I'm in Buenos Aires. I'm in the big city! Today I got asked directions twice. That means I must not be the most obvious tourist here. That's one good thing about Argentina, besides the great steak, ice cream, pizza, and coffee - on my best of days, I can almost blend into a crowd.
Last night I walked around San Telmo, mas o menos the old historic/recently-rundown Tango district. One highlight was when I found an old man, dressed in 20s style in a black suit, bowtie, and bowler hat, playing tango guitar on a probably too-noisy corner. Most people were passing him by, but I stopped to listen. When he finished his sad old tango song, he looked up at me and we started to talk. When I told him I had been studying music in the South, he said, "Here - try out my guitar, kid."
I played him a little something and we laughed but he soon had to go. The street was too noisy, he said.
But I left off long before that. I need to write about my trip down South. I can rarely make myself sit down to really record my memories, so I'll try to do as much as I can now.
30 hours by bus... not so bad, actually. We got to watch a lot of movies, I read a book. I met a Polish friend Bartek on the bus who happened to be going to the same national park in Chile, Torres del Paine, so we decided to continue together.
El Calafate exists solely for tourists who want to see the nearby Perito Moreno glacier. It's a huge, impressive, towering wall of ice. They say it's like the Grand Canyon, one of those wonders that just doesn't disappoint. Well, I didn't go. I was eager to head on to Torres del Paine in Chile. The one thing I will say about El Calafate (named after a delicious, uniquely Patagonian berry) is that after one day I was about ready to move on. I found myself playing the guess-who game: there's an Australian, he's American... she's definitely British. But it was fun. At one point I was speaking Spanish during an all-you-can-eat dinner with a Polish guy and an Italian guy in an Argentinan grill/Chinese restaurant.
It was easy to hop the 5 hour bus to Puerto Natales, Chile. (Obviously long bus rides don't phase me so much anymore). Puerto Natales is a formerly gloomy fishing village that boomed in the last decade or so with the rise in popularity of the nearby national park. Though the sheer number of internet cafes gives away the presence of lots of travelers, as opposed to Calafate, it is still a real city with more of a local soul. The S.Chilean specialty, apparently, is avocados. Everywhere I saw eggs with avocados, fish with avocados, and my favorite, hot dogs with avocados.
The streets are filled with stray dogs, from weiner dogs to beautiful huskies, and lined with colorful one story houses. You've got older cars and much darker people. It feels like a big rustic fishing town. It smells like the ocean. Think Beaufort, but a lot poorer. You probably would have wondered, like me, why the main town square (a green space, the centrally located park) is surrounded by chest-level ropes. Well, as I found out, It's so the wind doesn't blow people into the traffic in the street. (It will still blow them away, they just stop at the ropes). Very smart, I thought.
So there's the incredible wind. That might be the best segue into my experience in Torres del Paine national park - the mecca of hiking in South America. Most people go for the 3 day version, but I did the whole park - 10 days of trekking in all. I have hesitated to write about it partly because I'm afraid I'll sound like I'm exaggerating the conditions, like I'm creating an extreme adventure to write about. I'll just promise that I'm not, and lay out the facts. The weather in the park and some of the sights that I saw were incredible. Understanding the wind there requires a few anecdotes:
Two weeks before we started, a girl was setting up her tent and didn't want to let go when the wind picked up. It flew her like a kite for 20 meters, breaking two of her ribs.
Last season, a 250 pound man was literally blown off the mountainside into the valley below. That's all. They found him after a couple of days.
We talked to a guide on the way who told us, laughing, that he twice while hiking had turned around to yell at his hiking partner for shoving him hard to the ground, only to find him 30 meters behind him.
The wind, obviously, is strong. The huge glaciers with their walls of freezing air somehow make the weather unpredictable. On top of its strength, the wind doesn't increase like normal wind, gradually gradually stronger and stronger. There is nothing, silence, and then suddenly a wall hits you. You have to hit the floor or be blown down. I was blown down lots of times. Some of my days hiking averaged over 100 km/h, all day, any time you weren't among thick trees.
Anyway, it was some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever seen, some of the best hiking I can imagine.
One morning, we woke up at 5 in the morning for a Torres del Paine tradition - a supposedly 45 minute hike up to the top of a little mountain, to a viewpoint to see the park's trademark, "The Torres", get (hopefully) turned a beautiful gold by the sunrise. We started out at 5, and as we ascended we could see a bobbing trail of headlamps following us up the trail through the morning darkness. We climbed for the 45 minutes, then 20 more, then 20 more, and turned around to find that nobody was following us anymore. Well, we had apparently missed the trail somewhere in the darkness and climbed up to a higher peak instead. All for the best - we had our higher view all to ourselves. Because we had the idea to carry some gear up, we got to relax as the sun rose, warm in our sleeping bags, cooking a hot breakfast, on top of a mountain. And there was a rainbow.
I can tell you all some cool stories when I get back. For now, enjoy a couple of pictures. I'll see lots of you there guys in a week or so!
Ciao -
Joseph
There's the winding trail.
Breakfast right after sunrise on the Torres.
And the rainbow...
