? Yes, please, especially if it’s a quirky one. It was a very small cemetery up on the hill with graves marked by headstones shaped like things such as chalets and skis. It wasn’t fancy, but there was something so appealing about the small, quiet, remote nature of it, although I guess it doesn’t much matter when you’re buried there. Plus, I wasn’t prepared to die a torturous death on a mountain just so that it could be my final resting place.

Almost at the end of the loop, we ended up taking a detour back to the park and taking the one trail that we hadn’t taken yet—the one up to Cerro Llao Llao. I was getting pretty tired, but I didn’t think the hill could be all that high. Forty minutes of some steep uphill climbing later, we stood on the top and marveled at the view. Hill after hill after hill dipped its feet into the cobalt blue lakes that spread over the landscape further than the eye could see. The giant boulder that we had climbed onto to get a better look seemed to be tailor-made for us to stretch out on and enjoy the late afternoon sun that gave the whole scene a hazy, dreamlike quality.

The next day we set off again to try to catch the number 10 bus to the trailhead of Cerro Lopez. We took the number 20 bus to the crossroads, but we had given ourselves way too much time and were standing at the bus stop about 50 minutes early. We decided, like on the previous day, that we would just start walking and catch the bus as it went by. An hour and a half and ten kilometers later, we were standing at the trailhead and watching the number 10 bus blow by. Unbelievable. So after doing our little warm-up walk, it was now time to tackle the real thing. Earlier as we were walking, Adam had pointed at a tiny speck of pink on the mountain and informed me that the little speck of pink was the refugio at the end of the trail that we were taking. I tried to act like I wasn’t totally dismayed by this information, but I don’t think I did a very good job.

The trail started climbing immediately and went quickly from rocky and relatively easy to walk on, to deep, incredibly fine dirt which is a bitch to walk on, especially uphill. Adam is a pretty good judge of what I can do physically even if I’m not, and even he eventually seemed worried that I was getting too tired. My entire body was soaked with sweat, my face was dripping and dirty from the particles of dust that I was kicking up, and I was feeling a bit like Wesley in The Princess Bride when the man with six fingers takes a year off of his life using “the machine.” We stopped at a stream crossing to take stock. We had been going for about two hours and the hike was listed as a four hour hike. Now even though I usually feel like I’m going about as fast as a narcoleptic snail compared to Adam, we almost always, even with my slow ass tagging along, complete a hike an hour sooner than the time listed. But at this point Adam looked around and said, “I think we’re only at the one hour point right now.”

I was completely flummoxed and deeply discouraged. If we had already been hiking for two hours and we were only at the one hour point, this hike was going to take…eight hours? I am an adult, but it’s times like these when I wish that I could just fall on the ground and throw a super-tantrum. Instead I dragged along wondering for real this time if I was going to make it the entire way. Just when I was trudging up a particularly steep incline and cursing the dust out loud, Adam called down, “It’s right up here!”

Thankfully he had been wrong about us being only at the one hour point and we were only about twenty minutes from the refugio. When we got there, we had an astonishing view of the lakes and islands below us, but admittedly, we were not at the top of the mountain. Fortunately, Adam had a plan to remedy this oversight. There just happened to be a trail from the refugio that went up to a peak on the mountain range. “Come on, you’re not that tired, are you?” he asked.

I had to admit that since we had reached the refugio, I was feeling fine. Not wanting to seem like a crybaby-wussy, I followed behind. There was no actual trail, just a suggested path over the rocks marked by red splotches of paint and arrows. I clambered up and over the rocks as fast as I thought I could, but I kept falling seriously behind due to that pesky old fear of tumbling down a mountain in cartoon fashion, hitting every pointy object on the way down and culminating in an anvil dropping on my head. Finally it got to be too much for me. I crouched down between some rocks panting from physical exertion and fear. Adam crouched down next to me. “Do you want to stay here and wait for me?” he asked resignedly.

“Yes,” I nodded somewhat tearfully.

He pondered this for a second and then said, “Get up.”

“But…” I protested.

“Get. Up,” he said firmly and held out his hand. “You’re coming with me.”

The Jedi master was not yet ready to give up on his inept apprentice. Thankfully he did not.

When we got to the peak I honestly felt like I was on top of the world, that I was a giant straddling two countries. In one direction was Chile, the snow-covered volcano Tronador prominently on display. In the other direction was the entire lake district of Argentina, the vast blue going on seemingly forever like a recursive picture. We found a perfect windbreak overlooking the lakes and sat down to snack on our sandwiches—another unbelievable picnic spot. We kept talking about getting up and going back down the mountain, but we continued to find reasons to delay leaving. This is one thing about day-hiking that I am still unable to get over: you work so hard to get to the payoff at the end of the trail and then before you know it you have to head straight back down again. It’s like spending hours making a meal that people consume in twenty minutes. But I was just so elated that I had made it to the end and that I hadn’t missed such an epic view that I couldn’t complain.

If we wanted to make the 4:15 bus, we were going to have to hurry. So once we had climbed back down over the rocks to the refugio, we had to start running down the mountain. I was not terribly excited about this plan, yet I was also not excited about the prospect of having to wait another hour and a half for the next bus. I ran along behind as fast as I could, looking like Pigpen, enveloped in the clouds of dirt that we were both kicking up. Adam was going much faster than I was, but every once in a while I would catch a glimpse of him as he disappeared around a corner or down an embankment. I felt a bit like Alice chasing the white rabbit, but in the end we did not end up being late; we were dutifully seated on the side of the road waiting for the bus with several other confused tourists. “Is this where we get the bus?” “I don’t know, I think so.” “Do you know what time it’s supposed to be here?” “I have a schedule here.” “What does this mean?” “I don’t know.” “Does this mean that it doesn’t come by here at that time?” “I don’t know, this doesn’t make any sense.”

Well, surprise, surprise, the elusive number 10 bus never did show up. There were rumors going around that the 5:45 bus really did exist, but that would mean sitting on the side of the road for over an hour waiting for a bus that may or may not come. Unfortunately our only option, since taxis don’t often happen by that way, was to walk the ten kilometers back to our place. I was coated with a combination of sweat, dirt, and salt deposits. My face had brown smears all over it. I looked like a refugee in one of those Save the Children ads. I felt like I looked. But there was nothing else to do but pick myself up, forget about dusting myself off, and let the memory of a monumental experience carry me home.

When we got to the studio it wasn’t quite ready, so the owner told us about a walk that we could take that would kill some time and allow us to stretch our legs a bit. He was speaking English (he was from Tahoe), but after so much time on a bus it still sounded faintly like Charlie Brown’s teacher. “…up the road…waaa waaa waa waa…past the waa waa…up the waaa waaaa…you’ll come to a green Jesus…” My ears perked up. Who doesn’t want to see a green Jesus? It turned out that neither one of us was listening very well and we did not end up finding the green Jesus that day, but we did get some fresh air and returned to check into the studio.

First of all, I must mention that we were paying about $20 a day for this place. That is an absurdly good price. The studio itself wasn’t much to look at. The carpet was brown and worn, the oven we used once and never again, the walls were bulging out slightly in some places. But it was clean and functional and it happened to have a better view than 95% of any of the places in the area. The view alone was worth more than what we were paying for that place. In the morning we would open up the blinds and see the mountains reflected in the lake that had been ironed flat by the windless dawn. In the afternoons we could sit outside and read while the boats carved gashes of white froth into the water. And at the end of the day after a long hike we got to sit in front of the window with a glass of wine and watch the sky turn bright salmon pink over the peninsula. And this was only the view from our window.

When we went into Bariloche for the first time after we arrived, we felt much the way that we did our first day in Berchtesgaden—overwhelmed with joy. The architecture is sort of Swiss-chalet-meets-Patagonian-outpost which gives the town center a wonderfully rugged yet cozy feeling. But no homage to the Swiss would be complete without a serious preoccupation with chocolate, and that is exactly what Bariloche has. Almost every restaurant or store you pass has a “artesenal chocolates” sign in the front. In the town center there is at least one candy store per block. I didn’t know which way to turn, so I looked to the guidebook which said that Mamuschka had the best chocolate, bar none. Good enough for me. I don’t know if it was the best chocolate because we didn’t have time to try all of the shops, but Mamuschka lived up to our expectations. Dark chocolate with whipped, creamy mint filling. Almonds dipped in honey and cinnamon covered with white chocolate. Hazelnut paste sandwiched by thin milk chocolate squares. My eyes are rolling around in my head just thinking about it.

Besides the chocolate, Bariloche has something else that most other cities do not—ethnic food. It may not be the most authentic, but it is close enough for someone who hasn’t had Chinese food in eight months. Italian, Mexican and Indian restaurants. Grocery stores stocked with gourmet delights. And that was just the town center.

That night after we had eaten tacos at a Mexican restaurant and stocked up on groceries and chocolate, we sat staring dreamily out of the window of our studio thinking it was almost too good to be true. I looked hard at the darkening sky and saw a small cluster of stars blinking on and off. They looked like the final second of a fireworks display when the last of the aluminum burns up in the air. They seemed to be playing with each other, disappearing and reappearing in a new spot, chasing after one another. It was such a blatant display; I haven’t ever seen anything quite like it. I don’t believe in signs, but if I did, I might have taken this as a sign that Bariloche was going to be one of the most arrestingly gorgeous places I have ever been. It turns out no sign was necessary—all I needed to do was open my eyes and look around.

]]> http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?feed=rss2&p=379 http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=368 http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=368#comments Sun, 05 Apr 2009 22:34:14 +0000 Dawn http://tostrivetoseektofind.com/?p=368

After having to abort our mission to the Piedras Blancas glacier after I put both of my feet into the stream, we took a day to try again. It wasn’t a particularly difficult hike, but it was a long walk mostly over rocks and there were small streams that popped up everywhere along the route.

There have been many times during this trip that I’ve had to cross a stream by hopping over the rocks that just barely break the surface of it. The rocks will be of all different sizes and shapes making the choice of which rock to step on with which foot complicated. If I step on one rock with my right foot but the next rock is situated to the far right, I have to do an awkward little reshuffling dance so that I can step on that rock with my right foot as well and be assured that I will not plunge into a frigid stream like I had done previously.

The way that I navigate the rocks reminded me of learning the fingering for a piece of music on the piano. You can play a piece without the proper fingering, but usually it makes it easier if you don’t. My first experience with the piano was not with reading music, but by watching my grandmother play what was then my favorite piece of music, “Fur Elise” by Beethoven, and imitating what I saw. I ended up being able to play the beginning of that piece flawlessly before I ever knew anything about reading music. Therefore, I felt that I knew just about everything when I started taking piano lessons. I flew through the beginners books not paying attention to petty things such as fingering and pedal notations. I felt that these were really just suggestions and not things that I had to take notice of. My piano teacher’s insistence that I pay attention to such things while playing a one-handed three-note piece like “To the Zoo” seemed ludicrous. “Lady,” I thought, “I can play Beethoven. I don’t need your fingering crap.”

Once I started to play longer and more complicated pieces, I realized that if I paid attention to how it was supposed to be done right from the beginning, it made things much easier in the end. And of course, with practice, it became somewhat second nature. But it was still sometimes painfully slow as I was learning.

This is what I remind myself of when I see Adam hopping over streams in what seems like a single bound. I’m still practicing, and that might mean that it takes me three times as long to get across. It might mean that I accidentally fall in. But with each time I learn a little bit more about what it feels like to perform such a task intuitively. What the rocks feel like under my feet. How much I can slip without falling. How far I can stretch my legs to reach the next tiny island. Slowly but surely.

I then faced the next obstacle between us and the glacier: big boulders. Climbing over the boulders proved to be much like crossing the streams. Where do I put this foot now? Most of it was rather easy and fun, but there were times when I would be stuck on top of a rock, too fearful to make the next move. I pictured myself wedged between two boulders, stopping up the hole for all of eternity. Then Adam would come to my rescue. “Look,” he said at one point, “this is granite. It’s very sticky.” He demonstrated the stickiness by calmly walking down the side of a boulder like Spiderman climbing a wall. Tentatively, I inched down the side of the boulder. I stuck! This was great.

We made our way over to the modest lake and looked across to the glacier. It wasn’t as large as some of the others, but the seracs, looking like the crumbly cheese they are named for, radiated a massive amount of bright blue light across the water and the Fitzroy range peeked out from behind the ice. We ate some lunch, sunning ourselves on the rocks like the lizards that scampered to and fro on the trail. Then it was back over the boulders and streams, not quite as quick as I would like to be, but I was gaining confidence.

What was especially nice about the last few trails that we took, was that they were much less crowded than they had been at the beginning of the week. I talked before about how exhausting it is to greet all of the people that you pass on the trail, but worse than that is dealing with people who don’t understand trail etiquette.

The worst offense that people commit is not yielding to hikers who are going faster than they are. This is akin to driving 20 miles per hour below the speed limit on a one-lane road without having the courtesy to pull over and let others pass. Just as it is in a car, passing people who don’t yield can be dangerous. While it is unlikely that you will get into a head-on collision, it is likely that you will trip or step into a hole and injure yourself as you go off the path around the oblivious pair that are chattering away rather than paying attention. It seems to me that it would be uncomfortable to have two people breathing down your neck as you walk along, but it’s amazing how many people don’t show the slightest hint of uneasiness.

We tend to see a lot of this lack of trail etiquette because Adam cannot abide having people in front of him on the trail. Understandably, he enjoys himself much more when he doesn’t have to constantly look at the backsides of people in front of him. They way that I observe it, he is like the Terminator locking onto a target. He sees the people ahead of us on his screen. He locks on. The text on the screen says in red capital letters, “MUST PASS NOW.” He initiates passing mode and like a true Terminator, does not let up until the mission is accomplished. At first I found this to be exhausting, but as I get faster and faster, I have acquired a need to pass people as well.

We saved the hike to Loma del Pliegue del Tumbado until the end of the week. The first couple of hours were surprisingly easy. It was a continual yet gentle uphill climb, and I popped on my Ipod and put on some Guns N’ Roses which always helps me get moving. As I contemplated a viable way to get Slash and Axl to make up and get the band back together, I noticed that the climb was getting steeper and I was having to stop more frequently. All at once the terrain changed to reddish-brown crumbling slate which was quite slippery. I knew that the only way to get to the summit was to scramble up this steep, slippery incline, but I was unsure that I could do it. Axl was not helping, so I turned him off and put him in my pocket. Adam called down from the top what has become somewhat of a mantra: “If you fall, you’re not going to fall far. You are not going to fall down the mountain.”

I picked my way cautiously and nervously up to the top and was rewarded with an awesome 360 degree panoramic view of the area. It was like a summary of everything that we had seen throughout the week. There was the Fitzroy range partially obscured by clouds. There was the valley where the tiny town sat. There were the glaciers and lakes that we had lunched next to. It was approaching frigid up there with the clouds and the wind as usual, but this was the view. Adam surveyed the scene and asked, “Do you see how this can become addicting?” I did.

However, when it came time to head back down, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. I felt like a cat stuck in a tree. The prospect of going down that slippery slate path was even worse than that prospect of going up it. I figured that even if a rescue helicopter could be convinced to come and pick me up just because I was scared, I was pretty sure that it would be quite an embarrassing, not to mention costly, situation. So I picked my way back down, reassuring myself every few seconds under my breath. Nothing happened. Unfortunately, the evidence keeps mounting that I am acting like a spaz for no good reason.

After the hike we went back to the cabin to kick off the shoes and put our feet up. One thing that was nice about the cabin that we stayed in was that it had a DVD player and the owners had a large selection of DVD’s to choose from. There is something so appealing about being all cozy inside watching a movie with a big bowl of homemade popcorn with real butter while the wind howls outside. The only bad thing about this arrangement was that getting the DVD’s turned out to be a kind of awkward situation. The reception area for the cabins was also the owners’ home, so whenever we wanted a DVD, we would have to go to the door and knock and then 1) be greeted by the perpetually shirtless husband who would call from the loft, “Don’t mind me, I just came in from a run!” and 2) feel rushed and uncomfortable as the wife stood staring two inches away from us as we tried to make a selection as quickly as possible.

The last few nights we watched the whole original Star Wars trilogy in Spanish without subtitles. This might sound like we are real pros now, but think about what the dialogue in Star Wars is actually like. The best part about it was listening to the really well-known lines in Spanish: “Luke, soy tu padre.” And I was delighted to find that Yoda still speaks in his quirky anastrophic manner even in Spanish. Sadly, the end of the Star Wars trilogy signaled the end of our time in El Chalten.

For several reasons that all seemed stupid when we were standing outside in the merciless, icy wind at midnight waiting for a bus, we bought tickets for a bus from El Chalten to Bariloche that left El Chalten at 11:30 at night and arrived in Bariloche two mornings later. As I mentioned before, El Chalten is an extremely small town, so they haven’t quite gotten around to finishing the bus terminal that my guidebook tells me they began in 2005. So we were standing around in the freezing dark with thirty or so other people trying to stay warm by sheltering ourselves in the unfinished building next to the bus stop that had no doors or windows and was not helping at all. I went into silent meditation mode. Think about sun. Think about fire. Think about…FUCK I’M COLD! The bus showed up over an hour late, but by that time I had no energy for criticism. I plopped down into my seat finally able to relax my tensed muscles, and promptly fell into a fitful, yet satisfying sleep that would leave me well rested for…the next day on the bus.