The Long Road North Part IV: Salta & Jujuy

After seven months of travelling in, out of, and through Argentina, my final stop was its far north.

After Patagonia, visiting the high Andean desert of Argentina topped my wishlist for things I wanted to see in the country. To blame was Fernando and photos he had shown me many years earlier of stromatolites growing in shallow lakes waaay up in the Andes. My timing was off for being able to join Fer and crew on a trip up to his Stromatosite, but I was assured that there was plenty of other interesting stuff to see in the region, Fer’s former PhD advisor Ricardo even hooking me up with a detailed field guide for finding some fossil stromatolites.

So I kidnapped one of Fer’s grad students, Flavia, a friend who I had met two years prior when she was a student and I was helping teach the Geobiology course, and we set off to do some exploring.

I picked up Flavia in her temporary home of Tucumán, or rather I met her at the bus station after an overnight bus from Córdoba and we both jumped on a bus from there to the city of Salta. From there, we picked our way to the car rental agency for which I had what I hoped was a valid internet voucher for a three-day car rental—I was a bit nervous since the price I had found online was less than half what everyone else in the area charged, and I was hoping it wasn't a scam. Turned out it was only a half-scam. First, the car rental agency wasn't open when we arrived, but the hours on the door assured us that it would open later that evening. So we went to a restaurant around the corner and proceeded to order, in succession, everything on the menu only to be told that they didn't have that (You don’t even have empanadas? Or coffee? Or beer? Seriously??) until finally Flavia sarcastically asked what they did have and we both ended up with water and salads. Two hours later, we returned to the car rental agency, which was unaware of our booking but had a vehicle available and was willing to honor the price on my printout, with one exception: they wouldn't throw in the GPS unit and the extra driver that was supposed to be included in the price. I tried arguing for a discount, but to no avail. At least we had a car.

Our car (the silver one) picked up in Salta

It was my first time behind a wheel since I drove up to Portland from Los Angeles way back in August the year prior to drop my car off at my parents’ house before flying to Santiago for the start of this whole adventure. It felt good. Great. It felt great. God I love driving. Especially in places like Los Angeles and Argentina where driving laws are generally viewed as suggestions vs. rules, which turns getting from Point A to Point B is like a contest to see who has the biggest balls / can be the fastest, most cunning maniac. My favorite game. We tanked up on the way out of town (Argentina is like Oregon, where there are station attendants who fill your tank for you) and made a beeline south for Lago Embalse Cabra Corral, where Fernando’s Ricardo had said we could find road cuts with extensive lacustrine carbonate deposits, including stromatolites.

About an hour later, we found them. We had just turned a corner and exited a tunnel of trees when I saw a gleaming bank of a roadcut to my left. The color screamed carbonate, so I slowed, and sure enough I spotted resistant benches that called to me. Flavia protested that we weren't there yet, this couldn't be them, but I pulled over anyways to check it out. And it was a stromatolite goldmine. Several benches of big, beautiful, brainy stromatolites. Big concretions.  Little stromatoliltes. Stromatolites everywhere. We stayed and played for a while before deciding, since the sun was setting, to keep driving up the road and see if we could find any more.

Stromatolite!

Flavia inspecting the stratigraphy

The cool thing about this particular site is that the formation (Yacoraite) is tipped such that the road cuts across its many layers, which means that you get to drive back in time in a giant lake system (also argued to be shallow marine) as you follow the road. The stromatolites we started with were toward the top of the formation, representing the most recent deposits, formed around 68 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous (elsewhere in the formation, there are dinosaur bones and tracks, but who cares about dinosaurs when there are stromatolites?). As we took our magic drive back in time, we saw alternations between shale and carbonates, reminiscent of the Green River Formation in Wyoming where I did part of my PhD thesis work, saw some bright red paleosols, big deltaic deposits, and plenty of things that I didn't know the meaning of but was too busy driving to look in the field guide. We stopped a few more times and found more stromatolitic deposits, but the best ones were the first ones, so we eventually decided to turn around and go back. Since taking fossils and artifacts out of Argentina is highly illegal and I didn't want to risk getting arrested this time (I had to meet my aunt in Peru in a week, otherwise I might have tried it. Getting arrested in a foreign country is an item on my bucket list and getting arrested over a stromatolite would make a great story) I didn't take any samples, but my field assistant may have…

The sun went down and we set off in search of food, stopping at a cavernous but empty (bad sign? We were too hungry to care) restaurant in a tiny village on the side of the road. They had tamales. I loooooove tamales. They also had beer, although it only came in a giant 1.5L bottle and, since Flavia neither drinks nor drives, that left me with a lot of responsibility. I had a few swigs, intending to cap it and save the rest for once we had camped for the night, but was chased down on my way out of the restaurant. Apparently you can’t take an open container of alcohol from a restaurant in Argentina. This had never come up before, so I was unaware, but the waitress literally chasing us down the street made for a pretty memorable scene (it was really good beer!).

Tamales!

Dinner: tamales & beer

I wanted to camp off in the hills somewhere, but Flavia preferred a campground, deeming it safer. Not wanting to drag her out somewhere where she’d be too freaked out to sleep, I went along with the “find a campground” plan, although personally I always consider “no people” to be safer (and quieter and better for a good night’s rest) than “with people”. In the end we decided to head to the municipal campground back in Salta, which was mentioned in Lonely Planet as one of the best campgrounds in the country, spent an hour driving through what seemed like sketchy back-streets in Salta trying to find the damned place, and finally found an urban campground surrounded by the Salta ghetto behind tall barbed-wire fencing. Inside were strange toothless men and party music blaring and I wanted to sleep anywhere but there, but it was late, and we didn't really have other options, so... I drove—despite the campground manager’s wishes that we camp next to him (heeeeellll no, creeper)—to the far end of the campground which was darker (i.e., not directly under a spotlight) and semi-quiet despite the neighbors up until the wee hours of the morning drinking and chatting, set up my tent on the lawn, locked Flavia (with the car keys) into the car, shoved in my earplugs, took a sleeping pill, crawled into my sleeping bag, and tried to sleep. It wasn't ideal, but it was better than driving all night. We woke up with the sun next to what turned out to be an immense, dry swimming pool, which may have explained why the campground got such a glowing Lonely Planet report in other years or seasons. We got the hell out, stopping only for gas station pastries and coffee for breakfast on the way out of dodge.

The giant swimming pool at the urban campground in Salta

First, we went for a romantic drive through the jungle on a windy narrow mountain road. After months of Patagonia, jungle was pretty novel. So green! So lush! Then we passed the city of Jujuy and headed for the mountains—the real ones, the Andes. Our goal: lunch in Purmamarca, home of the Cerro de las Siete Colores (Hill of the Seven Colors).  We were there by one. Flavia desperately needed a restroom, so we booked it into the first café we found, but got a familiar line: the only thing they had available for eating were cheese sandwiches. Screw that, I said, so we offered to pay a dollar to use the restroom and went somewhere else to get our food. Good thing, because we found a great restaurant that served, get this, Llama steaks. They were delicious.

Llama for lunch

Colorful wares for sale in Purmamarca

After lunch, we put the 4WD capabilities of our non-4WD vehicle to the test and explored around the area trying to get a better view of this so-called seven-colored hill. It was really impressive. I wished I had a geologist with me to explain everything, but we had left the range of the field guide (which was also in Portugese, making it a rather difficult read), and pulling out my laptop to consult the papers on regional geology I had downloaded seemed like a good way to make my navigator puke and/or break my laptop.

Exploring around the Cerro de las Siete Colores

We continued on toward the heart of the Andes up a steep half-dirt-half-paved road that switched back and forth through the desert up into the mountains. We could both feel the altitude, the air tasted different, noticeably thinner. We crossed rows of mountains, spotting snow in the distance, until dropping onto the Antiplano, the massive high-altitude plateau (the largest outside Tibet, and the visual similarities are striking) that characterizes much of northern Argentina and Chile as well as most of Bolivia and southern Peru. We drove on toward the Chilean border where we reached our next objective of the day: Salinas Grandes, a huge salt flat (the third largest in the world) that is twice as big as Utah’s famous Bonneville Salt Flat. We parked the car and walked out onto the salt flat, Flavia quickly getting an altitude headache at the nearly 3500m elevation while I felt my body responding to the low oxygen levels (“Breathe faster! Faster!”). We poked around, hoping to see endoliths, but although we did see faint colors in some of the hypersaline pools, there was no life visible in any of the crusts we saw, although we didn't have rock hammers with us to break away fresh chunks. It was beautiful, salt flats always are.

Vicuña standing guard over the Andean Antiplano

Salinas Grandes

Salt sculptor working in Salinas Grandes

I wanted to camp there, in the mountains, so we drove off on a side road until I felt like we were far enough from where anyone could see us, then turned the car 90 degrees and drove straight out into the sand rim of the salt flats, avoiding deep sand as best I could (because wouldn't that be exciting: getting my rental car stuck in a sand drift in the middle of the Andes). The little 2WD rental handled like a champ on the uneven, soft terrain. I drove toward cross-country toward the salt flat until the car was no longer easily visible from the side road. I was hoping to get closer to the rim of the salt flat, but decided not to take any more getting-stuck risks. It was a nice spot, with 360 degree views of mountains and a nice view of the salt. We were just in time for sunset. I quickly set up my tent, unpacked our dinner and a bottle of wine I had bought myself, and we sat and watched the mountains turn pink, and then purple, and then dark as we ate and drank wine straight out of the bottle (even Flavia, who doesn't drink, had a few sips). Flavia retreated back to the car, but I laid with my head out of the tent for a long time.

Our campsite in the Antiplano

Our campsite, as reflected in the bottle of wine we shared that night

The stars were out.

Not just out. The altitude, the long distance from any towns and sources of light, the dryness of the air, and the temporary absence of the moon conspired to make probably the darkest night I had ever witnessed, and the stars were like a glittering ocean overhead. The milky way was bright, and other dull celestial clouds were visible. It was hard to sleep, I was so awestruck by the show over my head. Eventually the moon came up like a spotlight, and I had to bury my head inside my sleeping bag to sleep.

I was awake just before dawn, and sat in the sand and watched the sunrise paint the mountains and salt flats with a range of pastel colors. I felt peace again, something I had been missing in the previous month of nonstop activity and travel. It’s like John Muir’s quote (John Muir has all the best quotes):

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”

Llama tracks in the desert at our campsite

The mountains have always been my cathedral, the place where I’m reminded of my soul and my place in the world. If I go too long without spending quiet time in them, I get antsy, agitated, nervous, stressed. I need them.

Eventually Flavia woke up and we ate breakfast, packed up camp (although I had intentionally parked it on top of a set of bushes, I was a bit worried that the car might have settled into the sand during the night and would be difficult to get out…it was fine), and made our way through a thick fog back down the Andes. We made a detour to stop for lunch in the scenic pueblo of Humahuaca before continuing back down to drop the car off in Salta.

The drive that morning looked like this.

Flavia demonstrating the fierceness innate in Northern Argentinians

Humahuaca

The colorful, scalloped hills of the Quebrada de Humahuaca

We made it to Salta just in time for Flavia's bus back to Tucuman, and just in time for me to wait an hour and a half for the car rental people to bother to show up so that I could drop the keys off. I thought several times of just leaving the keys in the glove box and dropping the car there for them to deal with on their own watch, but after making a dozen phone calls was finally able to wake a napping person who promised someone would be “right there”, “right there” meaning 40 minutes later. I almost missed my bus back to Jujuy, but made it to the bus station with a whopping five minutes to spare. And, of course my travel luck being what it is, I happened to be walking through the main park en route to the bus station just as the weekly pan flute circle started up, so I got a free show in on my way.

Thanks Flavia for joining me on the adventure, and Fer and Ricardo for the tips on where to go! More photos from Salta & Jujuy up on the Google+ Album.

Next stop: a 49 hour bus journey across the Antiplano to Peru.

The Long Road North Part III: Córdoba

For my overnight journey to Córdoba, I was seated next to a well-dressed older woman who very much admired the fact that the water cooler had a plastic flower perched on top. I tried to sleep, but the TV blared loudly (horror movies, as usual) well into the night, until, looking around me at around 3am and confirming that everyone was at least trying to sleep, I went up and knocked on the driver partition and pleaded with the driver to shut off the sound. He seemed surprised that it was still on, and did. And then I finally slept. For 3 1/2 hours until the bus rolled into Córdoba a full hour early.

I had stopped in Córdoba to visit my friend Fernando, who is now a geologist on the faculty of the University of Córdoba but who was still a freshly-minted PhD when I met him in 2008 when we took the Geobiology Course together. Geobio friends are forever friends, and Fer was my best friend from that summer. Our staying in touch has been helped by the fact that we both share a tiny subfield as researchers of lacustrine stromatolites. Actually Fer shares some of the blame for getting me into stromatolites, since I had only barely heard of them before taking the Geobio course, and they were, like, his favorite thing. I had just finished my first year of grad school and knew nothing. Fernando, on the other hand, had the Dr. title in front of his name. So I was prepared to believe everything he said (and I still do).

A few fun photos from Geobio 2008

Fer & me working on final data analysis, or something serious, and I'm pretty sure I'm seated where I am so that I could easily turn around and make him help me figure things out.

Fer analyzing microarrays (remember those?) while I modeled the latest in labwear fashion. We were a good team: I taught him how to pipette, he taught me how to rock hammer. The spirit of Geobiology.

A lot had happened since that summer course. Fer moved to Tennessee for a postdoc. I switched projects and passed my qualifying exams. Fer returned to Argentina and starred in a TV series (see videos below). I switched projects again and started working on stromatolites for realz. Fer got married. I graduated. We had so much to catch up about! So I was thrilled when, while sitting at the bus terminal cafe sipping coffee,  eating a medialuna, and working on my talk, Fer showed up and gave me a big hug.

TV special on Fernando and his High Andean stromatolites

Part I (unless you are a math nerd, skip to 4:44)


Part II, filmed since of the whole series that year, Fer's segment was the viewer favorite (mine, too)


So yeah, Fer is pretty awesome. And so I was excited about meeting his wife who, I assumed, must be amazing to have landed a guy like him. And she was.

Wendy answered the door when we got to their house and greeted me without any hint of a Tennessee accent (how, Wendy?) despite being Tennessee born and bred. After the three of us chatted a bit, Wendy announced that she was going for a run, which sounded like an excellent idea so I asked if I could tag along. She took me on a mini-tour of the neighborhood, and we ran along the banks of what was usually a nice riverside park but that day was mahem thanks to the unusual flooding of the river that not only jumped its banks but decided to take over some of the nearby streets as well. Meanwhile I peppered her with questions and was deeply impressed with her story: a smart, tough, independent, successful lawyer who had fallen in love and followed a guy to a different continent, arriving in a foreign country and culture without knowing the language, but adapting so quickly and thoroughly that she's now the relationship's social anchor and has carved out her ever-evolving niche doing contract work as her own boss, speaks fluent Spanish, and has been adopted into Fer's extended family. Fer even half complained, "She has more friends than me here!"

Ferris wheel in Cordoba designed in 1916 by Gustave Eiffel. Ironic, since George Ferris designed the original Wheel in 1983 for the Chicago World's Fair as an answer to Eiffel's Tower built for the the 1989 Paris Fair. There must be a story behind this...

I was doubly impressed because I know from experience how hard that is. In the end, I had not wanted to stay in Germany with my ex-fiancé. I spoke fluent German and had German friends and "family" even before I met him, but the culture and environment was too different, and it went beyond my capacity (and willingness) to adapt. I said I would have done it at the time, but I know it would have driven me nuts. I'm pretty sure I couldn't have lasted. It made me wonder if I could have done that under different circumstances, in a different culture, but a part of me doubted it. We are who we are and home is home and our culture is a part of that. And admired Wendy all the more for it. Home is also where your heart is, and where her heart was was obvious.

We returned to the house, and I showered and crawled straight into bed to catch up on the night of sleep I didn't get, and Fer and Wendy promised to wake me when it was time to eat. They didn't need to. My carnivore's nose pulled me right out of dreamland as soon as Fer fired up the Asado in their back yard. What followed was a feast: a giant slab of meat (and more meat) as well as grilled veggies that, I found out, had quite a story attached to them. Wendy may have arrived in Córdoba as a fish out of water, but she didn't waste any time in tracking down a laundry list of local farmers from whom she could reliably procure various families of organic veggies, like a sort of one-woman patchwork CSA. Now, years later, the whole system has gotten a bit more organized and she no longer has to go to 20 different farmers' homes to get 20 different types of vegetable, but she still puts the rest of us "yep. bring the box to my door. I can make it that far in my pajamas thanx" CSA-supporting veggiephiles to shame.

Was it delicious? What does it look like?? Of course it was.

And that's when the miracle occurred. My innate lunar cycle-timed capacity to lose a not-insignificant percentage of my body weight in uteral lining, apparently finally satisfied with the offerings of steak steak and more steak (and organic dark leafy green vegetables, too) that I had been plying it with all week, decided to return to me. It was a little, well, anemic, a [mercifully] far cry from its usual buckets-of-blood gory glory, but I was reassured me that my ovaries had, indeed, not been taken over by an alien or basketball-sized tumor. Iron. Turns out it's an essential mineral. If I had kept eating like I had been eating the past few months, the gnomes working in my bone marrow factories pumping out my red blood cells probably would have given up on the whole heme thing and would have started trying to substitute in manganese in hopes of producing chlorophylls instead. That could have been neat, but I don't know if I'd like life as a plant.

Anyhow, happily full of delicious food, and happy that my body had apparently started to return to normal functioning, I was ready to hit the town. Fer and Wendy took me on a brief driving tour of the city and then to a nice central park on a hill overlooking the city where we drank mate for a bit before continuing on to Córdoba's famous weekend artisanal market. The market, claimed to be Argentina's biggest, consists of a good several hundred stalls selling handmade jewelry of a thousand varieties, whimsically-painted pottery, mate gourds and bombillas in every imaginable shape, size, and design imaginable, books on the million medicinal applications of marijuana, the standard cheap trinkets you can find everywhere on this continent, giant chandeliers woven from sticks, antiques sold by Fer & Wendy's transvestite tailor neighbor, and everything in between. Meanwhile music drifted through the crowd from a group of enormously talented local kids performing on the street to a half-seated, half-dancing crowd.

Fer and Wendy as my designated Pathclearers for the Cordoba market.

Seen at the Cordoba Market. I'm a sucker for creative, artistic graffiti art.

Once we had had our fill of the market (Wendy bought a cute pair of handmade earrings), we settled into seats on a balcony overlooking the bustle from one of the hip resto-bars lining the market's street and drank some beers as the sun set.

The next morning I went with Fer to the university and gave Talk #2 in the Dr. Frantz and her Stromatolites South America Tour. I met Fer's academic extended family, from his PhD advisor to his current students and undergrads under his care. The excellent questions reassured me that I had made it mostly understandable. It was fun chatting with everyone and discussing the doubts that Fer's advisor had, which was good practice for the reviewer responses I needed to write up for the manuscript I had written on one of the topics I presented. He later hooked me up with tons of tips for my upcoming trip to the north of Argentina, including a field guide pointing out the location of a bunch of really nice stromatolites. Stromatolite people are good people.

Poster for the Cordoba talk

After lunch, Fer took me to the cafeteria for lunch and we reminisced about the Geobio course and how it had changed both of our lives. It certainly shaped mine. Life consists of a billion small and large decisions that subtly and dramatically alter the course our living takes. The Geobiology course was--and continues to be-- a giant magnet that pulled my life into its orbit and changed its direction in a huge way.

When I took the course, I had just finished my first year of grad school, a tough year where I spent a lot of nights sleeping in my office at the university while running all-night measurements and teaching early-morning classes on topics that I had previously known nothing about. I came to grad school with a background in engineering and a degree in chemistry. Yet the PhD project I had chosen was a pretty hardcore microbial metabolism study, and the department I was in was a geology department. I had never had a microbiology or geology class before in my life. It was a steep learning curve, and I felt like I was just barely keeping my head above water. The Geobiology course came highly recommended from  all of my mentors and I hoped that it would finally give me some background in the two subjects I was supposed to become an expert in--biology and geology. It did that, but more than that it made me fall absolutely in love with the field of geobiology, in love with the colorful and talented microorganisms that have shaped the chemistry of our planet since life's beginning, and introduced me to stromatolites, which years later would become the topic of my PhD thesis, despite spending most of my PhD working on bacterial metabolism. It also introduced me to the people who would later become my advisors, mentors, letter-of-recommendation-writers, and some of my closest friends.

More fun Geobio 2008 photos

Fer: "These are beautiful, domal, rounded, nicely formed stro..." Richard: "Boobs?"

Fer, getting held up by a bird somewhere in Wyoming.

Will, 2008 course director, demonstrates the proper investigation of sensitive sites while Frank, current course director supervises.

In addition to the professional and academic impact, the course was a catalyst that changed my personal life as well. Being surrounded that first summer with smart, interesting, and largely well-adjusted people who liked and respected me was novel. I had spent the past three years in an intense and serious relationship with a smart, interesting, but not-so-well-adjusted boyfriend who regularly echoed the self-doubts in my own head that I was not smart enough, not good enough, not talented enough to be in grad school, to be a scientist. Who celebrated my successes by telling me that the only reason I was accepted to programs like my PhD program and the Geobiology course was because I was a girl and programs had quotas to fill. Who would yell at me for hours about how stupid I was when I would fail to do things The Right Way, like the time I hung a pot in our kitchen from The Wrong Hook and he took that as an opportunity to berate everything from my pot-hanging logic to my abilities as a scientist and my goodness as a person until I left the house crying to go sleep in my office again.

The course was a much-needed reprieve from that. The people there made me feel at ease, accepted, a valuable part of the team, even though I was one of the youngest students and knew nothing. The mix of students from very different backgrounds provided a valuable life lesson: none of us know everything, and in order to succeed, we need a good group of friends with talents and skills different than our own. That you don't have to be perfect or the smartest person in the room to contribute, as long as you leverage the skills and knowledge you do have. And the course reminded me that I had skills and I was smart enough. And that I didn't have to put up with the bullshit I was used to getting from my boyfriend.

Monster! Giant kinda adorable inflatable one in a modern art exhibit in Cordoba.

In retrospect, I should have shown him the door when I got back home at the end of the course. I had intended to. But like many abusive partners, he had a charming and a sweet side and was a master manipulator. When I laid out my grievances when I came home that summer and told him he needed to go, he cried and swore earnestly that he was sorry, that he had been wrong, and that he would change. I wanted to believe him, so I did. I loved him like a person loves a three-legged puppy. "It's not his fault he's a asshole sometimes, he's insecure and sort of autistic, he needs me, I can't leave him." He was my best friend, we had a house together, the relationship was a disaster but it felt comfortable. And when he was good he was wonderful: kind, caring, empathetic, devoted, romantic, and bend-over-backwards helpful. But when he was bad he was a monster. He swore the same things again and again and again for years more until I finally, finally pulled my shit together and closed the door for good. It took years and was one of the hardest things I've ever done, and things may have turned out a lot differently for me if not for the glimmer of hope for a different life that I saw during the Geobio course that made me ultimately refuse to accept a life with someone who called me stupid.

All of that flew through my head while chewing my lunch and thinking about how the Geobio course changed my life. And across from me was someone I will always be grateful to for the part he played in both recruiting me to the Cult of Stromatolites and for being a living reminder that it was possible for a man to be smart AND kind, respectful, secure, and handsome (seriously Wendy, you won the love lottery! but then, so did he!).

Cordoba is famous for, among other things (like being a crazy university party town), its pile of historic Jesuit churches and educational institutions.

Not Jesuit, but very pretty. Everything was plated in gold in this cathedral. After seeing this, all the beautiful cathedrals I saw in Germany don't seem quite so impressive.

I spent a few more days with Fer and Wendy. One day when Wendy didn't have to work in the afternoon, she took me on a tour of some of the more historic parts of Córdoba (and was my guardian angel when she helped me arrange bus tickets for my upcoming adventures, dollar exchanging, and a camera repair). The two of them also took me to their local 50-year-old Arabian restaurant (apparently there is a large middle eastern community in that part of Argentina--who knew?) where I ate brain for the first time in my life (it was surprisingly tasty). But not before first stopping off for a late-night desperate exchange at Wendy's dealer where pesos were slipped through a wrought-iron gate in exchange for a paper bag full of goods: arugula, squash, beans, and other organic CSA veggies. Being that close to fresh produce made me itchy.

Hummus and Brain: not your typical Argentine dinner.

And not your typical Argentine restaurant sign.

I was excited to head up to the Argentine high desert--something I had wanted to do ever since Fer had showed me photos way back in 2007 of the stromatolites at his field site up there--but sad to say goodbye to Fer and Wendy. Thanks you two for the hospitality and I hope to be back someday! (and come visit me, you promised! haha)

Dangerous drug paraphernalia from Wendy's shady back-alley dealer.

The Long Road North Part II: Buenos Aires

Arrival

My overnight trip from Bahía Blanca to Buenos Aires was uneventful. The bus showed up more or less on time at the central bus terminal, I wasted a bunch of time once again being thwarted by an unhelpful Argentine information booth occupant who fed me all sorts of misinformation, but eventually made it onto the bus (which I had looked up in advance with the help of Constanza and her mom) to my hostel. It was 8am, and apparently the male hostel staffers were still recovering from the night before because their eyes were bloodshot and they seemed very, very high.

It was too early to check in, but the female staffer ushered me upstairs for breakfast and coffee and I sat there and enjoyed the spotty wireless for a bit before claiming a locker once the dwellers in the room I was checking into woke up, and then going for a walk. A little on edge about being in a BIG CITY again for the first time since Santiago way back in October, I didn't bring much with me and was all paranoid, eyeing everyone suspiciously and peevishly glaring at every bit of graffiti and thinking, "Ugh, humans" every time the wall or sidewalk smelled of piss or feces.

Thank you Buenos Aires graffiti artist.
That pretty much sums it up.

But I eventually got to the spot that was my goal:

The U.S. Embassy.

Calm down, I wasn't in trouble. I was just out of room for stamps in my passport (uuuuuuugggggh firstworldproblems) and needed to get me more before I moved on from Argentina. I showed up at the giant gated complex, walked right around the long line, flashed my passport, and got VIP treatment. Ameeeerrriiicaaaa!! (it made me feel more than kind of bad). They did confiscate all of my stuff, though, not trusting me with whatever electronic devices and mystery liquids (Nalgene bottle of water) I was carrying with me. I took a number, waited 30 minutes, filled out a form, paid the fee and handed over my passport, and was told to come back in four hours.

So I walked across the street to the large green spot on my map which turned out to be a perfectly acceptable city park and curled up on the grass and read a book for a few hours, then getting stiff, got up and walked around, discovering an immense and beautiful rose garden where I stopped and, you guessed it, smelled them roses.

Rose garden. Okay, maybe this city stuff isn't all bad after all.

The four hours up, I wandered back over to the Embassy, skipped the line again, had my stuff confiscated again (although this time I was handed plastic retrieval number 69 with a wink and an obscene comment from the Argentinian guard who thought he was being awfully clever). I then waited 40 minutes behind a VERY ANGRY woman, cut straight out of a SNL-style mold for a middle-aged butch lesbian, who, impatient about her 40 minute wait time, kept turning to me and mumbling variations on "fucking cunt" under her breath anytime the mini-skirted and heavily made-up and bejeweled Porteña in epic platform heels currently being served at the desk loudly vented her difficulties in obtaining a fiancé visa.

Meanwhile, some great propaganda was playing on the televisions hanging in the waiting hall. Fascinating and successful ethnic-looking people talking about how the U.S. is the Land of Opportunity and how they've managed to Maintain their Cultural Identity while enjoying the Great Mixing Pot that is Ameeerrriicaaa and making lots of blonde friends. Features of Women and Muslims Conquering the Business World. A segment on Black History Month. The funny part: 90% of it was recognizably filmed on USC's campus, and of course the "Universities: The Nation's Jewels" was all about TROJAN PRIDE! Fight on!

Anyhow, I eventually got my passport back, now fat with lots of new pages that I'm going to have a hard time filling before the passport expires, especially at my rate of travel (2 countries in over 6 months? Come ON).

By then I was starving, so I rolled into the first not-sketchy looking sandwich shop I found and ordered their biggest sandwich, with fries and a beer, and sat on the street and ate my sandwich and drank my beer, all while attempting to not be angry about being in a city. I felt like crap. I was tired, exhausted. I felt unduly emotional and grumpy. I had weird cramps. I was dizzy a lot. I was bloated. I had been nauseated almost daily for a few hours in the morning for almost two months. It was like really bad PMS, except...I was still months overdue in the monthly bleeding department, so I was also worried, and I worried about that while I ate my sandwich.

I couldn't be pregnant, having not engaged in the requisite activities, apologies to Mary Mother of God. And I'm normally a bombproof regular bleeder: I've never missed a period despite long periods of heavy exercise, crazy travel, serious stress, major illness, and several of those combined. I worried that something serious was wrong, and wondered if I should see a doctor. Or could I be pregnant? That would have pretty disturbing implications involving being drugged and raped, something I assumed I would at least have had a clue about after the fact. I finished my sandwich, and skulked back to the hostel, now in a decidedly worse mood.

I was finally allowed to check in, and promptly claimed a top bunk as My Domain, and sat there catching up on emails and stuff for a few hours, avoiding conversation and avoiding smiling at people like an antisocial jerk. The others in my room were a group of sick Norwegians, which made me even grumpier. Fed up with my sulky self, I kicked myself out of bed, put on running clothes, and went for a run to my newly-discovered park. Which was full of kissing lovers. Which made me even grumpier. I returned back to the hostel in a supremely foul mood, showered, drank a huge happy hour beer by myself, still avoiding people, went out for a lonely and mediocre dinner, returned to the hostel, stuffed the earplugs in, and went to sleep.

Black Market Dealings and My Imaginary Fetus

I went running again the next morning, attempting to shake my funk that had started on the way back from Antarctica and that had been following me like a shouldered albatross. I ran and ran and ran, then did situps until I felt like I wanted to puke, then thought about maybe being rape-pregnant again. To distract myself, I decided to go have an Argentine Adventure and head downtown to do some black market money exchanging. I was wildly successful, shopping around for the best rates, hunting down the best traders, doing shady behind-dumpster deals, discreetly hiding my multiple stashes of cash money obtained from various sources so that nobody would know how much I was actually carrying, and coming away almost twice as rich as I had started the day. I bought myself some semi-stylish, inexpensive sandals to celebrate, my cute Chiloe shoes having been completely worn to sole-less. And I went to a pharmacy and bought a pregnancy test.

Downtown BA

Parktown BA

Then I decided to go explore another of the green spots on the city map, a big nature reserve nearby. It was surprising nature-y and I found a nice spot to sit on a bench and read more of my book, but I couldn't focus. I kept thinking about being pregnant. What if I was?

I thought about it. I've always wanted kids. I sure didn't ever want to have them under the circumstance of having been drugged-raped, but I still thought that if there was a child inside me, I wanted to be its mother. Then I remembered all of the drinking I had done in the past months and felt immediately terribly guilty, and apologized profusely to my imaginary fetus. I assumed everyone I knew would think I was crazy if I decided to have the baby, but an abortion was out of the question for me. I'm not the sort of person to picket abortion clinics because for me it's a personal and not a black and white moral issue (besides, it seems to me that picketing abortion clinics is an ineffective and jackass way of going about an extremely sensitive and personal issue). But for me, ever since seeing a collection of pickled fetuses at various developmental stages at a museum, it's been burned in my head that a fetus is little human, and humans have a right to live, and that right to live outweighs my right to anything except maybe my own physical safety (and in a battle of self-defense, sorry fetus...I've got a bit of an upper hand). I also never bought the "life worth living" argument because who am I to judge what sort of life is worth living? Someone I had the Abortion Conversation once asked me if I would feel the same way if I found out my fetus had Down's Syndrome. Of course! I know it would be difficult, but I would happily be the mother of a child (and adult) with Down's. Some of the nicest, happiest, and arguably wisest people I know have Down's. Anyhow, I knew that was a discussion, and a difficult one, that I would have to have with many of my best friends, most of whom are militantly pro-choice. Not to mention the "no, I don't want to give it up for adoption just because I would be a single mom," conversation with my family.

All that thinking made me need to pee, convenient, since that's what is needed for the pregnancy test, which in the middle of all that thinking, I had sat and read the Spanish instructions for (having never had the occasion to take a pregnancy test before). I needed a 10-second stream of 3-hour old pee. Whatever that meant, but I was pretty sure I had that. I looked around, crawled off into the apparently alligator infested (? really?) bushes, and peed on the end of a little white and purple plastic stick, which yes, was weird.

Modo de uso: How to find out if you've got a 2-month old proto-human incubating inside you in three easy steps. The fact that urine probably shouldn't be blue doesn't seem to bother these people.

Not in the pregnancy test directions but conveniently posted elsewhere: avoid getting eaten by alligators.

Then I capped it, and decided to not spend the next 5 minutes obsessively watching it to find out my fate for the next rest of my life, and went off to walk to the beach. I got to the beach, sat down, held my breath, pulled the stick out of my purse, and...

BAM

Not pregnant.

I was simultaneously relieved, a tad disappointed, and suddenly scared. Because if I wasn't pregnant, then I probably had Cancer Part 4 involving a tumor the size of a basketball that had taken over my overies, or had been infected by aliens, or was otherwise Seriously Messed Up.

The Recovery

Back at the hostel, I vented my concerns to the Former PhD Advisor Known as Frank, who asked me if I was maybe anemic. Anemic! Yes! That would explain everything! I had always had problems with mild anemia, and with the exception of the occasional asado, had been eating very little in the iron department. Excellent, I thought, I'm only in the best place in the whole world to fix this problem: Argentina, the land of Great Steak. So I immediately set out to eat ALL THE STEAK. (yes, I know there are other ways to get iron, but I love steak, and when in Argentina...)

So I asked for advice about where to go to get steak, and was told that if I hurried, there was a restaurant a 15 minute walk away that had a Steak Happy Hour that involved showing up at the door and getting in line 20 minutes before opening at 6:40, getting seated at 7:00 and quickly ordering, and snarfing down the food before the clock hit 8:00, when the classier customers would start showing up and the cheap backpackers would get booted from their tables. Perfect. So off I went, and I found the place, and in line I met Londoner Rob who was a Steak Happy Hour regular, and who suggested we share a table in a sort of blind speed date, "The best part is if we hate eachother, we know we get kicked out in an hour!" Except Rob was a super fun guy to talk to and also knew which steak to order, which meant that we ended up with this:

All that...for me?
(note the look of excitement mixed with terror on my face)
And yes, I ate it. For health purposes.

Needless to say, I immediately felt a whole world better. Seriously. And it was steak for every meal I could get from there on out. And it was like I was a whole new person.

The next day I went running again and didn't mind the lovers making out in the park so much. Good for them.

I braved new adventures, like the post office, which turned into a big freaking fiasco that took two hours and involved me using every trick in my feminine portfolio short of offering sexual favors (actually it was the getting all feisty and argumentative that finally did the job, the whole "I'm going to be such a pain in your ass that you're going to beg me to let you do what I want so that I'll shut up and leave you alone" trick) to get them to ship my damned box. I eventually won.

Just SEND THE DAMNED PACKAGE! uuuuggghhhh

Then I went to go track down a place to buy ferry tickets to Uruguay, since I had heard that Uruguay was the Magical Land of Dollars where I could get more money to smuggle back into Argentina. Except that after a solid hour of wandering around getting lost trying to find the place they would only let me pay in dollars. "If I had them, why would I be going to Uruguay?" I asked. I didn't have any more dollars, and the tickets were really expensive, which totally defeated the purpose. Grumpy again, I consoled myself with more steak. Or rather attempted to, but the place that promised they had what I wanted didn't after I sat down, so I had to settle for chicken smothered in cheese which is what they brought me as the replacement, which both sucks and I'm allergic to. Grumpiness level increased. Plus I had blisters. Damnit.

But then I went with my roommate--fellow transplanted Angelino Emily, a vivacious Hollywood costume designer--back to the steak restaurant and all was well again. Well enough that we decided to go out and get ourselves some tango lessons at a milonga. It was pouring rain when we finished our meal (promptly, of course, at 8:00), so we took a taxi to the dance hall. Lessons, it turned out, weren't going to start for another two hours. So we ordered a bottle of wine. Tango music was playing on the speakers and there was a dance floor, so some intrepid young gentlemen found their way to where we were sitting and spun us around a bit, patient with our lack of skill.

That's me in the green dress

When the lessons started, I was immediately grabbed by a dashing young man who turned out to be a pediatric surgeon doing his residency in Buenos Aires, and who loved to tango and danced very well. Why he picked me as a dance partner I will never know, but I didn't argue, because he was fun, and it meant that I got to go to the advanced class with him. While practicing, I chatted with my partner, Ariel, and half fell in love as he told me more and more about himself and his world-saving dreams, except he confessed that he didn't like snow so I knew there was no future for us. Class ended and we rejoined the rest of the group, but I danced with the surgeon until morning, arriving back at the hostel just in time to sleep three hours before the hostel owner woke me up with a gentle shake, telling me they needed me to check out.

He woke me from one of the most vivid, colorful dreams I can ever remember having, probably a result of all of the iron now flooding my system.

Buenos Aires Dream Sequence

In the dream, I was back in the tango club, except the club not a dance hall but a dingy and cavernous warehouse, dimly lit with a few lamps on the tables scattered by the bar and one hot spotlight on the unpolished wood dance floor. The bare concrete walls were decorated with a chaos of abstract paintings on unframed  canvasses, held together by red tones that were probably pulled straight from memories of La Luna Negra, my favorite Spanish tapas restaurant back in Pasadena. The giveaway that I was dreaming was the massive anatomic heart sculpture, the size of a room, hanging red and bloody looking from the ceiling above the bar, seemingly pulsating slowly to--or was it the source of?--the beat of the nostalgic tango music.

My pediatric surgeon was back, but he was a gaucho now, lost and out of place in this big city but at home among the bola performers and wistful old couples. He took my hand and we danced, not in the solid open frame I had learned, but the close embrace of lovers. He led me through the slow walks and twirls with the pressure of his cheekbones alone and my steps were long and elegant and sensual like how I always imagined tango being.

In the middle of tango-ing, we were treated to a bola show at the Milonga

We melted together in my dream.

"I have a secret." He whispered. "I am a gaucho."
"I know," I whispered back.
"I live on a secret Ranchito in the city."

Then he took me to his Ranchito, except he was driving my car, except my car was white. He parked at a pediatric hospital in the middle of an old neighborhood, and led me to a tall black gate. "Welcome to my Ranchito," he said, as he opened the gate.

Inside was a secret garden. There were bushes of rosemary, jasmine, and thyme. In pots he was nursing a dozen exotic flowers that looked like jewels. He picked one with long red petals, like one of the tubeworms from hydrothermal vents, a tube of red lipstick, and gave it to me with a kiss. I followed him through rows of squash and tomatoes and corn. It was my friend Vicky's backyard garden, except everything was oversized, including an avocado tree the size of a house with avocados like hard, green grapefruits. It was lit through the fruit trees by the full moon. The city had disappeared.

In the middle of the secret garden was a round, orange, one-room earthen hut, sculpted in Cobb, straight out of one of my sustainable building books. On the outside were reliefs of serpentine trees. On the inside, sculpted onto the wall, the word AMOR. Love. Wine bottles built into the earth walls let the moonlight shine through in glittering green. Gritty tango music from a hundred years ago played over a radio that seemed at least as old.

We danced. Kissed. Sat down on his small bed covered in a wispy canopy of mosquito netting. "Do you want a baby?" he asked, "Un pequeño gauchito?"

And that's when I woke up to the shaking of the hostel owner back in the dorm room with Emily, who was still passed out.

I wrote this down because that is how I want to remember Buenos Aires: romantic, surreal, haunted with nostalgia, and saturated with the sound of tango music. And also because when I woke up I found an inexplicable, hard, green, grapefruit-sized avocado and a flower in my purse.

Emily and I decided that the proper course of action
was to leave the avocado as a ritual welcome gift for
the next guest a the hostel, hoping that it would lead
them to their own Buenos Aires adventures.

Epilogue

In various states of hangover and exhaustion, Emily and I went out to brunch to soak up the fun of the night before and then went to check out the colorful neighborhood of La Boca, which turned out to be crazily, but sort of fun in a Disneyland-esque way, toursity. We were both exhausted so we didn't last long, but we had some fun before crawling back to the hostel to take naps: her in a comfortable bed, me on a couch in the computer room since I had been unceremoniously kicked out of my bed.

Me and Emily, reliving our crazy previous night

La Boca

Emily and I and a few others from our hostel room (including the Mexican guy who I had been sleeping on top of the whole week but who had such an opposite schedule to mine that I only knew he was there because every time he rolled over the bunk would threaten to shake me out of the top bed, but he turned out to be really cool) went out to a final dinner, and then I said goodbye to this lovely, bizarre, magical city and hopped on an overnight bus to Córdoba.

Check out the story from Emily's perspective told on her blog.