South America Explorations: Week 17 - El Chalten

Sunday, February 2^nd, 2014

My entire day today was consumed by a 19-hour bus ride from Ushuaia to El Calafate. The bus takes this long not only because of distance and road condition, but also because of the border crossings. Though both cities are in Argentina, Ushuaia and Tierra del Fuego as a whole are not connected to the rest of Argentina by land, and therefore this transit requires entry into and exit from Chile. My day started at 5:30am and ended just past midnight in El Calafate. The highlight of the trip was that my seat on the second bus I had to take in the evening from Rio Gallegos to El Calafate was in the front row of the second level and I had some spectacular road & scenery views until the sun went down an hour later.

The super long bus trek also meant that I completely missed the Super Bowl. Initially, I had given some thought to delaying my transit by a day so that I could catch the game. Ultimately, I’m glad I didn’t since the game was a blow out from the very beginning as far as I could tell.

By the way, this picture is of a sign in the bus that I found humerus.

Since I was captive in the bus for so long, I started and nearly finished a new book on my tablet – “Black Like Me” was written in the early 60s by a white journalist, John Howard Griffin, who took dermatology medication and used dye to artificially change his skin tone so that he could pass as a black man. His intent was to fully comprehend what it was like to live as a Negro in the segregated South in 1959.

My first thought when I saw the book on the library website was that there was already a poorly executed movie in the 80’s where a young white guy went blackface so that he could get a full scholarship to Harvard. No, I’m serious – look it up; it’s called Soul Man. I thought there was TV show of a similar ilk, but I can’t find it. But then I figured that this book is probably a bit more serious than that horsecrap.

Anyway, as I read this thoroughly fascinating book, I had a couple of thoughts. And as you are well aware, I’m planning on sharing these thoughts with you:

-          How would this assessment be similar or different in the black community today? While the country is definitely a healthier place today for all colors than it was 50 years ago, there are absolutely problems that still exist, because like it or not, we are still a partially-segregated society. I wonder what conclusions an author doing a similar experiment today would develop.

-          This quote – “racism always hides under a respectable guise – usually the guise of patriotism and religion” flicked a light bulb for me. I read this and saw a lot of parallels to some of the slogans and rationales bandied about by today’s right-wing conservatives and/or Tea Partiers as a means to justify discrimination and exclusion. By the way, it’s no surprise that Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly of a particular race. And I don’t think that those few minorities within that organization truly understand what they are advocating. The members of the Tea Party will steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that their positions have racist implications because they it seems they are unable to comprehend racism beyond calling someone an epithet or lynching them. In fact, they have to audacity to believe that white people are the ones who are discriminated against (and thanks for that, Fox News), which just blows my mind. White people – just watch Louis CK’s bit on “Being White” – another excellent example of comedians being able to convey something that others often fail at. AND, this is something that white people will only ever truly listen to when it’s spoken by another white person (Griffin proves this in his book, by the way, and the reverse is true too). Michael Moore has the same message and puts it even better, but he’s less likely to truly be heard because his documentaries tend to go a wee bit overboard.

-          The black community back then was trying their best to follow a path of non-violence, knowing that a single incident would be blown up by the white establishment to be indicative of the entire community and an example of why segregation and second-class citizenship for Negroes was justified. There are parallels today with the anti-Islamic sentiments in the country – the overwhelming majority of Muslims know that they only progressive path is to remain calm and “turn the other cheek”. And then they see their efforts repeatedly derailed by a single Muslim or group of Muslims acting of their own volition. Meanwhile, similar acts of manslaughter by non-Muslims is not attributed to that group in the least; for example – every school shooting in the country is not attributed to the white community or even to gun-owners, instead they are roundly treated as individual acts of violence. To be clear, I’m not saying which way is right or wrong, I’m just saying that the dichotomy is not okay.

-          A similar parallel would be the homophobia persistent within the conservative religious community as well. I find it fascinating (and troubling) that the black community can often be the staunchest opponents to gay rights even though the battle they fought themselves 50 years ago has significant parallels; at a minimum, to direct parallels on the interracial marriage ban which was very clearly an attack on black people.

I also learned that prior to MLK’s assassination, the goal of the black community was a utopian vision of full integration and acceptance within the total community – the “I Have a Dream” speech. Post-assassination, this goal changed to one of “a nation within a nation” – the thought leaders essentially decided that utopia wouldn’t happen any time soon and so the black community should work to become self-sufficient. For example, they would focus their spending in black-owned businesses that would keep their money with black-owned or black-friendly banks which would lend to the black population. This was the essence of the black power movement, to stop trying to be “white” and instead embrace and uplift the community that already exists as they are. Of course, I’m gleaning all of this from one book, and that's not enough research to know what was and wasn't. Hopefully I can have some conversations back home with friends or co-workers who lived through it or have heard from their own relatives first-hand how everything happened. Token black friends, you’re on notice. Just joking, I don’t have a token black friend because I have at least three of them. This clearly means that I could never be a racist myself.

Monday, February 3^rd, 2014

I spent most of the day today taking care of some loose ends and relaxing. Chelsea and Celine had arrived here on Saturday, and were planning to go to the Perito Moreno glacier today. Unfortunately, Celine was feeling like crap with fever and nausea, so her plans for the foreseeable future are not so certain anymore. The three of us were planning to head up to El Chalten tomorrow, where there is hiking abound.

Strangely enough, the biggest event of the day was just finding an ATM that worked. As far as we could tell, there were four ATMs in town. The first three didn’t work for any of our ATM cards regardless of what quantity of money we tried to withdraw. And the fourth was out of cash. And we had about 200 pesos between us and there were most certainly no ATMs in El Chalten.

Back at the hostel, I was moved from a 3-person “private” room to the 10-person dorm. There was a minor fiasco on pricing as well – I had paid 180 on the Hostelworld website while Chelsea & Celine paid 110 on the Hostelbookers website a few hours before me, and now those websites show 150 or 160. The hostess argued with me that 180 is the correct price so I let it go, since I knowingly paid 180 for the room. But even so, I don’t care for places that play games and don’t have their sh!t together when it comes to consumer prices. To add insult to injury, I accidentally left my old worn-out Seattle cap in the room from last night and I ended up accidentally leaving my custom-fit mouth guard on the sink in the dorm at this place in the morning when we left. Great. I’m more upset about the mouth guard and the story I’m going to have to concoct for my dentist when I get back home on why I need a new one. Of course, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. That’s probably because I didn’t really do all that much worth writing about today.

By the way, since I know how nervous you must be about the ATM saga, the machine that was out of money was replenished later in the evening and I pulled out a healthy chunk of change.

Tuesday, February 4^th, 2014

During the night, I woke up and noticed a string of mosquito bites on my right upper arm. So I covered up a bit better and went back to sleep. When I woke up, I realized that this was a mistake – I couldn’t open my right eye because a jerk mosquito decided to bit my eyelid as penalty for not exposing any other flesh for his chomping pleasure. Yes, you read that right. So when I met Chelsea in the dining room to grab a quick breakfast, she thought I was winking at her for an unnecessarily long time. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that I didn’t need to think about whether or not I wanted to put my contact lenses in.

We boarded a bus to go north a few hours to the town of El Chalten which is situated at the base of Fitz Roy National Park. It was just me and Chelsea because Celine was still feeling under the weather and wanted to get completely better before joining us. And she seemed to like El Calafate a bit more than either Chelsea or I and was happy to hang around a little.

As we arrived into town, the bus stopped at the park visitor’s center and the park rangers talked us through the trails available and the upcoming weather and gave us maps. Then we re-boarded the bus for the 3-minute ride to the bus station a few blocks away. I found it odd that the bus would stop at the visitor’s center, but I’m glad they did.

Once we got off the bus, we had to walk a little bit to find a hostel for the night, but then got unloaded and went to figure out what the rest of our week would look like. We grabbed lunch at a nearby place called Porter’s and Chelsea had an unbelievably large and terrible tasting hamburger – eerily similar to the unbelievably large and terrible tasting hamburger I had myself a month earlier in Puerto Natales. But hers tasted like charred mystery meat instead of vinegar like mine had.
 

We returned to the visitor’s centre and after talking with the rangers a bit more, we decided that we’d do a 3 day/2 night camping trip in the surrounding area starting tomorrow morning. This left our afternoon and evening today open for whatever we could come up with.

We spotted a few short hikes on the trail map leaving from the visitor’s center and set out to figure out why they existed and what pot of gold was at the end of those rainbows. What we found was a few miradors (viewpoints) from where we could see the neighboring Patagonian mountain range. It had been quite cloudy when we got off the bus, but the weather turned and it was pretty blue up top now – unfortunately with the exception of the area right around the big mountain peak, Fitz Roy. We waited a bit and finally got a reasonably clear view to get a few “framers”. It was glorious.

And so that you know, the reason we knew that this was the Fitz Roy mountain range is because we looked at Chelsea’s shoes. They were Patagonia brand, and the brand logo is this very same mountain range. Betcha didn’t know that. I guess I had assumed that the logo was a random set of scribbles.

This evening was spent comically grocery shopping. I say comically because the grocery stores were all very small and we spent hours traversing the town trying to get all of the different things we were looking for, and then backtracking when we couldn’t find certain things. For example, we couldn’t find oatmeal anywhere and then had to make a new plan to have corn flakes with dehydrated milk powder and then had to figure out which combination of grocery stores had those ingredients in sizes that made sense for us. It should have been frustrating, but we were both more amused than anything else. Maybe because the weather was so awesome and we were content to be walking around anyway. I guess I should mention that both of us decided that we really quite liked El Chalten as a little town.

Wednesday, February 5^th, 2014

We woke up bright and early this morning – 8am, so not that bright and early, but apparently it was brighter and earlier than anyone else. We couldn’t find very much open for breakfast, so we hopped into a bakery and had some coffee and pastries while watching cartoons in Spanish with the baker’s daughter. I shared with Chelsea the travesty that Spongebob Squarepants in Spanish is Bob Esponja instead of SpongeRoberto SquarePantalones. She didn’t seem to care very much.

My camping gear isn’t the greatest. At all. I don’t have a tent. My backpack is quite ill-suited for hiking. And the sleeping bag I have isn’t quite warm enough for the weather here. So I rented all three – tent, sleeping bag, and backpack. Though Chelsea is planning to travel for nearly a year, hiking and camping is a major focus for her trip and she packed accordingly. It helps, of course, that she actually knows what she’s doing and therefore knows exactly what she does and doesn’t need. I’m flying by the seat of my pants. But I suppose since she’s helping me by checking to make sure I have everything I’ll need for the next few days, it would probably be more correct to say that I’m flying by the seat of her pants.

After the bags were packed up, we slung them around onto our backs and off we went into the wilderness. The hike to the first evening’s campsite was not very far – it was a little over 2 hours, but we were making pretty solid time for a 9.5 km hike. A decent part of the first half was on an uphill grade, but the rest was pretty flat.

When we arrived at Camp Poincenot, we unloaded our gear, set up camp, and had some sandwiches from some inordinately dense submarine-type sandwich bread plus cheese and salami. I’ve never really eaten much salami in the past, but owing to how well it holds up to non-refrigeration, I think I have a newfound appreciation for it. And since I’m drinking a beer while I’m writing this, let’s have a toast to salami, the unheralded (to me) and rather versatile mystery meat.

The weather so far had cooperated pretty nicely, so we opted to hike up a massive hill after lunch to get up close and personal to the massive iconic mountain, Cerro Fitz Roy, from a small lake at the base called Laguna de los Tres. Though I no longer had the large backpack weighing me down, it was steep enough that it didn’t take long before I was huffing and puffing and poor Chelsea was forced to wait for her now out-of-shape new friend. Damn you, Chef Tony, and your unreasonably and unnecessarily excellent cruise ship food!

When we finally made it to the top an hour or so later and were treated to a spectacular view of the mountain in front of us, except that it was quite cloudy and snowy. We both sat and wandered a bit for the next hour, hiking up and around stones and boulders to get a different or better or less crowded view of the mountains and the glaciers and hoping that the weather might clear up. At one spot, we were both lying down on the rocks and lingering for a bit when I felt the weather turn. I got up and Chelsea must have had the same thought because she got up at the same instant. As we started to make our way down the hill, the wind grew strong enough that I had to seriously lean into it to walk straight, and tiny bits of hail were also being pelted at us by the weather god to whom we had apparently forgotten to make an appropriate sacrifice.

When we got to the bottom of the hill, we figured it was too early to return to camp since there was plenty of daylight out, so we started walking along another trail to the Piedra Blanca glacier. After about 20 minutes of walking into heavy winds on this riverbed trail, we turned around back to camp because the trail was just a wee bit too miserable for our tastes and it didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

For dinner, Chelsea boiled up some pasta in her camping stove kit and we topped it off with a packet of red sauce and sprinkled some parmesan cheese over it. It tasted quite good, actually, even though we had to make multiple batches and servings owing to her 1-person cooking kit and the tiny bowl I had bought. And for dessert, we had leftover warm pasta water (because it was surprisingly good) and a cup (or bowl, in my case) of tea. During dinner, I spotted a cute field mouse scrounging around for some food – my first inclination was to feed him, but Chelsea quickly reminded me what a bad idea this was. Out of an abundance of caution, we triple bagged the food (including a dry bag) in hopes that the mice would not eat through the tent and our belongings to steal the food we hauled.

After I got in my tent and adequately bundled in my sleeping bag, I heard mice squeaking outside the tent fairly loudly so I periodically did a quick scan looking for any critters or newly-gnawed holes. I wasn’t overly paranoid or anything, but I was surprised at just how loud the sounds were.

Thursday, February 6^th, 2014

We were in no rush this morning, so we agreed to just wake up whenever. Whenever turned out to be about 9am. I was up much earlier, but owing to the winds and rain, I opted to linger in the comfort of the warm sleeping bag instead.

By the way, it wasn’t a large extended family of mice that was exceedingly close to my tent. It was the sound of creaky trees in the wind. But I swear it sounded like squeaky mice. Scout’s honor.

After a sumptuous breakfast of corn flakes in rehydrated milk, Chelsea opted to hike back up towards Fitz Roy hoping for a clearer sky backdrop to the mountain than we were afforded yesterday. I hiked back along the windy riverbed to the glacier. After 45 minutes of following a shifty trail on a rocky riverbed, the trail took an abrupt left turn into a huge field of massive boulders and the trail all but disappeared. I saw two others off in the distance ahead of me, so I knew that this was the right direction, but it was clear that the right path was whatever route could get you there. So the next 15 minutes was full of constantly evaluating route alternatives and hopping from one boulder to the next, all the while hearing my mother’s voice “Don’t take chances!” in the back of my head. She’ll be happy to know that on more than one occasion, I took a longer route owing to that voice in my head.

When I got to the end of the boulders, a massive ice blue glacier from the right side of the Fitz Roy mountain range was smack dab in front of me melting slowly into a lagoon of water separating me from the ice. The blue hues of this ice were spectacular, but unfortunately I don’t think it quite comes out in the pictures. I sat and stared for about 10 minutes before it seemed like the rain was getting a bit too heavy. Again, my mom’s voice rang out in my head as I decided to make my way back across the boulder minefield before the rock got too slick. I rather enjoy hopping from boulder to boulder – it’s just too bad that the price of a mis-step is potentially a broken ankle or worse. They need to invent a type of hard foam boulders and then airdrop them around nature.

I arrived back at the camp after Chelsea and I had split up two hours before. I figured I had a good 30-45 minutes before she showed up, but apparently the weather had different plans for her hike as well. After she got up the hill, she had a few minutes with a clear sky behind Fitz Roy before rain starting pelting everyone, cutting the excursion way short. But in the end, both of us saw what we were hoping to see, so it was still a success.

As we were finishing up our lunch of a half sandwich and some soup, the weather once again started to turn and we knew we needed to leave the shelter of our campsite sooner than later. Our destination was Camp d’Agostini, about 3 hours south near Cerro Torre. Within an hour of leaving the campsite, the weather changed drastically and we each went from three layers of clothing to one layer of clothing. The weather here is a bit nutty and temperamental.

By the time we got to Camp d’Agostini, the weather had turned a bit on the crappy side again. With the cover of the trees on the campsite, we were able to set up the tents and have dinner without too much of an issue, but it was clearly going to be an early night. Not that there’s a ton to do on a campsite anyway. If only we had a travel Twister game… then everyone at the campsite could join us.

Friday, February 7^th, 2014

We got a very early start this morning – the skies were clear and we wanted to get a view of the sunrise on Cerro Torre and the glacier at the base of the range. It seems like we were the only ones with that idea, which is a shame because it was gorgeous. Of course, we were both thrilled since fewer people = better. There were a couple of clouds in the sky to reflect some beautiful reds and oranges, but the mountain range itself was crystal clear and we got to watch as the sun slowly illuminated the snowy mountain from top to bottom as it rose from the horizon.

As the sun continued to rise, we hiked along the lagoon at the base of the mountain towards the glacier to get a more up front and personal view. The shapes of glacial ice are absolutely magnificent – in this glacier, there was a symmetrical pattern created the steep mini-peaks of ice as it slowly flowed down to the lagoon. And there was a large piece of ice teetering over at a 30-degree angle that looked like it was going to fall any moment. Unfortunately for me, it didn’t fall while I was there. Stupid ice.

Back at camp, we had another scrumptious breakfast of corn flakes in rehydrated milk before packing up camp and heading back to town. The route back took about 3 hours and passed a number of scenic viewpoints, all of which looked spectacular. We could also see that Fitz Roy was perfectly clear as well, with blue skies everywhere. I suppose it’s unfortunate that the two days we were around that mountain were cloudy, but all in all, I think we lucked out with some pretty decent weather. For the most part, we didn’t have to hike in heavy drenching rain at all and it didn’t get too bone-chillingly cold either. And ultimately, I was happy to get this, my first real self-sufficient overnight camping trip under my belt. I’m also extremely thankful to Chelsea for making sure we were prepared and that I didn’t go hungry or cold from ill preparation.

When we got back to El Chalten, we returned the rental gear and checked into our hostel for the night, Condor de los Andes. When we walked in and I gave my name, the receptionist handed me my cap and mouth guard – dear sweet Celine was able to locate these back at the Marcopolo Inn in El Calafate and dropped them off here for me. She had arrived yesterday – the Cipro I gave her earlier in the week did the trick and she was feeling back up to par. We learned from an e-mail message that she was camping tonight and would be back tomorrow. Since I’m leaving early in the morning, I won’t be able to say a proper goodbye or thanks.

We sat in the hostel and ate whatever was left of our sandwich bread, salami, cheese, and even the corn flakes (not in the sandwich – we’re not that ghetto) while checking our e-mail on the snail-paced internet service that is typical all around this town. And then I showered – what a glorious feeling that was, too, after 3 days of not showering and hiking and camping and all that. That’s nothing to experienced hikers out there, but for the rest of us who are addicted to our creature comforts, it’s an eternity.

Saturday, February 8^th, 2014

I got up early this morning, had a measly breakfast of bread & butter, and walked a block to the bus station to grab a morning bus back to El Calafate. Initially, Chelsea was going to return with me, but she decided to stick around in El Chalten for a few extra days with Celine since they will be hiking together for the next week and possibly longer. So it seems that my time with Antarctica ship friends has completely come to a close. It’s definitely been wonderfully nice to have travel companions after going solo for 3 months.

I know what you’re thinking – poor Paraag, now having to be all alone by his lonesome loneliness. But not so! This evening, I’m meeting up with some friends from the US who are flying in to hang out with me (yes – despite all evidence to the contrary, I am still loved somehow, or maybe just liked, or maybe tolerated is the best word for it). But who are these brave souls? And what, pray tell, will we be doing? I guess you’ll have to wait until the next post to find out!