South America Explorations: Week 19 - Buenos Aires

Saturday, February 15^th, 2014
After landing in Buenos Aires, my friends (Kishore, Renuka, and Sharon) and I took a taxi to our hotel, El Conquistador, in the Retiro area of the city. Renuka had found the hotel on Expedia, and it turns out that this is a significantly cheaper way to get a hotel – the front desk even told me this. I have to admit, it was nice to be in an actual hotel room with an actual private bathroom. Renuka and Sharon took the king bed so that they could get some cuddle time (kidding) and Kishore and I had single beds that ended up being far less comfortable than the dorm beds we had been sleeping in for the past week.

It was a bit late and we were famished, so on the hotel dude’s recommendation, we crossed the street to a relatively non-descript restaurant for dinner. The food wasn’t non-descript though, it was rather descript, in fact. I believe Kishore had some pasta while the three of us enjoyed some nice juicy wonderfully cooked steaks.

After dinner, we went to hit da clubs! Okay, not really. We went to a couple of Irish pubs that were within a 10 minute walk from the hotel. When we got there, it was kinda dead and empty and wee bit on the depressing side. But it seems Buenos Aires bar scene can be a bit scattered in the evenings, and so we didn’t have a ton of options without hopping in a cab (as far as we knew). So we picked one of the two bars that appeared to have more than 3 people – first up was Pirate Bar, which had a large creepy pirate caricature out front. After finishing a pint each, we went across the street to Kilkenny, where a cover band started playing lots of oldies, albeit in an Argentinian accent.

We all stumbled home a bit. Given everything we had gone through the previous week, we kinda needed that though. It was good night, as you can probably tell by the pushups that Kishore and I decided to do in the middle of the street on the way home for who knows what reason.
And yes, we were wearing the same colored shirt, though we didn't realize it until we had left the hotel.


Sunday, February 16^th, 2014

This morning, we grabbed a breakfast at the hotel that was just kinda meh, and headed to the Palermo Soho area of Buenos Aires. Prior to joining us last week in El Calafate, Kishore had spent a few days here in Buenos Aires on his own, tangoing the night away, and he left his tango gear with a tango friend. So we figured we’d pick his little bag up and then just walk around a bit.

The area is a bit upscale and renovated in a sense – lots of nice condos and apartments around. It easily could have passed for a nice neighborhood in NYC, full of bars and quirky restaurants, along with upscale clothing stores and other kitschy interesting shops. We wandered aimlessly for a few hours and then we wandered aimfully for an hour or so trying to pick somewhere to eat. We ended up eating at a restaurant that Kishore’s friend had recommended and had some burgers. The toppings on the burger were good, but the burger itself was a bit crappy. I’m not exactly sure why this place was recommended to be honest; it was far from special.

In the afternoon, we joined a walking tour for a few hours through the City Center. Our guide, Mariano, talked our ears off for the next three hours and showed us many of the amazing buildings around the city. He shared with us that the city itself is not so old, but the city was an important hub for South America and as a result, there were a significant number of wealthy people here. Those wealthy people built lots of buildings in very varied architectural styles, side by side, and sometimes atop one another. Mariano showed us a corner from which, we could see 8+ buildings with different architectural styles – from Victorian to Classical to Gothic to Post-Modern to Art Deco to Adobe to Duplo Blocks.

We walked along Avenida de Mayo from the Congress building all the way to Casa Rosada (Pink House, where the President’s offices are) and discussed lots of buildings in between. Near Casa Rosada is the Plaza de Mayo, where all protests or all large social gatherings are held. Mariano shared that if a group is planning something, they don’t even talk about location, because it’s widely understood that it’ll be at Plaza de Mayo. And the police and government expect this and are present to ensure everything remains peaceful. It’s almost as though “protesting” is part of everyday life here. They even have some ugly temporary metal barricades up between the square and the Pink House that have been in place for well over a decade.

Nearby is the national church/cathedral whose exterior looked more like a courthouse in architectural style than anything else. The inside was more typical per se, although we did happen to arrive at the right time for a “changing of the guards” ceremony. I wasn’t exactly clear why they had guards to begin with, but I guess I didn’t care enough to ask either. In any case, it’s odd to think that this used to be the main church of the current Pope only a year ago.

In the middle of the walk, we had to cross the massive tree-lined 9 de Julio Avenue, a boulevard with four separate sections of car lanes and two sections of bus lanes plus massive dividers… it was pretty gol’darn wide. In fact, the Argentinians claim that it is the widest boulevard in the world and that it is impossible for a pedestrian to cross the entire thing in one stop light without running. I tried a few times and twice got within one section at a brisk walk only.

We had to leave the tour a little early unfortunately, just as the tour was headed to the Washington Monument they have erected in the center of the city (they seem to refer to it at the Obelisk for some reason). I found it strange that they would build such a huge iconic structure in memory of the first President of the US, but I suppose that’s just how big our cultural influence is. Merkuh!

We had to go back to the hotel to freshen up and change clothes for a tango event that Kishore had booked for us this evening. As we left the hotel, I had this gem of an exchange with Sharon:
                me: “Danggit, I left my phone in the room!”
                Sharon: “Who are you gonna call?”
                me (without missing a beat): “Ghostbusters!”

I was giggling and snorting to myself and out loud for a solid 10 minutes after that one.

Our tango show was a combination lesson, dinner, and show spanning a good 3 hours or so. The lesson was first, and we were directed to sit in a largely empty room. There was a striped black fedora hanging on the wall, so I put it on and rocked it. It fit me perfectly and just looked like it belonged on me. I was planning to walk out with it, but I didn’t. I totally should have though – it wasn’t that valuable, but it would have made for a solid story to tell any time I wore it.

The tango lesson was quite basic. There ended up being about 15 couples learning in a hot crowded studio. I spent more time trying to avoid a few European couples who seemed completely content to run over other people (like us) if we happened to be in whatever they determined was their path. Sharon and I danced together while Renuka and Kishore danced together. Since the man is supposed to lead and the woman is supposed to follow at all times, I especially enjoyed getting halfway into the steps and then just stopping as Sharon tried to take over the leading responsibilities. It was good fun. There were a shortage of men, so there were easily 5-6 quite attractive single women in the corner attempting to learn on their own. Men who can move definitely have a big advantage here. Then again, I'm guessing a significant proportion of Argentinian men can move well, so that’s probably a moot point really.

Dinner at the tango place was solid, but not spectacular. More spectacular was the all-inclusive nature of the drinks, so we ended up knocking back 4-5 bottles of wine between us. The show was pretty wonderful as well – they were clearly acting out some sort of mini-drama, but given the rapid-fire Spanish, we spent more time gazing longingly at the tango women’s legs than anything else.

Monday, February 17^th, 2014

Today was the last day for all three of my friends – their flights were late this evening. Since I had no interest in paying for a 4-person room for myself, I was going to move to a hostel – the same one that Kishore stayed in for a few days at the beginning of his trip. So we packed up our bags after showering and having breakfast so that they were ready to go when we needed them.

Our agenda this morning was to take another walking tour. The one yesterday only hit half of the sights, so we were going on the sister tour this morning to get the other half. And lo and behold, the guide was Mariano again, so we’d get to hear many of the same stories about the city’s history and so forth. He was really a pretty solid guide all around, so we weren't too miffed about this in the least.

A significant portion of the tour was spent in a very large square at the northern end of the city called Plaza San Martin. General San Martin was the guy who liberated Argentina from the Spaniards way back when, and apparently he and Simon Bolivar from the north more or less joined forces to kick the Spanish virtually off the entire continent. After the revolution, Argentina went into a civil war but San Martin wanted nothing to do with this so he stayed out of it. As a result, as Mariano says, there is not a single person in Argentina who has anything but positive associations with this guy. The same can’t be said of the two other most famous people, Eva Peron and Diego Maradona.

Around the plaza were lots of old gorgeous stately mansions that were built by the uber-rich families back in the early 1900s. Many of these have been converted into state buildings or into foreign embassies, because no family can really afford to live in them anymore. As we were walking by one of the embassies, a policeman stopped by to let us know that it was illegal to take pictures of embassies. Ummm… okay.

Also of note in the square was the existence of these ridiculously massive trees, called gomeros. These were present in several of the other squares as well, but many of them were fenced off so that you couldn’t sit on them. Supposedly, there was another one that was twice the size of the biggest one we saw, but unfortunately we didn’t get to see it. We had to leave a bit early to get back to the hotel so that we could move our bags to storage. This wasn’t poor planning on our part; instead the group today was too large – almost 30 people. This meant that what should max out at a 3hr trip was running on close to 4hrs. The only thing we missed was Recoleta Cemetary.

After moving the bags, we set out to go to an Indian restaurant called Kathmandu that the hotel staff recommended, only to find absolutely nothing at the address they gave us. So we stepped into another Indian restaurant called Delhi Mahal that we passed along the way. We weren’t too pleased with this place because they charged us for water and for rice, and that’s just cheap. I also have a sneaking suspicion that they turned the wifi off when they saw that we were using it. This is all odd, since as we learned from the owner, there are only about 700 Indians in the city. You would think they would be thrilled to see us and greet us like old friends. Nope. Cold shoulders everywhere. Indian people suck. Yes, all Indian people suck, since the entire community should clearly be held accountable to the actions of a single group of jerkwads who obviously represent all 1.21 billion of them.

We had just over two hours before my friends needed to take a cab to the airport, so Kishore and Renuka headed over to the Recoleta Cemetary (I’ll describe this place later) while Sharon and I went to a Havanna Café. There’s a Havanna on every other street corner in this city, kind of like Starbucks in Seattle, except that there are also Starbucks all over this city too. There’s also another chain of cafés called Café Martinez that seems to be everywhere. Basically, I guess they like their cafés.

After a few hours, we met back at the hotel and I bid my friends a fond farewell as they loaded into the taxi cab for the airport and I loaded my backpacks onto my shoulders for the 45 minute trudge in the heat to the hostel.

As I mentioned last week, it’s been really nice to have my friends with me for a bit. I found it very interesting also to see how the very different personalities blended and contributed to our “unit”. Kishore and his outgoing personality is an endless source of stories – he chats up anyone and everyone more than anyone I’ve seen before. I don’t think I heard a negative word from Renuka the entire time – she was peppy and perky the entire time from start to finish. And my old friend Sharon knows me better than the rest – she’s as steady as they come and I really enjoyed her company because we somehow know when to be silent and when to be chatty with each other.

After settling in at the hostel, I grabbed a few slices of pizza at the parlor just below the hostel on the street and headed up to the rooftop, where I was treated to some outstanding views. It turns out that one of the buildings that Mariano had shown us on Sunday afternoon is directly across the street from the hostel. The tower on the building had lots of curves and rounded segments and was crowned with a lighthouse at the top. I sat there in stunned silence, enjoying the cool air and the incredible scenery over a 1L bottle of local beer and my two slices of pizza. This… this was just incredible. Indescribable even.

Tuesday, February 18^th, 2014

This morning I decided to walk over to an area of town called Puerto Madero that my guidebook said was always easy to find a nice place to eat. When I got there, I thought I might need to turn around. It was really kinda blah – it’s an old port area that has been completely renovated and looks nice and modern and fancy, but given the charm and soul and architectural wow of the majority of Buenos Aires, I fail to understand why anyone would possibly want to live here or even be associated with it. They even had a TGI Friday’s and a Hooters. I was starving so I grabbed a bite to eat at a little café for an hour or so and then I headed out to do something, errr… anything else.

I spent a little bit of time today while I was traipsing around just trying to figure out what to do for the rest of the week before I head back home next Monday night. There were a few options for longer trips, but mostly I decided to just hang out and relax a bit here in Buenos Aires. But it reminded me of a gem of an exchange I had with Renuka yesterday on the same topic...

Renuka: “There’s that one city with a huge statue of a lady on a mountain – there’s photos of it everywhere and it’s in movies, but I’m not sure where it is.”
me: “You mean, Cristo Redentor in Rio? The one that looks like this?” (shows the pose)
Renuka (excitedly): “Yeah! That’s the one.”
me (cracking up): “Ummm, that’s Jesus. He’s a dude.”

On my way back towards the hostel from Puerto Madero, I passed a youngish guy on a street holding a child in his arms and asking for some money. As I waved him off and walked forward a block, I thought about this a bit more – I never know what the right thing to do is. I don’t want to hand out money, but he was standing outside of a Subway sandwich shop and I easily could have bought him a sandwich which might be all he was looking for. I turned back, but given the lack of language command, I was still hesitant to do even this as well – I also don’t want to enable nor do I want to propagate any thought that tourists should be a source of charity. It’s so very hard to know where humanitarianism ends and enabling begins. But I remembered something that a visiting ex-Prime Minister of India said at a lecture in Lexington KY a number of years back. One of the Indian-Americans in the audience asked him how the Indian population in the US can best help the less fortunate in India. His response was that our responsibility was first to the less fortunate in the US, our adopted country (or for those like me, our birth country). For real social change to happen in India, the people still in India must make the changes, not those from outside. After thinking about this a bit, the response makes perfect sense. As I turned back around, I resolved again to make sure that I increase my volunteerism and charity when I return to the States. This was one of the 19 resolutions I had written and shared with friends as the New Year arrived as well.

Danggit… I totally should have bought the guy a sandwich. At the end of the day, humanity should win out. Period.

On the way back to the hostel, I passed by a place called Kentucky Pizza & Bar – I had seen a few of these outlets around town, so apparently it’s at least a local chain. It seemed kind of odd to name a pizzeria after Kentucky, a state with almost no Italian heritage that I know about at least. Nor does the name Kentucky conjure up anything at all that would be associated with good pizza. Alcohol? Yup – we got the bourbon industry, so we can do that. Agriculture? Yup – we got Kentucky bluegrass and have a strong association with horses, of courses. Pizza? You lost me there, even though Papa John’s started in Kentucky. Argentinians wouldn’t know that. Heck, most Americans don’t know that. The slice of pizza wasn’t that spectacular here anyway.

For a late dinner that night, I headed to a restaurant near the hostel called Chan Chan that got great reviews. You would think with a name like that, it would be a Chinese eatery founded by Siamese twins or something, but like me you would think wrong. It was actually a Peruvian place and it was really popular. I ended up waiting outside for 30+ minutes to get a table. I would have gone elsewhere but there wasn’t really anything else open in the area. The hostel just isn’t in a great place for bars & clubs at night apparently. I didn’t actually think the food was all that spectacular either, though I met at least two others later in the week who were raving about it.

Wednesday, February 19^th, 2014

After running over to Avenida Florida briefly this morning to partake in the blue market to exchange some more USD into pesos, I walked over to the Recoleta Cemetary. Generally speaking, I find the very concept of a cemetery to be on the creepy side of things. And since I grew up in a Hindu household, our dead people are generally cremated. Not only that, most of my relatives were in India so I didn’t really get directly exposed to death all that much – even today, I’d still say that’s largely true. But for a cemetery to be a primary tourist attraction? You have to admit – that’s kinda creepy.

So the cemetery was more of a mausoleum, with all sorts of large and small structures erected to house or entomb any number of caskets. The mausoleums were largely built aside one another in an almost city-grid like fashion, with streets and avenues criss-crossing the cemetery complex. Some of the structures have been restored to former glory while others are crumbling and awaiting TLC while even others are relatively new and still getting new tenants.

Overall, the place was more or less a Who’s-Who of Argentinian history. Everyone who is anyone is buried there, making this an extremely important facility from a national perspective. The most famous, of course, is Eva Peron. I think I mentioned before that not everyone in the country loves Evita – most revere her (and her husband) for fighting for the poor and the laborers, and for advancing women’s rights. Others despise her and her husband Juan claiming that they were a wee bit on the fascist side of things. Regardless, even today, she remains very visible as a symbol of Argentinian pride. A large building in the middle of the Avenida 9 de Julio boulevard even has a masssive likeness of Evita on either side – on one side, she is speaking into a microphone, though it almost looks like she’s about to take a bite out of a huge cheeseburger.

That evening, I joined a group of 15 other hostel-dwellers to see an authentic futbol match between a local team called River Plate and a team from Mendoza called Godoy Cruz. I had never seen a futbol match live and this was definitely on my “to-do” list, so I was thrilled when the opportunity arose.

I wanted to go and buy an authentic jersey or something but apparently, River Plate is the “rich” team – think the New York Yankees of Argentinian futbol. I would have preferred getting a jersey from Boca Juniors, which is the team across town in one of the poorer neighborhoods. In retrospect, any authentic jersey is better than no jersey, so I should have sprung for it. Oh well.

We arrived about 90 minutes early to the match in a Wednesday evening, so we were some of the first in the building. And over the course of the next 90 minutes, the stadium slowly filled up. About 20 minutes prior to the start, massive cheers erupt and everyone on cue starts singing the team’s fight song – on the upper deck of one of the end zones, a swarm of fans emerges from a tunnel and completely fills up a huge section of the stands. Our guide, Flora, told me that this section is controlled by a very powerful group that runs the concessions and parking for the stadium – it’s a mafia of sorts, and they also are the leaders of the cheers. They’re like Fireman Ed of the New York Jets, except that they’re also a mafia.

Similar to American football, the rowdiest fans are in the endzones, which is where the group I was with was sitting. It wouldn’t have mattered though, because everyone in the stadium was loud, chanting and singing songs the entire match from start to finish. And when a call didn’t go their way, all of the fans were passionately objecting – not just vocally, but with their arm/hand gestures as well. They seemed very… Italian in a sense. Even while singing, the predominant hand motion was to pump your arms up at a 45 degree angle with an open, yet limp, hand – which is very different from the “woo, we’re #1” or the middle finger salute that we Americans tend to give at our football games.

Most interesting was the fact that there were zero beer sales at the game. None. In fact, as we walked in, they stripped us of anything not valuable that could be used as a projectile – pens, lighters, water bottles, etc. This was probably pretty smart given that people got very animated.

The game itself was fun to watch. The home team was clearly a better team, but it was tied 1-1 for the majority of the game. And while the fans complained loudly, the players weren’t the big cry-babies that we associate with the Southern European teams (Italians – you’re definitely on notice). They didn’t go down clutching their shins every 14 seconds, so it was completely watchable.

As the game neared the end, Flora asked our group, mostly younger Kiwis, if we wanted to leave now to beat the crowd or if we’d rather stay to the end and then hang back for most of the crowd to dissipate before walking out (so that we could stay together more easily). Surprisingly, our group decided to leave now. I definitely would not have expected this from Kiwis.

On the way out, there were lots of food vendors along the streets. At Flora’s recommendation, we stopped and had choripan, which is a chorizo sausage sliced in half, grilled, and placed on bread as a sandwich, which we then added generous amounts of chimichurri atop as a condiment. It was positively exquisite. So much so that another guy and I went back for more while we were waiting for the other groups in our bus.

It turned out that the opposing team, Godoy Cruz, scored a last-minute goal after we left and the crowd got extremely rowdy and started throwing stuff that they had snuck in onto the field and at the opposing players. Danggit. I wish I would have told everyone to sit their whiny asses down and let’s finish this thing. Stupid lame Kiwis.

When we got on the bus and started moving, we were driving by some city parks on the opposite side from where I was sitting. I noticed that the Kiwis were hanging out of the windows on that side, catcalling, and taking pictures, so I went over to see what was going on. Prostitution is legal in Argentina and apparently the city park is the locale of choice for finding one. Many of them were stripped down and showing all of their, ummm… assets. And then one particularly attractive lady had an unexpected frontal asset that she flopped out for us as we drove by. As we collectively groaned, our guide Martin confirmed that the majority of the ladies are in fact transvestites.

Thursday, February 20^th, 2014

Way back on Monday morning during the second walking tour with my friends, the tour guide Mariano told us that a guided tour of Teatro Colon was well worth it, and so this was the first thing I did this morning. This theatre was built in the early 1900s after 20 years of construction and is considered acoustically one of the top 5 opera houses in the world. In fact, Pavarotti is said to have remarked that he doesn’t like performing here because if he messes up slightly, everyone would hear it.

The building was magnificently beautiful and opulent with stunning marble architecture that would easily rival what you would expect to only see in Europe. I liked that they had a very cheap (about $5) standing-room only level so that even the poorer folks could get access to these performances. I suppose it looked extra special magnificent because the theatre had just undergone a massive 5-yr restoration that was completed only a few years ago. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a performance available that I could see to experience the acoustics. That probably wouldn’t matter much, since I don’t believe I’m enough of an audiophile enough to even be able to tell the difference. Boston’s Symphony Hall is one of the other top 5 venues acoustically and when I saw a performance there, I don’t think I could tell. On the contrary, I fell asleep kinda quickly – it was Handel’s Messiah.

After the building tour, I hopped on a bus to go to a Latin American art museum. I had saved up coins for this very trip because the buses don’t take paper money and don’t give change. All of the locals use a prepaid swipe card that they recharge periodically. But since the coin machine on this particular bus was broken, the driver just told me to sit down and not worry about it.

The museum was really nice and had more contemporary art than anything else, which I am a much bigger fan of myself. But it was really quite small unfortunately. Some contemporary art is quite boring and annoying – like that one piece I saw in New York that was a canvas just painted straight blue. That ticked me off. Of course, you could make the argument that the artist was successful since I am still talking about it 7 years later… but I don’t buy that argument.

But what I really like about contemporary art museums are the gift shops – this is something that my ex Julia opened my eyes to. And for whatever reason, I really have a thing for earrings in particular. Ummm… so… why hello there, ladies. If we were in a relationship, you could expect my natural tendency to be to shy away from most jewelry as a whole like necklaces and rings (absolutely no diamonds – not a commitment thing, but a blood diamond thing), but you’d see a fair number of earrings. I almost bought a few pairs to give to whoever is silly enough to date me in the future. Yes, it’s a quirk but I’m totally owning it, and no, I’m not getting my ears pierced any time soon. But in the meantime, my nieces will probably just get lots of earrings from me since they are getting old enough.

A few blocks away from the museum was a Japanese garden, so I paid the admission and walked around there a bit. There were too many people there for my liking, and it was really quite hot outside as well. So I went into the café and had part of a crappy dessert and some green tea before calling it quits and leaving. As I made my way back to the hostel, I walked for almost an hour through a part of town called Recoleta, which is apparently another region where all the yuppies in Buenos Aires live. Though devoid of really old and near architecture like the central part of the city, the area was very nice and peaceful, had plenty of trees and shade, as well as little shops and cafes. It was quite the pleasant walk.

The hostel was having a barbeque this evening on the 6^th floor patio – all you can eat for 100 pesos (about $10 USD). I got up there a few minutes late, but I found a seat and chatted with Nathan from South Africa and Tim and Erin from Germany. Tim unintentionally cracked me up because he kept referring to his girlfriend as “my girl”. I was thiiiiiis close to asking him “do you got sunshine on a cloudy day?” or “when it’s cold outside, do you have the month of May?” But I didn’t. I definitely didn’t know him well enough to tease him just yet nor do I think he would have had the slightest idea what I was talking about.

The barbeque was quite wonderful – and I had more than enough platefuls. My plate was about ¾ full of gristle and other discards by the time I was done, so I know I did well. Chicken, beef, sausage, corn, and salad – mmm, mmm, good. We were sweating a bit by the time we got done, both because our stomachs were undoubtedly working in overdrive due to the mass consumption, but also because our table was a bit closer to the grill than I think any of us would have liked. So, we hopped upstairs atop the roof to chill and hang out for a few hours… with 2 more 1L bottles of beer.

Joining Tim and I was a lady around my age from Spain and later, her beautiful dormmate from Italy. The Spanish woman and I were talking US politics and you might be surprised to know that I was generally defending George Bush and many of the Republican positions – sharing my belief that in many cases, our true positions are not that far apart. The problem is that extremists love to propagate a level of unnecessary hatred because it serves their interests better (votes or viewership) since everyone pays more attention when something is “outrageous”. Just look at the headlines on CNN – all of the adjectives and action verbs are extreme, like “blasted” and “chilling” and “nasty” and “massacred” and so forth. The 24 hour news media knows that their business model requires that there is a steady stream of out of the ordinary items to drive viewership and clicks.

Heck – it’s the same reason we have so many utterly foolish reality shows (which most often are not that “real”). For whatever reason, our brains are programmed to love scandals – but the real scandal is that we actually could probably get along if we were actually talked real to one another and made honest attempts to genuinely empathize and understand one another. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear as though this will happen any time soon.

But I hope I see the Italian girl again – she reminded me of Gabriela Sabatini, the most jawdropping women’s tennis player ever (who, coincidentally, is Argentinian). Then again, I might get a bit tongue-tied, and then I’d get nervous and start dripping with sweat, and then I’d be self-conscious because I was dripping with sweat and I’d start dripping more with sweat, and then I’d excuse myself to go to the bathroom and stick my bald head under the cold water tap to cool down (seriously, it works!), and just generally make an overall fool of myself. I think I need to date a blind woman. And while I’m at it, make it one with no sense of smell so that I can squeeze out some silent ones whenever the need arises.

Friday, February 21^st, 2014

Today, I took a day trip to Colonia in Uruguay, which is just across the river from Buenos Aires. Although, I guess it’s more than just a river since it’s a 90 minute ride by boat. The schedule was to leave BA by noon and return by 10pm, so this wouldn’t leave a ton of time in Colonia unfortunately. And the boat ended up getting delayed for a good hour for a reason never explained to us. I was asleep anyway – the excessive food and beer from last night necessitated that a bit.

When we got off the boat in Colonia, many of us had a walking tour included in the price of the ticket in both Spanish and English, for the 5 of us in the group of 40 that didn’t know Spanish. The tour guide was very friendly and walked us through the old town in Colonia, where many of the original buildings along with the city walls have been restored as best as possible to their original grandeur. She explained the history of Uruguay as well and gave me a somewhat quizzical answer that I no longer remember to my question of why Uruguay didn’t end up being part of Argentina or Brazil.

During the tour, one of the other English speakers and I struck up a conversation and I thought she looked familiar. As it turns out, she (let’s call her Leanne) was hiking Torres del Paine when we were the week before and was the same woman I found rather fetching on the last day of our hike to Grey Glacier, exactly one week ago. However, she didn’t seem to remember me and my bright orange backpack with my three other Indian friends at all. Oh well. I guess I need to work on being more memorable.

Once the tour was complete, we split up and I went to get some food. It was late afternoon by this point and I was starving since the hostel breakfast doesn’t hold me over much. Per the guide’s recommendation, I went to a restaurant and had a traditional Uruguayan sandwich called a chivito. I figured why the heck not and I had a beer with it. It was nothing to write home about, and it ended up being quite expensive, especially by Buenos Aires standards. I was not impressed.

I had a few hours to kill yet, so I wandered around the old town a bit more and climbed up a lighthouse to get some beautiful views of the surrounding ocean and of the town itself. There’s really not much to the rest of the town at all, especially for non-locals, and I could kinda tell from the view atop. Even so, I figured I had time to kill and went exploring for about 15 minutes before throwing in the towel. I walked back to the old town, picked a spot on the crumbled city walls near the ocean, and sat down to read waiting for the sun to set. The sunset was pretty, but nothing spectacular compared to other sunsets. Even so, I wouldn’t trade it – all sunsets are nice.

On the way back, Leanne and I got to talking a bit and I learned more about her. She’s from South Africa and used to work in the UK for a bank. Then she got a little disillusioned with that and went to work for World Bank in Washington DC. She just quit that job because she was frustrated with all of the bureaucracy and is travelling for a bit before she’ll return to Cape Town and work on a start-up that is trying to expand the realm of personal finance in developing countries using cell phones. Just an absolutely fascinating person all around. I often wish I had the balls to make changes like that.

When we got to the port, we shared a cab back to the central city near Leanne’s hostel. My hostel was a short 15 minute walk away, and I love walking around Buenos Aires at night – the temperature is perfect, the air is perfect, and the lights and people-watching are a perfect accompaniment to a leisurely stroll.

Saturday, February 22^nd, 2014

I hung around the hostel this morning for an inordinately long time and started talking with a young couple, Clint and Leah, from Sacramento. They were just finishing up 2 months of traveling and were returning home tomorrow. Clint seemed to be thinking what I was thinking and commented, “if you’re still in the hostel at noon, it’s probably a pretty good sign that you’ve hit travel fatigue.” So with that, I got up and headed over to Café Tortoni – the oldest café in Buenos Aires. I was told by our informative walking tour guide Mariano a week before that it’s worth going in just to have a coffee and take a look, and yesterday, Leanne confirmed the same as well. So I hopped in and had a coffee and tres medialunas (three sweet croissants). This after having coffee and two sweet croissants for lunch. My eating plan was clearly a low-carb low-fat plan today, which I might add, was being executed flawlessly.

After lingering for almost two hours, it was getting clear that it was time to leave because there was a small line forming at the door to get in. So, I headed over the Pink House (Casa Rosada), which was Argentina’s version of the White House, even though the President doesn’t actually live there. It was open for tours on weekends and as luck would have it, today was part of a weekend. And as luck would also have it, they had a tour in English starting a few minutes after I got there.

The tour was interesting on a few fronts. There was a lot of contemporary art in the place and the décor itself was a mix between contemporary and Victorian. Some rooms seemed like a normal building while others had a grandeur and statelyism about them. And in other spots, the paint was peeling, hardware was falling off, and some basic maintenance could probably afford to be done.

After the tour, I realized I hadn’t really had a meal at all yet, so I found a little place on the way back to the hostel and ordered a chicken dinner that I thought would be small enough to hold me over a few hours until dinner. Unfortunately, it was quite humongous, and it wasn’t really that good – breaded chicken with a slice of ham atop it and covered with melted mozzarella. With a side of fries and bland all around.

That evening, Leanne and I met up to go to Palermo Soho to grab a bite to eat and hopefully scope out a place to listen to some live music. On the boat yesterday, I had mentioned to her that I have this recurring image in my head of sitting in a hole-in-the-wall type of place listening to some live soulful music over a bottle of wine. Apparently, she thought that sounded great too and was hopeful we could find such a place.

So we hopped onto the subway and got to Palermo and walked up to an Armenian restaurant about 10 blocks away that some people from my hostel were planning on going to later in the evening. But when we got there, there were about 30-40 people waiting outside and it was clear that it would be a very long wait. We wandered a bit and eventually settled on a little Spanish-style place. I was still pretty full from my late afternoon unfortunate feast, so I had some hummus and pita. I’d been craving Middle Eastern food for a while now, but unfortunately this hummus wasn’t very good.

Leanne had been wanting to learn & watch tango, and so we decided to do that instead of search for a place with jazz or live music. The venue appeared to be a ballroom in a rec center of sorts and when we got there, there were a handful of couples dancing quite nicely in the middle of the room and lots of other people scattered around the periphery and I almost felt like we were intruding on a private function in a sense. My instinct was to bolt, but Leanne appeared to want to try it out and my new mantra “say yes more than no” reminded me that it was time to jump in with both feet.

So we’re standing around trying to figure out what to do next and how we would possibly learn anything watching advanced couples dance, since their moves are very well coordinated and seemingly random to us. All of a sudden, an announcer-type guy grabbed a microphone and had us all in the dance floor together before having us self-split up into beginner, intermediate, and advanced groups – so I guess there would be lessons and practice after all. This was good.

We naturally got in the beginner group but after about 10 minutes of watching and trying to grasp whatever we could from the 110mph Spanish being muttered, we realized that beginner here meant “I’ve never danced before in my life and have no concept of movement,” which I would have thought would be unbelievably odd for Argentines. Leanne was a bit bolder than I, and pulled me over to the intermediate group and we tried our best to catch up quickly. The basic moves were slightly different than what I had learned earlier in the week with my friends at the tango show, but we were able to get on track with some help from a friendly neighboring couple that spoke a little bit of English.

After about 45 more minutes of instruction, we had gleaned enough from watching the instructors’ movements and their hand gestures to get the basic steps down plus an additional variation or two. And then after every few songs, we were told to switch partners and I ended up with an older lady that I had a hard time dancing with – she was patient and let me lead, but wasn’t following what I was intending to lead. That’s probably more my fault than hers though. But finally, beginner’s hour ended and Leanne and I grabbed a seat at a table we were probably not supposed to sit at (there was a “reserved” sign that we conveniently moved to another table). We had another hour of watching people dance and getting up and joining them from time to time before we called it a night and grabbed a cab back to the hostels.

Tango is a bit fascinating. It’s an extremely passionate dance, yet people seemingly have no problem dancing cheek-to-cheek and chest-to-chest with complete strangers. True, much more groping occurs in dance clubs around the world, but I generally think of that as being youthful exuberance greased a bit by alcohol. Most people here were not that young, and while they were serving alcohol, this was cursory and not really “greasing” the dancing by any means. I guess it feels like a strange violation of personal space when booze and/or nookie are not involved. But ahhh, you know… the Argentinians are also quite the passionate people.

Sunday, February 23^rd, 2014

Almost every person in BA will tell you that the street market in San Telmo is not to be missed on Sundays. Seeing that today is a Sunday and that not going today would mean that it would be missed, I put 2 and 2 together and figured I should head over that way.

The San Telmo neighborhood is a bit on the gritty side – not nearly as renovated and refurbished as some of the yuppier neighborhoods, but I liked it this way. It seemed more authentic in a sense, as though real Argentinians actually lived here, whatever that means. There seemed to be a small amount of graffiti culture on several streets as well. As I wandered through, I could see the street market straight ahead, on Avenida La Defensa. Along the outskirts of the market were numerous shops that were interesting on their own – from leather goods to random antiques to clothing to even more random antiques. This seemed like a neighborhood you could just wander around for hours.

The street fair itself was… well, tiring. I’m not generally the biggest fan of street fairs because they get so crowded, and this one was no different. On top of that, the street was a neat cobblestone, but the bricks were in the midst of upheaval and I found myself constantly tripping. And it didn’t help that it was crazy hot outside as well.

After walking all the way up La Defensa, I noticed a small museum a few buildings down on a major street, which ended up being the actual museum of contemporary art. I paid admission and looked around, but basically all of the displayed arts were only of geometrical patterns. It didn’t take long before I was bored out of my mind, but at least admission was only about $1 USD. I also made sure to walk a few blocks north to go see the Russian Orthodox church. Sharon asked me to take a picture of it for her before I left Buenos Aires.

I figured I ought to make one more pass through the market since I hadn’t bought anything yet. I didn’t have a ton I wanted to buy, but since I hadn’t bought any gifts at all the entire trip, I knew I should get a few things for my nieces and nephew since I had missed Christmas and a birthday or two. I also wanted to find a hat for me, because I had already decided that I’m going to start a hat collection because I think they look good with my new beard. A number of stalls had hats for sale, but it was really hard to figure out if any of them were good quality or what the right price should actually be. I really hate haggling. Finally, I just picked one and paid about $5 for it.

For dinner, I wanted to get one last nice juicy steak before I left Argentina. I wandered around a bit looking for a place, and then just asked some policemen where to go after explaining that this was my last night in town. They told me that I needed to go to La Estancia, which I had heard of before as well – if memory serves, Renuka’s friend had recommended it to her too. I only had about 300 pesos on me, so I told the waiter this limitation and we decided together it would be best to get the best cut of meat and a bottle of water. Out came a massive hunk of meat on a mini-grill, though there was plenty of fat and gristle on it as well. Basically, the plan was to slice up the massive hunk into 3-4 smaller hunks and let the mini-grill finish cooking them to a medium rare before eating them from my plate. The steak was so good I honestly probably could have eaten another one.

Leanne and I met up briefly for a quick drink to toast my last night of my trip and her last night in Buenos Aires before she leaves for Iguacu Falls by bus tomorrow. The only problem was that we couldn’t actually find a bar, as strange as that seems. Finally, we found a small restaurant that was still serving drinks. So we sat down at a sidewalk table and shared a ½ bottle of red wine, right on the main thoroughfare of Avenida 9 de Julio, just across from the towering Washington Monument (or Obelisk as they like to call it). I think I would have liked to stay out longer, but the restaurant was closing and they were kind of shooing us away. But I sat there and thought to myself, I’ve had one hell of an experience these past 19 weeks and I envied Leanne for just having started her own.

Monday, February 24^th, 2014

I woke up this morning with bites all over me, itching like crazy… although not entirely unexpectedly. Yesterday, Clint informed the front desk that his bunk, which was in the same room as mine, had bedbugs. He was telling me that I should switch hostels, but since I was going home in another day and the critters were likely already in my luggage, I figured it would be better for me to just stay put. I had a few bites from the day before, but not this many. So I went and slept in the lounge for a few hours. The reception manager apologized profusely and told me he was going to clear the room today and fumigate it. With so many travelers crossing in and out of multiple places, it’s no doubt that bedbugs get transmitted quite quickly. Looking back, there were at least three other instances where I woke up with lots of bites on me… I had thought these were mosquitoes that got me though a few times, I did actually see mosquitoes in the room. But I started to wonder if I was that jackass traveler who was carrying the bedbugs with me.

I’ve started to get a bit under the weather as well. Sharon told me that she was getting a bout of bronchitis as she left BA last Monday. My throat is quite itchy, so perhaps I’m coming down with the same.

So the only thing to do today is pack up and leave really. I was thinking about buying some wine to bring home, but I don’t want to mess with having to pack it securely in my big backpack to make sure that it doesn’t break. So I figured I’d buy a few bottles duty-free at the airport with whatever leftover pesos I have and look for the recommended names that my friends gave me.

But I did still want to buy some quality hats – upon further examination, the one I bought at the market yesterday was “Made in China” and that made me grumble a bit, though it’s my own fault for buying on the cheap. After checking on the internet, I found a few reputable hat stores back in San Telmo, so I returned there and ended up picking out two – a warmer winter black hat made in Argentina and a summery Panama hat made in Ecuador. That made me feel much much better. Then it was back to the hostel to wait my time out before the taxi swung by to pick me up.

The taxi ride to the airport was largely uneventful, as was the stay in the airport itself. I had about 180 pesos to “kill”, so after getting a reasonably decent sandwich and a beer at a restaurant, I was left with 50 pesos that I promptly used to purchase two bags of overpriced peanut M&Ms. But since you can’t really exchange Argentinian pesos back to USD, I didn’t really have much of a choice. Even if I could change the pesos back, with the fees that the money launderers exchanges charge, I would actually owe them money for the opportunity of sacrificing my pesos, which would net me with a sum total of ZERO M&Ms.

I didn’t end up buying any wine, per the original plan. As it turns out, the airport prices looked the same as the prices back home in the US, and so this was a complete missed opportunity. Even so, I don’t know my wines very well, and a $10 bottle is usually plenty fine for me. So all I really missed was the opportunity to enjoy a $60 bottle of wine for $5, while still getting the enjoyment level I would have gotten from a $10 bottle. But that’s because I’m not a wine snob… errr… aficionado. Some of you may have not heard my theory on wines, so allow me to expand. As I mentioned, I’m just as happy when I drink $10 wine as when I drink $50 wine. As a result, I’m not sure I understand the benefit of learning a lot more about wines when the end result is that I’ll more often need a $50 bottle of wine to achieve what really nets out to be the same level of happiness as today, while also creating plenty of opportunity to be unhappy with wines that no longer meet my new standard, most likely including those very same happy wines from today. Net: I only see a downside.

The plane was beautifully new and modern, with a gorgeous TV screen that even had a USB port. I’m not sure why it had a USB port, but maybe so that people could bring their own porn to watch since that wasn’t a selection available from drop down menu. Note to self...

Tuesday, February 25^th, 2014

I had a rough time on the planes – over the last 24 hours, I had become more and more congested and being congested on a plane doesn’t work so well since it prevents you from equalizing your ears. So I kept on trying to pop my ears and it sucked, though chewing gum did help a little. But all in all, it was a relatively short ride on the planes – leave at 10pm and arrive in Cincinnati at 9am the next morning with only a 2 hour time change. That's not so bad really. And customs & immigration didn’t hassle me too much – the dude was a bit suspicious that I had been traveling for that long and only had about $100 to declare. I told him that since I was traveling for so long, I didn’t really have space to carry anything else… which was really the truth. In the end, I suppose I was just happy that he let me pass without a full body cavity search.

Since I came from a hostel with bedbugs, to be extra safe, Mary brought me a change of clothes when she came to the airport to pick me up. I changed in the airport and left all my clothes & bags outside in the garage. The conventional method to kill bedbugs is to wash in VERY hot water and then dry on high, but since all of my clothes are synthetic, that won’t work very well without melting all of the clothes to oblivion. But then I found out that the suckers die below freezing too. It just so happened that I had bought and placed a chest freezer in my garage to store the homemade dog food (long story) that I had to make for the pups while I was away. By this time, of course, the freezer was almost empty my backpacks fit right in there quite nicely. On top of that, the weather is supposed to be below freezing the next three days, so the suckers should be freeze-dried by Friday in or out of the freezer. I guess that’s one of the few positives from this polar vortex crap that everyone’s been dealing with while I’ve been cavorting down south.

So that’s that. I hope you enjoyed reading about my latest adventures. If I get around to it in the next few weeks, perhaps I’ll summarize the trip a bit – good choices / bad choices, what I packed vs what I should have packed, books I read, friends I made, and any overall impressions that stuck with me. If I get around to it...

In any case, it’s good to be back home. I’ve been looking forward to a hug from my mom for quite some time.

Yes, this picture is from Antarctica, but it was too funny to not post.

 Tidbits

1.       There are lots of dog walkers in Buenos Aires. All of the dogs are very friendly and seem to behave quite well, and I finally saw someone pick up after their pet for the first time since I’ve been in South America.

2.       Red lights turn yellow briefly just before they turn green, so the “caution” element of traffic signals are in both directions.

3.       I found Argentinians to be generally very friendly, but they don’t care to give you space on the sidewalk – the manners don’t exist while driving or while walking. Or perhaps their definition of manners is different than ours.

4.       It seems that Argentina is still a bit hung up on the Falklands / Malvinas debate. Mariano told us that Argentines don’t hold any ill-will towards the British for the war, given that their military dictatorship started the war seemingly randomly. But there were memorials and signs and declarations and all sorts of stuff all over the place about these islands.

5.       The women here really are just ridiculously beautiful… I mean, just wow. All of them. I think it’s because there’s not a lot of northern European blood here or something. Think about it – what countries would you associate more with beauty? Spain, Portugal, and Italy; or England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany. You don’t need to answer out loud, because I think we have an understanding. By the way, I’m sure you could probably say the same about the men, but I wasn’t really looking at the men so much. Probably because the women were really just… wow.

6.       Sharon had been wearing a pair of bright red Toms around Buenos Aires. This is only noteworthy because she was wearing bright purple hiking boots last week and she’s not a flashy dresser at all. Apparently, she bought her purple boots so that if she were to fall head first into a snow bank or a ravine, we would be able to identify her from the bright purple footwear. And the red Toms? Well, she just wanted to make my blog. Well played, Sharon. Well played.

South America Explorations: Week 18 - Perito Moreno & Torres del Paine

Saturday, February 8^th, 2014
After I unloaded my bags at the hostel in El Calafate, Argentina, I went out in town in search of a proper haircut. It had been around a month or more since my last trimming and the excess was definitely bugging me. Though my bag is seemingly enormous, I definitely regret not bringing my electric clippers. At the very least, I could have brought the Gillette beard trimmer thing that runs on batteries and used it on my hair as well. The other thing I regret not bringing, as I think I’ve mentioned before, is a GoPro video camera. I had actually bought one and picked out the different accessories I might need for my trip, but nixed it (and returned the camera) in the final round of luggage trimmings.

In the evening, I picked up a rental car – a smallish Volkswagon Gol. It’s sold as a Golf virtually everywhere else, but in futbol-obsessed South America, dropping the “f” and naming it “Gol” is a pretty solid marketing move. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure they forgot to put more than 2-cylinders in the car because it didn’t really like to accelerate very much. I strongly contemplated punching my feet through the floorboards to add some Fred Flintstone power.

I was very happy to be driving again though, and in this part of the country, there’s almost no busy traffic so there shouldn’t be much danger from not understanding local driving customs and the like. But what most got me was the rental guy’s instructions on what to do to avoid accidents – I couldn’t understand his Spanish well, but I got enough from the few words I caught and his gestures to figure out that he was telling me that if a small animal runs out into the road, don’t swerve to try and miss it since I’ll likely lose control of the car. Instead, just run it over. I thought about it and decided that I would just try and be extra alert for small animals.

That evening, I went to the airport about 25km away to pick up my friends that were joining me from the US for the next week or so. Early in my trip, I had sent a message on Facebook that if anyone wanted to join me for a portion of the trip, to let me know and we might be able to make something happen. Well, these three friends did exactly that, and none of them knew each other either. First is Sharon, who I worked with at P&G for 2 years or so at a perfume plant in New Jersey about 7 years ago. Second was Renuka, a DC-based physician and older sister of my friend Aruna who I’ve known for the past 10-12 years, and finally Kishore, an IT-guy in Cincinnati that I’ve known for the past 10-12 years as well.

Apparently, the airline had to cancel a flight from Buenos Aires to El Calafate from the day before and they bumped Kishore from this particular plane for some reason. We’re not exactly sure how that happened, especially since he was there the recommended 2 hours in advance of the flight. So the airline was putting him up in a hotel in BA for the evening and sending him the next morning. Renuka and Sharon made the flight though, and I picked them up at 9pm.

When we got into town, we walked around a little bit looking for somewhere to grab a bite and settled on a parilla (meat-grilling restaurant) that seemed to be full of locals and only had a buffet. But it wasn’t too expensive so we went for it. It was only so-so, unfortunately.

Sunday, February 9^th, 2014

Kishore wasn’t due in to the airport until around noon, so we putzed around a bit this morning. Because we knew we’d be pressed for time after picking him up, we swung by the grocery store to grab ingredients to make the bestest sandwiches ever known to man. Then we sat down in a coffee shop downtown – this coffee shop was kinda neat. It was a combination library & coffee shop. Except that they sold the books too. So I guess it’s more like a bookstore that serves coffee. Which I guess all of them do nowadays. Okay, never mind.

When we got on the highway, we were stopped at the police checkpoint and asked a series of questions in rapidfire Spanish. My solution to these potentially tense situations was surprisingly effective – I decided to pretend my Spanish is worse than it actually is and tell them “Lo siento mucho. Mi espanol no es bueno.” in a really crappy accent. And then they just wave you on. Or they reach into the car and turn your headlights on for you as this particular police dude did. I guess daytime lights are the law or something.

After fetching Kishore from the airport, we sped back the other way for a few hours to get to the Perito Moreno glacier. This is the only glacier in the world (or something like that) where the glacier is actually advancing year over year vs retracting. Beyond that, it was supposed to be spectacular, and about the only reason to ever come to El Calafate to begin with.

At the national park, we parked the car and walked to a corner of the lot where a small trail quickly turned into a boardwalk. We didn’t really know what to expect, so we just followed this boardwalk for about 5 minutes and as we rounded a corner, the largest most spectacular glacier you could possibly ever expect to see majestically appeared. It was surreal – particularly because you generally associate glaciers with very cold weather that would coincide with the coldness of the glacier that is made of ice. But it wasn’t that cold, just a bit windy. Of course, that’s why the glacier is melting at the edge but I guess I’d just expect that to happen somewhere that it was a bit colder, especially for the size of this thing. Additionally, the trees that we were walking through were standard issue trees – it looked like the park near my house, not the evergreen trees you’d expect in the more extreme climates. Ultimately, I guess this all happens because the weather changes so drastically and quickly from the peaks of the mountains to the valleys very nearby. Or at least that’s my theory at the moment.

The boardwalk went on seemingly forever and ever, with us in disbelief that the next corner/viewing platform could possibly be better than the previous. We seemed ridiculously close to this 250ft tall glacier. Every few minutes, we heard creaking sounds or splashing sounds and would whip our heads around hoping to catch something falling. Usually, the creak/splash was inside the glacier somewhere, or at least completely out of sight, but every once in a while we witnessed what seemed to be a tiny ice cube splinter off the side of the glacier and make an enormous sound.

We walked a few kilometers around the boardwalk trying to get in all of the possible views before deciding to sit down in a wind-protected area and make our lunch. We had brought bread, prosciutto, cheese, and avocados and had us some solidly spectacular sammiches. I seriously think I could eat that every day for a week and not get tired of it. Maybe longer.

As we finished up lunch, the weather seemed to start turning a bit more sour. What had been a cloudless sky was now full of grey and white, and the wind was whipping around a fair amount too. So we started heading back to the parking lot. Along the way, we heard a large crashing sound, accompanied by the small piece of ice in front of us that had calved off. And then, a huge shelf of ice in the same spot fractured off for us… and with that, our visit was complete. We hustled back to the car and drove back to El Calafate.

We were a bit short on cash, and the single ATM in town that was functioning for us foreigners again was completely devoid of bills. So we had to do some creative financing to figure out what we could pay for using credit card and what we would use the little cash we had on hand for.

I’ve mentioned before about the blue dollar rate – the “actual” exchange rate you can get for US cash money vs from the ATMs and banks. It’s about a 40-50% increase in value. But because it’s so big, we continually found ourselves trying to figure out how/when we could get cash and spend blue dollars only. What should have been an enabler was actually making life more difficult in practice.

We decided to splurge on a nice meal that night – we walked into a ritzy little place and were easily the most underdressed group in the place. On top of that, we were also the only ones of any color – you’ll recall that the Argentinian folk are more or less all white with very little noticeable native blood. But fortunately, we were served anyway. I wouldn’t have served us. Riffraff.

The meal was excellent. Sharon and I shared a mixed grill for two and out came a plate of lots of different cuts of meat excellently cooked. The beef was exquisite, as was the chorizo and chicken. But we stopped there. There was also a piece of blood sausage that neither of us dared touch, as well as some random pieces that appeared to be intestines or veins or some creepy entrail of some sort. It gives me the heebie-jeebies even thinking about it.

When I told my friends a few months ago that I had booked a hostel for our stays, both Renuka and Sharon were a bit worried because the hostels they stayed in years ago were basically large rooms with scores of dorm beds side by side. We had two sets of bunks in a private room, albeit with a shared bath in the hallway. On top of that, the hostel had character and was cute and homey. But all three of them seemed pretty happy with the accommodations. In retrospect, for the same money we probably could have booked a proper room in a hotel, but we definitely wouldn’t have had the interactions with other travelers that we had over breakfast or in the evening. Those interactions are part of what makes traveling a special experience, for me at least. Fortunately, my friends agreed and gave me our hostel a seal of approval.

Monday, February 10^th, 2014

We hopped on a bus this morning to Puerto Natales in Chile. It is more or less impossible to go to Torres del Paine national park, which is in Chile, directly from El Calafate, in Argentina. So everyone is pretty much forced to spend at minimum a day on either end of their visit in Puerto Natales. This is a shame because Puerto Natales is a bit of a dumpy little town. While I wasn’t a fan of El Calafate because it was a bit too commercial, Puerto Natales was the opposite – it looked like they weren’t even trying to make an effort to look decent for all the visiting tourists.

The ride in was largely uneventful, except that the customs & immigrations for the two countries weren’t really coordinated and we had to make two stops. I’m not entirely sure why they wouldn’t simplify for everyone involved and combine into one building like they’ve done at multiple other crossings.

When we arrived at Puerto Natales, the weather wasn’t nearly as nice as it had been in El Calafate. Fortunately though, it wasn’t raining so we took the long way to our hostel and walked there through the back streets of the town. I’m fairly certain my friends were wondering why we were in the middle of nowhere walking on these creepy streets with randomly unfinished sidewalks and intersections, interspersed with seedy looking nightclubs and a shipping container that had been turned into a home, with a strange front sunroom addition.

When we got to the new hostel, Yaganhouse, my friends quickly gave me the seal of approval on this place too. It was very comfortable and homey. We had a private 4-bed room though with shared bathrooms again. But it had a lot of character, as did the hostel mascot, an unbelievably adorable string-mop lookalike dog named Mimi. She took a liking to me quickly and we were quickly engaged in a wrestling match as I tried to hog-tie her feet together and she nipped at my hands to try to get me to let go. I’m looking forward to doing the same roughhousing with my own dogs pretty soon.

We hadn’t eaten much all day, and it was late afternoon at this point so we headed to the square to grab a pizza at a restaurant I had eaten at last time I was in town called Mesita Grande, named as such because they have very large communal tables. It’s not a very original name, but it’s even better pizza.

On our way there, we stopped by the bus company to buy our return tickets to El Calafate for the coing Saturday. When we first went in, they said they only had 2 seats left. This would put us in a bit of a quandary since the later bus with a different agency would be cutting it too close for our connecting flight. So we made a plan to split up and Kishore and Renuka went back to claim those 2 seats. Then, when they were getting the seats, Renuka noticed that there were 4 slots available on the passenger log and pointed that out to the snarky little witch who was behind the counter. She agreed there were enough seats but refused to hold them for us until we had all of our documents there for her to look at and all of the money paid up. So Kishore sat in the office while we ran back to the hostel to get everything. That little girl – she acted like a power-tripping 15 year old and I was really angry with her. She had been very snarky with me a month ago too when I was asking about departure dates and times, but unfortunately theirs was the only bus leaving at 7am.

A couple of the guys at the hostel helped us figure out what we needed to pack for the upcoming 4 day/3 night hike. But once we told them that we were staying at the refugios, they more or less dismissed us. But yeah – the Torres del Paine national park is probably the best known portion of Patagonia owing to the staggering rock towers (or “torres”) and stunning panoramas. The classic backpacker-style way to do this is to carry your own gear and food for either the smaller 4-5 day W circuit (because the trail in total looks like a “W” shape) or the 8-9 day full hike which loops around the less traveled back side of the mountain range completing a full circuit. The refugios are essentially small hostels scattered across the W circuit that basically cover your room and board for the astronomical fee of around $100-120 per day per person. Almost every person I had met on my trip to date had carried their own food and gear, so we were definitely doing the pansy method. Given that Kishore, Renuka, and Sharon had not been exercising as much as me (since I’m traipsing around and they are in the office) and at least two of them had never carried their own packs before, the pansy method really just made sense for us as a group. And I suppose it gave me a good excuse to pansy-out as well.

Kishore had also brought me a bag of goodies from my house that I was eagerly anticipating, most importantly, a small backpack. The daypack I was using came with my large 90L mega-backpack and was really quite crappy for anything extended. On top of that, it was falling apart and I had already had to sew it up a few times. And it was definitely far from being waterproof. The one he brought to me was a backpack that I had just gotten from Kickstarter (if you haven’t used this website, it’s awesome). And the pack ended up being pretty incredible too – Sharon’s already decided that she’s going to order one. It’s called the Bootlegger and it’s sold by Boreas Gear (http://boreasgear.com/product-cat/bootlegger/). The reason for its awesomeness is that it somehow manages to feel incredibly light – I think they designed the pack such that the weight uses your shoulders as a pivot point to cantilever the weight to just above your butt, versus pulling down on your shoulders or hips. And it’s just quite incredible.

Given the rapidly changing weather in the region as well as how crappy the weather had been when I was here a month ago, we packed for the cold and wet – rain pants, gaiters, rain jacket, spare change of clothes, gloves, scarf/neck warmer, fleece, a few changes of clothes, toiletries, and a few snacks.

For dinner tonight, we wandered a bit to try and find something decent. Ultimately, we ended up picking a place called El Loving (or something weird like that) which was a vegan café. Kishore was overjoyed since he’s a vegetarian (and a good Hindu). Actually, the rest of us didn’t seem to mind it either since the food was pretty good and didn’t taste like cardboard.

Tuesday, February 11^th, 2014

The bus to the park left this morning at 7:30am, so we were up early to do a final prep, put our big bags into storage, and walk 20 minutes back to the bus station. The bus came before too long and we made sure to hop onto the first bus that came since we had a long day ahead of us.

It took about 3 hours to drive up to the park. It was a bit cloudy this morning and the windows were pretty fogged up, but we could clearly see the park in the distance. Somehow, most of the land approaching the park is flat and ranchland, so you can see the mountains in the distance. At the park entrance itself, which was still a good 15 minutes from the mountains, we could even see the famous towers themselves, though it was a bit obscured by some clouds and the nearby mountains.

At the entrance, we pay a fee and watch a video and then load up in a park bus to go to Torres Central, the refugio that we will be staying at. We finally get there around 11am and check in. The weather was absolutely gorgeous by this point – beautifully sunny, though quite windy.

After about an hour, we leave a lot of our stuff at the refugio and combine everything else into two packs, including a boxed lunch that appears to have been put together rather hastily. The front desk told us to go to the dining room to get the box lunch, who then pointed us back to the front desk, who then… it took about 5 exchanges for them to realize that this wasn’t a error in translation. So they put sandwiches together with whatever was left in the kitchen. As the designated pack horse, I had eight bags of trail mix, eight oranges, four bottles of water, and four sandwiches in my pack.

 

Finally, we were off, though we weren’t quite sure where the trailhead actually was. So we headed in the general direction of where we thought the trail might start and eventually got there, after passing a campsite and another large building that appeared to be a 4-star hotel.

The beginning of the trail was a slow steady climb up a hill. Even though we were getting quite a late start, there were still a ton of other hikers on the trail with us – some with full backpacks, others with daypacks, and others with nothing. There were a handful of young kids traveling with their parents as well.

 

It didn’t take long before I was quite a bit ahead of the rest, undoubtedly owing to the much higher amounts of hiking practice I had over the previous weeks and months. I stopped about halfway up the mountain to wait for the rest, and then started back up again towards the pass. Upon reaching the pass, the trail was downhill from there, but we were fighting ungodly amounts of wind – it was almost harder to walk downhill against the wind instead of the uphill climb we had just completed. But the scenery went from kinda boring to a stunning river valley with the smaller Refugio Chileno out ahead of us. We had initially tried to get rooms at Chileno for this evening, but they were sold out.

 

We stopped at the refugio to catch our breath after a little more than 2 hours of hiking and to eat our lunches a little late. The lunches were not much to write home about – in fact, in retrospect, we definitely should have bought groceries in Puerto Natales and packed our own, saving a fairly large bundle in the process.

The next hour of hiking was mostly flat but with some short uphill spots through a wooded area – we were headed up the valley for an hour to a spot where we would take a rather abrupt left turn to go straight up the side of the hill. Up to this transition point, we were mostly together as a group. But the uphill was a bit strenuous, especially the second half which was more bouldering than hiking.

I reached the top by 4pm, and as I rounded the last bend, a large lake appeared in front of me, surrounded in the back with the three massive iconic Torres: Norte, Central, and Sur. Unfortunately, the towers also had a backdrop of clouds accompanied with an intermittent spray of light rain flying in with the very strong wind. I found a nice little spot to nestle in and soak up the view. Fifteen minutes later, Kishore joined, followed by Renuka and Sharon within the following 15 minutes.

We sat and stared and took pictures for the next half hour, all the while hoping that the cloudiness would clear up to give us a crystal clear view. While we got a few small patches of blue, it wasn’t a whole lot unfortunately.

Before long, we needed to head back. It was 5pm and we needed to walk all the way back to where we started. The hike in took roughly 4 hours, so we were looking at a pretty late dinner. While we knew that dinner starts at 7:30, we weren’t sure when it ended. Additionally, Kishore had a passport issue that he had to clear up with the refugio, so we needed to get back sooner than later. Kishore and I more or less ran down the hill back to Refugio Chileno and then continued at a pretty brisk pace back to the Torres Central refugio where we started. I didn’t stop the entire way and ended up getting back around 7:15, and Kishore was only about 20 minutes behind me. I was a bit worried about Sharon and Renuka though, especially because getting down the boulders was very time-consuming for them.

I learned that dinner service was supposed to end at 9pm. The menu on the blackboard read “Asado”, so I was pretty excited that we were having a nice steak.  The hunks of meat on the other plates were pretty massive too. At about 8:30, Kishore and I decided to not wait any further and just get our food. My steak came out… except that it was a thick slice of meatloaf. And for some reason, they thought it would be interesting to stick a hot dog through the meatloaf in the middle… so I had a section of an Oscar Meyer wiener. It wasn’t very good, of course.

As the clock neared 9pm, I let the desk know that Renuka & Sharon hadn’t made it yet, and they worked with the kitchen to hold a few dinners aside for them. I had told myself that at 9:15pm, I was going to down the beer I was having and just go back out and start looking for them – from the end of the trail to the towers weren’t very well marked, so I was worried they took a wrong turn somewhere. But they showed up 5 minutes before my “deadline”, in pretty good spirits. It turns out that they stopped at Chileno on the way and had a snack and a long break. And they walked back together all the way, which was more time consuming because Renuka’s was a slow hiker on entirely different types of terrain than Sharon. So they effectively slowed one another down. But no matter – they were happy. And now that we’ve seen the glacier and the towers, Sharon had essentially deemed the entire trip a success already, even though we still had the better part of a week to go yet.

Wednesday, February 12^th, 2014

The walk today was much shorter. While yesterday’s hike showed about 9 hours total hike time, today’s was closer to 6 hrs and we had the entire day to do it in. So we took our time in the morning, which was nice because we had such a late hike yesterday and I think all of us could’ve used a foot massage. Already. Or at least I definitely could have.

We left at about 10am, primarily because check-out time was 9:30am and we couldn’t really linger and longer. So we put our full daypacks on, mine included the lunches again plus leftover fruits & trail mixes from the day before, and headed west along a relatively flat stretch of land. Our scenery for the first part of this trail was a massive mountainside to our right that was impressive, but not necessarily awe-inspiring.

For the first hour, we were together as a group. I made sure to not be in the lead, since I was the fastest hiker by far and this seemed to work well. Sharon tended to lag behind a bit, so we stopped after an hour to rest, regroup, and have a piece of chocolate from today’s boxed lunch. We also stared a bit at the sky, which was mostly blue but had the occasional strangely shaped cloud. The clouds were very thin in spots, almost like a dusting or a gentle Bob Ross brush stroke, and then heavy in other spots nearby.

When we started up again, we were faced with some extremely strong winds (>70 mph) and I found myself at the front. With this wind, the best way to hike was with your head down while trudging forward. So I did that for the next hour until I came to a nice stopping point – it was just after a somewhat strenuous climb up a hill that reached a cable bridge over a small rock stream. There was a short climb after the cable bridge and I chose to perch there to wait for my friends because it offered a great view.

I waited for 30 minutes and didn’t see a sign of anyone coming, so I guessed that they must have stopped earlier for a break. The wind had died down and I was almost baking in the sun, so I decided to get back on the trail. The mountain to the right had changed a bit – it was a different mountain with two really dark peaks atop larger white masses of rock that then changed back to dark rock below. It was quite magnificent to look at.

After hiking a bit more than an hour, I stopped again to wait for my friends. It was nearing 2pm and I thought I’d stop for lunch and I was certain that they were hungry as well. I found a cozy little spot where a few other hikers had chosen to relax for extended rests as well. After eating my sandwich, I contemplated getting back up and moving, but I stuck around figuring that it’s now or never to get them their lunches.

After waiting a little more than an hour, I started asking other hikers if they had seen 3 brown people. Finally, one of them said yes – that they were filling up water perhaps 10 minutes behind so I walked the trail back and found Renuka shortly thereafter. We returned to the spot I had stopped at and I transferred snacks and lunches to her. All in all, they were 90 minutes behind me at this point, but I was antsy and I just needed to get moving again.

The next refugio was called Refugio Los Cuernos, named after the abruptly colored mountain peaks I described earlier. I reached this refugio about 90 minutes later and it was packed with people staying in the campsite as well as in the dorms. We weren’t staying here either because they were fully booked up when we tried to make reservations. Instead, we were staying at a new installation called Refugio Frances that was another hour down the trail.

After getting directions from one of the employees, I went ahead and started walking again. It was a little after 5pm at this point and I didn’t know how much further the new site really was nor did I know what time dinner was supposed to be served, so I figured getting there sooner than later might be a reasonable idea.

The trail went downhill for a bit, all the way to a nice little beachfront by a lake that had formed at the bottom of the mountainside – the signs said that this was at sea level. A few people were relaxing here on the beach, but I figured I’d get to the refugio and then possibly return on a short hike with my sandals and a towel. Though it was hot and sunny out, the water was still quite freezing.

The trail continued forward normally for a bit before hitting a massively steep incline. After fighting this incline for the next 10 minutes, I realized that any chance of returning to the beach was unlikely at best. Finally, I saw a sign pointing to Refugio Frances to the left, downhill. I followed the direction of the sign to a small footpath that didn’t appear very well-worn. After a few minutes, this path hit a dirt road and I saw some small domes on what appeared to be an active construction site.

I knew that this refugio was brand new, but I had expected it to be fully functional and lots of other people around. Instead, I arrived and was greeted by the wonderfully beautiful Josefa, who proceeded to tell me that we were the only guests there. She showed me to the dome we would be staying in, which had two showers, two toilets, and one sink for the 8 beds that were there. Apparently, this was the only working bathroom on site, as the construction workers periodically ran in here to use the bathroom as well.

I’m still a bit baffled as to why you’d only install one working sink. It seems to me that two should be a bare minimum. In fact, I’m sure there’s something published out there about this – in public or shared facilities, I could imagine that there very well could justifiably be more stalls than sinks. But upon further contemplation, I would think that it should near a 1:1 ratio, with a minimum # of sinks at all time being 2. The Excel formula would probably be something like max(2,0.75T) where T is the number of toilets.

Yes, these are the things that I think about. And you should have realized this about me by now.

After taking a quick shower to cleanse myself of the sweaty mess I had become, I tried to figure out what the heck to do next. I had asked sweet beautiful purrfect Josefa if there was another dome somewhere that we could retreat to with scented candles, massage oil, and Barry White on the sound system, but unfortunately there was not. It was about 6:45pm by this point and I needed to do something or go somewhere – there wasn’t even really a place to sit down because everything was really still under construction.

So I headed back up the trail in my sandals and decided I’d walk forward a bit to see what was coming up in the morning. I went about 10 minutes and came to a clearing with a positively gorgeous view of the Los Cuernos peaks. To the left of these peaks was the French Valley that we would be hiking up in the morning, bordered on the other side by a magnificent snow/ice-capped peak. There were clouds up there, but there were strong winds was pushing them against the peak, which was almost parting the clouds as this happened. So you could see white on one side and a streak of blue within that white on the other. I, unfortunately, had left my camera behind in the dome.

 

I returned to the campsite by about 7:30 and my friends had all arrived by this point and had started to shower and clean up. All in all, I had hiked significantly faster than they had – the 6 hour hike would have been closer to a 5 hour hike for me (after excluding the waiting), but it took them closer to 9 hours. That’s not to say that they were this slow, it’s that they knew they had lots of time and they spent it along the hike – as Renuka had told me earlier, they were “dilly-dallying” quite a bit. This was actually a pretty smart plan, especially considering that there was absolutely nothing to do at the Frances refugio.

 

What I definitely learned today was that my mode of hiking is to get the hike done quickly and efficiently and then find a nice spot to relax and soak in the view. I think for me, there is an athletic component of hiking that I also enjoy, so moving fast and pushing my body is part of what I look forward to with these hikes. In either case, something would have to change for the next few days because I didn’t want to hike and soak alone – that was the whole reason of having friends with me. If today repeated itself for two more days, perhaps I would have been better off carrying a full pack and camping. Heck, I could have joined my Antarctica friends Chelsea and Celine to do the very strenuous 9-day full circuit hike instead.

And so we had a mini-festivus that evening over dinner in the barely constructed dining room, as we aired our concerns and grievances to one another. I don’t fault my friends one bit – they spent a ton of money to come down here and have every right to enjoy their vacations as well. We just needed to talk through how to manage our differing styles and expectations. Among us all, we had four very different types of hiking personalities: a very fast hiker w/ minimal dilly-dallying, a very slow hiker w/ minimal dilly-dallying, a medium hiker w/ maximum dilly-dallying, and a medium-to-slow hiker who is equally happy to dilly-dally or not dilly-dally.

After dinner, we returned to our dome and ended up getting an early sleep. There really just wasn’t anything to do around here, and we knew we had a very long day ahead of us and could use the rest.

Thursday, February 13^th, 2014

We woke up bright and early this morning to have breakfast by 7:30am and hopefully be on our way by 8am. Unfortunately, even these of best laid plans weren’t foolproof, but I believe we got on the trail by 9am at least. We wanted an early start for a few reasons: our hike was primarily a return trip up the French Valley – the earlier we started, the farther we’d be able to go before having to turn around to get to Paine Grande Lodge, where we would stay the night. The other key reason is that we wanted to avoid the traffic from all of the hikers coming from the Refugio Los Cuernos. We were physically about an hour ahead of them, so we should still be in decent position now.

Owing to the conversation last night, I tried my best to stay towards the back of the group as much as possible this morning and was mostly successful at that. It took us about an hour to get to Campamento Italiano, which was a campsite at the base of the French Valley. There, we left two packs and put almost everything into my pack before continuing onwards.

From this campsite, we had about a 3 hour walk to the mirador point deep in the valley, and then would have 3 hours of hiking just to return to this point. A significant portion of the first part of the hike was up and around all sorts of rocks boulders – frequently, it was difficult to figure out exactly where the actual path was, but it helped that there were lots of others hiking as well. These rocks split us up a bit, particularly Sharon who took her time and had a stated intention of not going all the way to the mirador so that she could make it to our next refugio before dinner. As we were walking up these rocks & boulders, we could hear the portions of the glacier calving – it sounded like thunder or an avalanche, but if we saw anything, it was a snowy ice mixture creating what appeared from a distance to just be a temporary waterfall.

After about an hour of the bouldering, we got to a flatter area of the mountain and had a bit of a walk before a large mirador appeared in front of us – lots of people were stopping here for pictures and a rest, ourselves included. The wind was quite minimal today and there were almost no clouds in the sky, so it didn’t take long before we were hot and wanted to continue forward.

The next hour was mostly under the shade of small trees – it was relatively flat as well, with only the occasional hill to climb. Overall, we were gaining in elevation, but not a ton. After about an hour, we came to a campsite that had no one in it – it was either just abandoned or people just didn’t see a need to camp here. I’m thinking it could be the latter since the Italiano campsite is not that far away.

After passing through the campsite that wasn’t there, the trail turned right and went up a pretty steep incline of dirt and rocks for the next 30 minutes towards the final destination, Mirador Britanico. We couldn’t exactly tell where we were headed, but finally we could see people perched atop a rock about 100ft away from us and we knew we must be there. We climbed atop a different rock and sat and stared – for a full 270 degrees, we were surrounded by an amphitheater of incredible mountains. And none of them looked the same. The other 90 degrees of view were directly behind us and we could see the valley we had just spent the morning hiking.

So Renuka, Kishore, and I sat down to eat. The lunch smelled a bit funny, but I took a bite anyway. Then I realized why it tasted funny – it was a disgusting tuna fish sandwich. I immediately wrapped mine back up and started asking our hiking neighbors if they wanted a free sandwich. No takers. Renuka got through about a third of hers. Kishore was quite happy with his vegetarian sandwich, even though a good 85% of it was pure bread.

About 30 minutes later, Sharon shows up, so I hand her her sandwich, which she proceeded to have three bites of before being disgusted. After a little while, Sharon asks us if we’re going to keep going to the final viewpoint – upon hearing that we were there, she was actually a bit disappointed that she had walked so far, because that meant that she could have turned around sooner. Nevermind that the view we had from this location was so ridiculously good. It was quite probably the best viewpoint of the entire trip.

After a few minutes, Sharon turns around to start heading back and then Renuka does the same 15 minutes later. Kishore and I hang around for another 15 minutes before doing the same. In that time, some French people show up at the mirador and I notice they are trying split up the small amount of trail mix they have amongst them. Sensing an opening, I offer them the tuna sandwiches and they immediately decide that I’m their best friend and take pictures with me. All for a crappy tuna sandwich.

 

On the way back, I got the brilliant idea of trying my hand at pseudo-trailrunning to see just how fast I could make it back to the campsite at the beginning of the valley. Though I had left 30 minutes after Renuka, I caught up to her and Sharon after only 30 more minutes. Then I went for another 45 minutes before deciding that the trailrunning idea was dumb. So I found a tree that was holding on to the cliffside for dear life and leaned up against it to take a picture so that I could give my mother a heart-attack. Sharon caught up after a little while, and we walked back to the campsite together.

 

 

We still had a 3 hour hike to get to the lodge we were staying at that evening and it was already after 3pm. The hike back was mostly uninteresting, except for fields of charred trees. I believe a few years back, a campfire got out of control and burned down an ungodly amount of acreage – this must be part of where that happened.

The other memorable thing was that it was unbearably hot. There was almost no wind and the sun was just beating down on us. For that reason, I went ahead and walked ahead – Sharon’s comfortable speed and my comfortable speed are very different. Getting a shower a full hour earlier was worth it.

Friday, February 14^th, 2014

Today would sadly be our last day on the hike. Our hike was just a return trip up this leg of the route that reaches Grey Glacier, about 3.5 hours away. The day wouldn’t be a long hike, but since we were leaving, we had to get back in time to catch a catamaran in the evening that would take us to the park entrance, in time to catch our bus back to Puerto Natales. Scheduling was pretty tight all around.

Kishore hadn’t slept very well at all because his allergies were acting up in a big way, and Sharon had told us that she was all-around tired and that she only wanted to do enough of the trail to be able to say that she did the “W”… the only question in her mind was how far up do you need to go to make it look like a “W” instead of an odd-looking “U”. So today would likely be a bit scattered as far as our hiking group was concerned.

We got started somewhere around 9:30am and had calculated that our turn-around time was 1pm… meaning wherever we each are at 1pm, that’s when we have to turn around to give us enough time (with some buffer) to be ready for the first catamaran that evening to start our return journey to Puerto Natales.

The weather was quite perfect this morning, perhaps a little too perfect even, because every lookout point we got to, we stopped for a while. I suppose it didn’t hurt that we happened to be stopping with some other hikers who were going at the same pace as us, and I found one of them to be pretty darn cute too. It probably goes without saying that women who actively hike tend to have nice stems. I’ve been impressed. I need to hike more often in foreign countries.

Before long, Kishore’s lack of sleep caught up with him and he stayed back to nap at one of the miradors, while Renuka and I trudged onwards. Renuka was actually ahead of me because I had stopped to get some water and it took a long while to catch up to her – within the span of these few days, she has become a much faster hiker overall.

The miradors looked out over a lake and far-off mountains. A few of them had chunks of frozen ice that had broken off of the glacier upstream, but for the first 90 minutes or so, we still hadn’t seen any sight of the glacier itself. And then we had a short climb and got to a mini-mountain pass and we could see it far off in the distance, partially obscured. It definitely looked neater than any glacier we had seen yet in this park, but I think we were all a bit spoiled by the massiveness of Perito Moreno outside of El Calafate.

Renuka and I eventually got to a stretch that was a very steep downhill stretch – which explained the scores of panting and gasping hikers going the opposite direction. It hit us then that the way back might be more difficult.

Renuka and I got to our destination, the Grey Lodge, just before 1pm and it was a bit anticlimactic. We asked around and were told that a mirador was only about 10 minutes away, so we opted to walk a bit further (and stretch the 1pm turnaround time rule). After all, it would have been a crying shame to walk this far and eat our lunches on the front porch of a secluded lodge that has a view of nothing really.

The mirador on the other hand was quite nice. We found a spot to sit and watch near the sign that said “mirador” and had a few bites of our sandwiches. Then we noticed that there was a massive rock jutting out closer towards the glacier and wondered if we could get closer. As we walked towards it, it was clear that getting out there would require some minor climbing and scrambling, which I definitely didn’t want to pressure Renuka into. So we agreed to split up and I’d catch up with her on the way back.

The rock formation was right up my alley – I love this type of climbing and scrambling around. There were a handful of our hikers out here as well, but the winds were whipping around at a pretty good pace here too and needed to be kept in consideration. I finally found a nice little indented spot in the rock to plant and lie back for a few minutes to enjoy the view and the rest of my lunch.

The way back wasn’t too bad – Renuka had about a 15-minute headstart on me and we met up shortly after the steep climb. From there, she was largely outpacing me the rest of the distance. She must have gotten her second wind or something, because she was making much better time on the return than on the way in. We ended up getting back by around 4:30pm, which was more than enough since the catamaran was scheduled to leave at 6:30pm. Fortunately for us, an earlier catamaran loaded up at 5:30pm and we were able to squeeze onto that one.

The catamaran ride was less than an hour in total, but offered some wonderful views of all of the mountains we had been hiking up and around the past few days. The views from up top of the boat were beautiful, but it was cramped standing room only so Sharon and I opted to stay downstairs. When we got to the other side of the lake, we found our bus company operator and he opted to put us all in a smaller van instead of a bus for the return trip to Puerto Natales.

As we drove towards the park exit in our 15-person minivan, we all started feeling pangs of nostalgia. It was hard to believe that this magnificent park that we had toiled around for the past 4 days was leaving us to become a faded memory. I completely understand why people rave about Patagonia – it really is different than anywhere else I’ve been before. The landscapes are fabulous and very varied, and it’s really all quite accessible (during this time of year).

I’m fairly certain that if I return to any of these countries again in the near future, Patagonia will be atop the list. I definitely want to do the full 8-9 day circuit with my own pack, and I also want to explore some of the lesser traveled trails around the rest of the park. Judging by the trail maps, there’s probably enough for 2 full weeks really. And then there are still other areas north of Fitz Roy in Argentina that are worth exploring as well.

We got back to Puerto Natales earlier than we expected, so we dropped our bags off at the hostel and decided to go get some food. The food at each of the refugios was definitely lacking in taste and quality, so we figured we may as well go out and enjoy tonight. The only concern was that tonight was our last night in Chile so we wanted to get rid of whatever pesos we had left.

I had remembered walking by a nice place in the corner of town that appeared to be more of a foodie-type of place called Aldea, so we headed there. After seeing the menu, we were very impressed and excited, but it was clear that we were going to be cutting it close. I had a grilled wild hare loin or something strange like that, and it was remarkably tasty and well cooked. The others were raving about their meals as well. When all was said and done, our bill + tip came out to 59,000 Chilean pesos, which was precisely the amount of money we had left on us. Perfect.

Saturday, February 15^th, 2014

Our early bus left at 7am this morning to El Calafate. This was a different bus company than the one that brought us over earlier in the week, and somehow they were using entire different roads and border crossings even though this was a very short trip in total. Ultimately, owing to the delays in processing at the customs & immigrations offices plus a parade that was going on in El Calafate, we ended up getting to the bus station with very little time to spare. It was clear to us that we were terribly fortunate to have gotten the last 4 seats on this bus, since our flight from El Calafate to Buenos Aires would be leaving soon. So we hopped in a cab to the airport and hurried to get checked in – fortunately we were all confirmed and there was no repeat fiasco for any of us.

So long, Patagonia, and thanks for all the fish.

In the end, I’m very grateful that my friends came out and joined me on this trip. As I think I had mentioned before, I had hit travel fatigue right around the new year, and while Antarctica kept things different for those three weeks, this trip and everything involved with it mixed it up for the rest of the time, so it salvaged part of the trip for me in a way. And frankly, all super experiences are better when spent amongst family, friends, or loved ones.

 

Tidbits

1.       Some Spanish words are almost identical whereas others are nowhere close… this bites me in the butt every once in a while. I asked other people on two different hikes where the best spot to watch a sunrise, or “sonrisa”, was, only to get a curious stare in return. Then my Google translate app informed me that “sonrisa” means “smile”. Stupid gringos.

2.       Special thanks to Kishore for cracking up even at the tiniest of sarcastic comments. I had no idea I was so damn hilarious. At one point in the journey, we were bored and the girls told Kishore to read my last blog post aloud, which Kishore had downloaded onto his phone. Apparently, reading my blog takes twice as long for him because he’s laughing too much.

3.       Another note on Kishore – I noticed early on that he was making videos of seemingly mundane things, like the briefing in Spanish that we got from the Torres del Paine park rangers. Before I made fun of him too much, I asked him why he does that. His response was that his family back home loves to watch these things because it makes sharing the experience much more real, and that his grandmother will never see someone speaking Spanish. For his gramma. Ya can’t make fun of that. Dang it, Kishore! I used to love snickering at Asians (starting with my own momma) who videotaped everything. And now you ruined that. Jerk.

4.       By the way, laughing is good exercise – you should try it. Even if it’s gratuitous, belt out a hearty laugh. If memory serves, Julia took a laughing class when we lived in Boston. I thought it was nuts. She just thought it was funny.

5.       I hate the plastic napkins that many establishments choose to set on the tables instead of proper napkins. Seriously, they’re plastic, meaning the absorption quality rivals that of stainless steel. I guess this plastic napkin is cheaper or something – they should just save more money and tell you to wipe your face on your sleeve like God intended. Has oil seriously gotten so cheap that it’s that much easier to extrude plastic napkins than to cut down a tree, mash up he pulp, shoot the pulp at a high speed wire mesh to form a sheet, dry the sheet via a sequence of pressure rollers and hot air dryers, wind the sheet onto a large core into massive parent rolls, store the parent rolls for who knows how long, unwind the parent roll into a new machine, emboss a pattern, decorate/print, slit the sheet into the correct widths, fold the sheets, cut the sheets into the correct lengths, bundle multiple napkins into a single sell unit, wrap plastic around the sell unit, bundle multiple sell units into a pallet, wrap the pallet to keep it from toppling over, and then distributing it from there? Don’t answer that. And no, I did not work in the paper manufacturing business for 7 years. Okay, I lied.