Lately I have been busying myself with the middle of nowhere.
I did a nice eight-day hiking trip around Torres del Paine, in which I really got to know my shoes and my hiking poles. Hiking poles are great for many things, but especially for bracing against wind and navigating through shin-deep mud. There were a few other people on the trek, who I would usually see at the campsites. Along the way we hardly crossed each other and so I really got the chance to feel alone -- something I´ve been seeking borderline-obsessively for a while. You would think that eight days of near-solitude walking among the world´s most impressive scenery would generate profound thought and divine realization. But this is just about all I wrote in my journal:
Day 1: "Sometimes wind can be so strong that you cannot breathe -- it pulls the air out of your mouth."
Day 3: "A game of cat and mouse: what to do about food. When I kept my food inside my tent, kittens clawed holes in my tent trying to get in. When I kept my food outside my tent, mice got it. Food is a condundrum." [The kittens incident happened before my trek, when I was at a campground in the town Puerto Natales]
Day 4: "Rainy day in Patagonia. What day is today? Rainy day."
And then I stopped writing. Besides wind, mud, and rain, I also got a bit of nice sunshine and also... snow!!! Overall, the hike was much easier than I had expected. Each day I felt stronger and by the time I got to the infamous John Gardner pass on day 7, I was walking so fast and stepping so lightly that I did two and a half days of walking all in one day. And not a single blister the whole time.
The day after I got back from my trek, I started hitch-hiking up the historic Ruta 40 to get to northern Patagonia. The Ruta 40 is a long dirt road that takes you through the heart of desolate nowhere. I was hitch-hiking with a friend I made in Puerto Natales, Daniel the Russian. Our first day, we were picked up by some gauchos (cowboys) who took us about 10km out of Puerto Natales to their estancia (ranch). They had been driving around looking for their lost sheep. At their ranch, they served us mate and lunch. I ate cow tongue. Then they showed us their animals. They put Daniel to work to help them fix a door, but in the process they got too drunk to figure out how to take proper measurements and messed it all up. As for me, they wouldn´t have me doing man´s work (because a women couldn´t possibly know how to use a tape measure...) so I spent the day reading and watching their horses escape. I went to tell them that their horses were escaping but they didn´t take me seriously (because women don´t know much about escaping horses), and they had to spend the next day looking for their lost horses. They also fed us dinner and had us sleep in their house. The next morning, Daniel and I continued hitchhiking and crossed the border into Argentina. The border guard was astonished to see a Russian and an American traveling together, but I assured him that the Cold War ended a few years back.
The next five days are a blur, but it mostly involved spending many hours waiting in the flat, windy, desolate middle of nowhere for cars to pick us up. Sometimes four hours would pass without seeing a single car. Little by little, we moved forward in the 1,300 km of desert. Usually the cars that picked us up were going somewhere even more desolate off the Ruta 40 so they would drop us off at the intersection of nowhere and nowhere. We would wait hours by the side of the road, 100km from the nearest road maintenance outpost, or estancia, or any other of the few marks of civilization. We spent most of the time in silence, since Daniel´s main subject of expertise is different varieties of hard alcohol -- a subject that is exhausted fairly quickly. And I was not any more interested in hearing about that than he was in hearing about sustainable agriculture. But armed with dried fruits and nuts, a good book, and plenty of small rocks to throw at bigger rocks, we made it happily and patiently through our long waits. Daniel had a two-person tent which we used, but it was not a good one for the wind and we would wake up as the tent would collapse on to us with one wind gust and then pop back up with another. I have concluded that most of Patagonia looks exactly like Nevada, except without as much topography.
Yesterday we made it to El Bolson (a town south of Bariloche), where I am now. I quickly abandoned Daniel for other distractions that transcend beyond the world of booze and cigarettes. The last woman (Belen) to give us a ride was on her way to a 7 hour philosophical talk about education and global energetic changes and some other things. It sounded interesting, so I accompanied her and learned all sorts of things that I cannot begin to describe, but they fell in very well with what I have been reading about in the book Autobiography of a Yogi.
I´ve spent the day meeting fascinating people who have filled me to the brim with profound insights and paranoid conspiracy theories... I am now socially exhausted. It is a bit rainy.
No comments:
Post a Comment