Summer 2010: Heading off and back again

To all my favorite family and friends -

For summer 2010 I've revamped this old gap year blog as a place for current travel updates. Expect stories, quotes, or plans from the ground, pictures when I can get them uploaded, or just pleas for help when I'm stranded at midnight in a peacefully dusty bus terminal.

Just kidding. I won't have internet then.

My certain and most immediate destination - Rwanda. I'm excited to get back to the beautiful Land of A Thousand Hills. Other probable destinations for this summer, before I find my way back to Chapel Hill - my favorite haunts of Uganda and Tanzania, and the unexplored (for me) lands of Belgium, Scotland, and Ireland... and many ports and stations on the way and in between.

So keep an eye out. And thanks for watching.

Love,
Joseph

Looking back on Torres del Paine

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...

Looooong bus ride to Calafate

I have arrived safe in El Calafate. Charming little town of about 15,000, very outdoorsy. I found a nice little clean hostel.

Tomorrow morning I take a bus into Chile. They told me at the bus ticket booth that the border-crossing can take as long as 3 hours, so we'll see how that goes.

The bus ride yesterday/last night/today was about 29 hours. Some of the landscape was incredible. We would go 100s of kilometers of absolute nothing. Totally flat on all sides, just us on our little gravel road cutting through the middle of the middle of nowhere.

PS I saw the coolest sunset Ive ever seen. Because it was so flat the colors stretched 180 degrees across the horizon. Very Cool.

I'm Going Down South

I'm about to leave Bariloche.

Tomorrow at 12 noon I hop a bus to El Calafate. 28 hours later I will arrive in El Calafate. I got a ticket that's not exactly first class, not exactly coach. Let's just say it doesn't come with food, but I will be able to recline a little.

28 hours through the Patagonia. 28 hours of the closest thing on Earth to Absolutely Nothing.

I'm bringing lots of books - even, against my best hiker's instict, an iPod. I know I am going to thank myself for that.

If you look on a map, the sheer southern-ness of Calafate might surprise you. I will be farther south than South Africa, farther south than Australia, even - if my calculations are correct - 250 miles farther South than the southernmost tip of New Zealand.

As great American poet Tom Petty once wrote, "I'm headed way down South/ Gonna impress all the women/ Pretend I'm Samuel Clemens/ Wear seersucker and white linens." I know, that has nothing to do with what I am going to do. It's about another South. I was just proud to remember a lyric that halfway applied, at least in direction.

Eventually I'll make it all the way to Puerto Natales, Chile, then on to Torres Del Paine National Park, home of one of the awesomests hikes in the world, which I am going to do.

I'm prepared for some great trekking. I've recently been collecting necessary gear to get ready to be outdoors for a while. I met an Israeli traveler named Daniel downtown one day who sold me his tent that he couldn't take with him. Today I bought a little camp stove. So I'm all set to take on the harsh nature of the Patagonia. (We've met before, but I'd like to get to know her a little better.)

Wish me luck! Talk to you all soon.




And check out this cool picture. It's from a while ago, but I thought I'd put a picture on here. Thats me playing guitar on the beach where we were camping. The stars are spinning because it was like a 15 minute exposure on the camera. It was pitch black, with the light from our fire in the corner. It's not edited - the long white light is from a headlamp when our gaucho bud Andres forgot about the camera and walked past. Turned out cool anyway.

Spanish living

Let's see, to update:

My Spanish is getting better. It inevitably does, just by hanging around and talking to people. Even if you spent your afternoons here speaking English (and I don't) I don't think you could help but absorb the language from street signs, movies, and conversations in the street. That's one good thing about being in a Spanish-speaking place - almost every activity can be excused as studying, almost everything is. If, like this past Saturday, I spend the afternoon playing ping-pong with some guys from Cordoba, I'm studying. Even if I sit on the couch and watch the Lord Of The Rings Trilogy in Spanish, I'm studying, more or less.

Of course I have been doing more for my spanish than watching movies and hanging out. Two big educational activities have been reading and traveling. The other day I spent the morning reading "El Principito", The Little Prince. Last week I finished going through a short series of middle school detective novels in Spanish, the "Lucas Lenz" series.

The back of the Lucas Lenz books say for 12 years of age. So apparently I'm at a very awkward age in Spanish. That explains the feeling of a lot of my conversations here, i.e. yesterday I described a rubber band as "the little circles that stretch". I'm at a point where I might describe myself as "good" but still end up saying ridiculous things like this morning when I asked, "Sir, could you show me the little batteries of three a's?"

I've recently developed a love of Tango, specifically the work of the late, great composer Astor Piazzolla. By the time he was a teenager he was an accordian prodigy and fluent in Spanish, English, French, and Italian. He then spent his life composing the majority of the classic Argentine tangos, and is now something of a cultural symbol - to many, a hero. It's funny, knowing just this much about the Tango culture here is like a password. It gets you in to some real Argentine conversations. Just this weekend I was in Esquel (more in a minute) and found myself talking to the owner of a small hotel next to my campground. I happened to mention that I'm studying tango guitar here and that I'm enjoying Piazzolla, and his face lit up and he took my by the shoulder like an old friend. He sat me down, we shared mate and food, and just generally chatted for a while about "the crisis", 70s rock, and American movies.

Now, maybe I'm likeable enough without a secret tango password - like I've said before, Argentines make the warmest strangers - but it definitely doesn't hurt.

Today's collection of pictures will be from a hiking trip in Esquel, a medium-sized city about 500 km south of here. The bus ride is really comfortable. I got to sit on the front row of the second story of a double-decker bus, so it kind of felt like I was in an airplane cockpit. The good news is that I could easily understand the Spanish-dubbed movie on the loud TV directly in front of me. The bad news is that the movie was Baby Mama, so I spent the whole 2 hours wishing I couldn't.

I have seen exactly 2 days of rain in my 6 weeks here. Rainy day numbers 3 and 4 happened to come during our hike in Esquel. The first half-day of serious storming was pretty exciting as an extreme little weather novelty. I got to actually see the storm's sheet of rain blow into the valley in front of me, and at one point we actually had to stop hiking because the incredible Patagonian wind was threatening to blow us off the trail. Note that these hiking stories are not exaggerated to make me seem like a competent wilderness survivalist taking on the harsh Patagonia (though I'm not saying that I'm not). I took off my pack and jumped into the air and landed like 3 feet away. We rushed down the mountain for fear of lightning up there.

Night 1 on a deserted sand beach, then the second night at a nice campground fit with bathroom shack. The hikes here tend to be unpredictable like that. We hid from the rain and cooked in the bathroom, with all our wet clothes hanging from the stall doors. The downpour reminded me of Alaska. I slept wet, but it was really fun.





During the storm, from campsite 1. Thankfully my camera is waterproof.

This weekend I hit the trails again. I decided to finally head to the refugio up on Mount Tronador.

Tronador has been in the back of my mind for a while. The name means something like Mount Thunder, so named because it's surrounded by 7 glaciers and their constant roar as they "thunder" and calve. At about 11000 ft, its the biggest peak around. I was camping at almost 7000 feet, right before the snow starts, but it feels like you're really up high - the peak juts out, seeming like it's right above the cabin. And the wind... it's really incredible. Your muscles are constantly flexed just to keep your balance up there. At the same time, the sun is intense. I ended up sweating under all my windproof layers while my hands got sunburned and numb from the cold. Very weird sensation, the weather up there.

Despite the piercing/numbing heat/cold, I mostly stayed outside. With the Andes spread out in every direction, as high as you can imagine, as far as you can see - I don't think I could ever get used to it.













Though I've seen a few, this was the first time I've slept in one of the refugios. This one is called Refugio Otto Meiling, and it amazingly offers drinkable running water and a bathroom.

The downstairs is an open kitchen and a room of long tables and benches, cafeteria style. There's a couch, pictures on the wall, and an old-timey iron wood stove doing the heating. All dark wood, very cozy.

Upstairs is wide open. It's the sleeping quarters (10 bucks a night, which only feels cheap before you sleep there). The floor is completely covered with summer camp sized mattresses, end to end, so the unlucky folks in the far corner had to walk over everyone else to reach their sleeping bag. It was kind of fun, obviously very warm. I woke up with someone's feet resting against my ears.


On Sunday I took a trip with the family to Cholila, a tiny town, if you could even call it that, about 3 hours south of here. We were visiting Anna's son at his new job. He's now a real life gaucho, working with horses on a huge farm.

Even just a few hours south, the landscape totally changes. We left the lake district and really entered the Patagonia - a vast, flat, nothingness on every side. Huge mountains in the distance. It's dusty and windy all the time. I just finished a book about the place where the author says he finally realized, "Nowhere is a place." That's kind of how it feels down there.

As it turns out, Cholila was once the home of exiled outlaw Robert Leroy Parker. He was born into a nice Mormon Utah family and grew up into a gunslinging, bankrobbing outlaw better known as Butch Cassidy. Beyond his famous name, I didn't know his story before I got down here. He was almost a revolutionary figure (a legendary shot, he vowed never to kill a man, robbed from the rich, etc.) and when he was too hunted in the Wild West, he escaped with the Sundance Kid to the wilder (south)west of the Patagonia. It's a really interesting story. They covered their tracks pretty well, so no one knows the details beyond local legends of the bandoleros norteamericanos. He may have died here or reemerged under a different name back in the States. If I visit Cholila again I'm going to go see his cabin.

Anyway, such is the intriguing history of the Patagonia. More soon.

Obama news

The TV news here is pretty sensational. In Costa Rica I only saw CNN en espanol, so this is my first exposure to all South American news all the time. Though they do talk about what I would call "important" issues, like the economy or conflict in the Middle East, it's more common to see continuing coverage of this guy named Belgrano who was successfully kidnapped and held for ransom for a month (possibly by ex policemen!) or this program called "City in Peril". Last night on "City in Peril", they showed - in its intirety - a 10 minute fight between some teenagers in Buenos Aires, complete with subtitles of the yelling.

Last week, on top of this news backdrop, there was constant Obama coverage. This is a part of a commercial that also flashed a banner saying, "Don't miss the assumption of the first black American president!!"