The Long Road North Part V: Crossing the Antiplano on the Bus to Lima

Video of the journey

Day 1: The Creeps

I woke up early to be at the bus terminal in Jujuy before 7am. I was groggy, having spent the night on the wiggly top of three bunks in an overcrowded and poorly-ventilated hostel dorm room with Argentine and German party animal roommates who kept me up most of the night. I had my 6am revenge, but it didn't feel as sweet as sleeping would have.

My bus was not at the terminal when I arrived, but I was early enough to not be concerned. My bus wasn't supposed to leave until 7:50, but the woman who had sold me the ticket had insisted that it was important for me to be there by 7am, so 7am was when I was there, although it wasn't clear why it was necessary to be an hour early for a bus that, no doubt, was going to show up 2 minutes before departure like every other bus in Argentina ever. When 15 minutes later the bus still wasn't there I got concerned enough to ask at the ticket window, where they told me that I needed to go to another bus station a 10 minute walk away. Why the hell hadn't they put that on the bus ticket?? But I walked over, sweating hard with my giant backpack through a not-particularly-appealing neighborhood. I had been warned about rampant theft in the area and felt helpless with all of my stuff. Fifteen minutes of walking later and there was still no sign of a bus station. I asked the one guy who happened to be out on the street, who pointed further down the road. Cursing under my breath I kept walking, and found nothing. Another guy pointed me back in the direction I had just come from. There had been no buses, no terminals, nothing. But back I walked until, sure enough, I spotted a building with the name of my bus company painted on it, but it was boarded up. There was no bus, were no people, no signs of life…this can’t be right, I thought.

Waiting for the bus

I hailed a taxi back to the main bus terminal and asked again. The guy swore that the boarded-up building was where I was supposed to go. I made him promise twice that if I waited there, my bus would come and get me. He insisted that I was going to miss the bus if I didn't hurry, so I got another taxi back and sat down to wait, sitting alone on the sidewalk in front of the abandoned building on the sketchy street that was empty except for a few men occasionally staggering by reeking of piss and alcohol and making lewd comments as they passed me.

The 7:50 bus departure came and went. So did 8:00, 8:15, 8:30… I started to think that I should go back and give the guy who had promised me I needed to wait there hell for making me wait in a weird place and miss my bus, or make him call the bus and insist that they pick me up at the main terminal where I felt much safer waiting. The whole situation made me really uncomfortable.

I was about to leave when a vehicle drove slowly by, stopped, and started to back up. I wondered if it was maybe a company representative come to inform me that my bus had exploded and wouldn't be coming or something…that or life was about to get unpleasant. I discreetly pulled my Swiss Army knife out of my purse and unfolded a blade. I wasn't sure just what I planned to do with it, it was handy enough for slicing avocados but not exactly a knife-fight worthy blade, but figured a knife was better than nothing on that street. The van pulled up to where I was sitting, and a man leaned out the window.

“Hoooola,” he drawled.
“Hola.”
“Como estas?” 

I wasn’t smiling and was wondering how I’d be able to get proof that the guy was from the bus company, and decided that I wasn’t going to get in a vehicle with anyone I didn’t recognize, and I didn’t recognize this guy.

“Que necesitas?” I asked. What do you want?
“Are you sleeping here?” He asked me in Spanish. Oh great, he thinks I’m a streetwalker.
“No. I’m waiting for my bus. It’s coming soon.”
“No, honey, your bus is late! I will drive you where you are going.” To Lima? I thought. Right.
“No, gracias. I will wait for my bus.”
“Do you want a cigarette?”
“No.”
“Coffee?”
“No.”
“Oh come on pretty girl, come get a coffee with me.”
“No.”
“Just a coffee, come on honey, I’ll take care of you.”

I turned and looked him straight in the eye and said evenly,

“Déjame en paz. Leave me alone.”

He laughed, put his head back in his window, and started to inch the van forward, then stopped again and stuck his head back out the window and made kissing noises at me.

I stood up, knife in hand, and yelled,

“Fuck you, get the hell out of here. Go!”

He left.

Angry and shaken I was gathering my stuff to hail a taxi after an hour of waiting on the street, when suddenly I saw my bus come down the road. It didn't look like it was going to stop, so I walked out into the road and blocked it from passing. Sure enough, after the driver yelled at me and I yelled back and showed him my ticket, it was my bus, and the driver pulled over, threw my bags in the hold, and let me on. I was in a sour, sour mood but I’d be spending the next two days on this bus with this driver, so I figured I should at least try to be nice.

My bus ticket

The bus was full, which was disappointing. After all that time being the only one waiting for it I had hoped it would be a quiet ride, but apparently everyone had gotten on somewhere earlier down the road. There was a guy who had sprawled out across my seat, and I politely asked him to vacate my spot. He was my seatmate and I would spend the next two days smelling his BO, but he ended up being a sleeper, and I was grateful at least for that. Be it plane rides or bus rides or car rides or any rides, I like seatmates best who don’t talk. Ideally ones who don’t smell either, but I’ll take smelly over chatty. I settled into my seat for the two-day journey, then got up to make myself some oatmeal that I had cleverly thought to pack myself, since I hadn’t had breakfast yet. I got back to my seat and realized that, although I had paid for a good seat, my seat was broken and didn’t recline. At all. This was going to be a long 2-day ride.

The drive was scenic, but I had been on the first three hours of it already, so I pulled out a book and read, a book on the history of the Inca Empire.

It looked pretty much like this for 49 hours, except when it was dark.

Usually on these long bus rides I alternate between my Kindle and my laptop and snapping photos with my camera, but after that morning and all the warnings I had heard about thieves in the region, I didn’t trust anyone, and didn’t want to advertise that I had valuable stuff with me. I did shoot some videos with my GoPro, but I kept it strapped to my wrist at all times, and figured if anyone touched it, I’d punch them and scream bloody murder. A tougher target than someone knifing open one of my bags to pull out my camera or laptop. I chided myself for being so paranoid, for behaving differently than I would have in the south. In the south, passengers on the buses were usually European or Israeli tourists. It’s not that tourists don’t steal stuff, but there I was always one target among many. On this bus, I was the only non-Spanish speaker, the only person who didn’t look like they could be Peruvian, and I stood out. On other buses, people smiled at each other and shared snacks. On this bus, I got on as the last person on a full bus, a white girl with fair hair in a sea of dark faces who looked at me not with the warmth and friendliness of the south, but with frowning and suspicious, “what is she doing here?” looks. I’d smile at people, and they’d glare back at me. When I’d turn around to look behind me, there’d always be half a dozen eyes on me, the whole trip, night and day. It was creepy.

Late afternoon rolled around and we had not been fed. I wondered when they were going to bring something to eat or stop for us to get food, since I hadn't brought anything to eat other than my one packet of breakfast oatmeal. The multiple border crossings make having a food bag on the bus impossible as any food would be confiscated. Besides, my ticket read “con servicios” which means “we will feed you on the bus”, and I figured that would be good enough. At around 3pm we stopped at the Chilean border. In the three hours that we were stuck waiting to get our papers processed I could easily have walked to the nearby gas station and bought something to eat, but we were sternly told to not leave the line, and I assumed bus food would eventually come, as it always had in the past.

My giant green backpack on the border securty scanner.

My chariot for the long, long trip.

No bus food came. After being loaded back onto the bus, a woman selling egg and cheese sandwiches—i.e. everything I’m allergic to—was mobbed by the passengers and I asked the driver if we’d be eating soon. “This is your last chance until tomorrow,” he replied. WHAT?? I asked him again to be sure, explained that I was allergic to the only thing she was selling, and she had just sold out of sandwiches anyhow, that I had no food with me, that my ticket said “con servicios”, that I had nothing to eat. He was unsympathetic. I asked if I could walk to the gas station to buy something. He said no. Low Blood Sugar Carie muttered something obscene as tears welled up, and I skulked back onto the bus, slumped down into my chair, and resigned myself to a night of trying hard not to slice the arm off of my seatmate to grill for dinner.

Luckily there were some distractions from my growling stomach. Movies, as usual. Unusual was that most of the movies were not horror movies, which I was grateful for. My creepily staring busmates were scary enough. Ronan, some heist movie that I didn’t watch, Hangover III, Fast and Furious 7 (Really? There have been 7?), Rocky 7 (Grudge Match), Lone Ranger, a surprisingly not-completely-terrible movie by Sylvester Stallone about an undercover narcotics cop hiding out with is daughter in Louisiana, some terrible-looking movie with Vince Vaughn, and then a disturbing movie based loosely on the even more disturbing true story of an Austrian girl who had been locked up as a sex slave in some creep’s basement. In the movie, the guy was a stranger who had kidnapped her as a child, he waited until she came of age to start raping her, and kept her locked in the basement—except when he chained her to his bed—for 10 years before she escaped. In the real life story, the rapist was the girl’s own father who started raping her when she was 12 and kept her locked up in the basement with her seven children/half-siblings for 24 years before she escaped. That night I had nightmares about the bus driver yelling, "Obedéceme! OBEDECAME!!" (obey me) while I was locked up in the luggage hold.

And I dreamed of food.

Day 2: Welcome to Peru

I woke up dizzy the next morning, having not eaten in a full day. Breakfast didn't come. Neither did lunch, making 30 hours with no food. I slept a lot. We crossed the border to Peru, there was no food at that border crossing. I looked. I did make some friends, though, after one middle-aged woman approached me while we were waiting in line and asked if I understood what was going on. Thinking she was trying to help me, I smiled and thanked her and said I did. She thrust her papers upside down in my hand and asked if I could help her fill them out. At first I was confused. She spoke Spanish, I didn't, and the forms were in Spanish, why did she want my help? Then she started pointing to the lines as if trying to read them, but they were upside-down, and it dawned on me that she couldn't read. So I sat down with her and went through and filled out her forms for her, and just when I had finished, there were three other women waiting. I helped all of them with their forms and waited with them in the customs lines to make sure everything was okay. From then on I had people on the bus who smiled at me. Apparently the people on the bus had decided that the gringa wasn't so bad after all.

Welcome to Peru! After 7 months in Argentina and Chile, I finally made it to another country!

Finally in the mid-afternoon we stopped at a weird mud-gated building that looked like an abandoned warehouse from the outside but was a sort of restaurant on the inside. I elbowed my way to a spot in the line (one thing I had learned after two border crossings with these people was that an unwillingness to use elbows will get you left behind and unfed) and gratefully accepted the blocker-elbowings of a few of my new woman friends to keep my spot, and when I got up to the cashier I asked the women to help me order Lots of Food because I was really hungry. They were happy to hook me up with the best of hearty Peruvian Fare, and when the meal came it felt like the best meal I’d ever had. It helped that, having been starved of spice for the past 7 months, Peruvian food was legitimately flavorful. It also helped that I was famished. The women sat and ate with me, and made it clear that I was now in their protection. I was grateful for it.

Later that evening, we stopped for dinner, and I felt like my whole world was Food. It was glorious. I was in Peru. And I had food. Life was good.

Finally! A meal! Also, Pincapple and Orang.

Back on the bus, people smiled now. Maybe they had been hungry and grumpy, too. It was like being on a bus in Chile, only whereas in Chile people are warm and kind and welcoming immediately, my Peruvian busmates had taken significantly longer to warm up to me. Now that they had though they were all smiles and jokes and curiosity and advice and niceness.

I slept much better that night.

Bus rest stop bathrooms

Day 3: Arrival in Lima

The bus arrived in Lima six hours late. Six hours. Nobody seemed surprised. I didn't mind, since that meant a daylight versus a 4am arrival, giving me more time for bus sleeping, which I had now been at long enough to have worked out the optimal arrangement of baggage to produce a sleeping nest that sort of passed as comfortable. The Lima bus terminal, once we did arrive, was beautiful—an airy, glass-encased building with security guards posted at the entrances checking bus tickets, which seemed like a good sign at the time, but in reality belied the chaos outside.

My morning in Lima quickly got quite exciting. Continued in The Long Road North Part VI: Lima

I ran away to Chile and got a temp job at an Ecolodge

After I said goodbye to my family when they went home after Christmas, I had a month and a half to kill before I needed to be back in Ushuaia for…something really awesome (more about that in a future episode). What to do? As nice a home base as Bariloche had been, I was anxious to move on, and besides, there were no affordable beds left anywhere in the city beyond the few days I had booked back at the Green House Hostel. So where to go? The two remaining things on my South America bucket list were 1. Go to the Atacama Desert, see the endoliths and 2. Work for a while at some sort of sustainable/natural farm or tourist outfit.

Spotted on my bus ride out of Bariloche. WHAT IS THAT?? Borg cube crashed into an otherwise nice-looking volcano? Cerro Pantoja at the Argentinian/Chilean border.

#1 – The Atacama – was to satisfy Science Carie, the Atacama (driest hot desert on Earth—some weather stations have never recorded rain—ever!) has been the top of her World bucket list (and #3 on the Universe bucket list after Mars and the moon) ever since I read about the photosynthetic microorganisms that live inside rocks there—some seriously badass bugs.

#2 – Spend time working at a Green Nature Organic Hippie Rainbow Farm Lodge – was to satisfy Treehugger Carie who had dreamed of building an Eco Camp somewhere lovely and mountainous and running a sort of sustainable building and alternative energy demonstration center and laboratory / natural science and green engineering camp for kids. More on that in the post that follows this.

Stuff like this was pulling me back to Chile

Being indecisive by nature, I sent out emails to people involved in Atacama research asking when they were going and if there was any chance of me tagging along. At the same time, I researched Green Nature Organic Hippie Rainbow Farm Lodges in Chile and Argentina advertising a need for help, bookmarked a few that looked interesting (i.e., in a pretty location with people who worked at something more interesting than smoking pot all day and who would feed me), and sent out a few emails, including one to one particular Ecocamp in a spot in Chile I had wanted to visit at some point anyway.

I didn’t hear from anyone for a few days, so I tried to book a hostel room in nearby, but less citified, El Bolson. Still no beds available. Fine, screw you Argentina, so I found a place on the other side of the border in Puerto Varas.

Church in Puerto Varas

And then I got sick. Deathly, wheezy, coughing in a scary rattly way, fever and chills, shit-I-think-I’m-dying-of-pneumonia sick. It had started with a phlegmy cough on New Year’s Eve and wasn’t helped by hiking up a mountain for hours through the rain and freezing cold, then partying until the wee hours of morning, then hiking for hours through the rain and freezing cold back down a mountain. I woke up in the hostel on January 2^nd unable to talk and with a horrible-sounding cough, quickly developed a fever, and it was all downhill from there. But that didn’t change the no-beds-in-Argentina situation so I loaded my deathy, wheezy, coughing in a scary rattly way, fever and chills, shit-I-think-I’m-dying-of-pneumonia self onto a bus and wheezed and coughed (trying to be as good as possible about coughing into tissues and wiping my hands down with sanitizer ever few minutes to protect my innocent fellow passengers) my way into Chile. It was another 6 hour trip, which would once have seemed long, but after my 36-hour bus ride to Ushuaia seemed short and I entertained myself by, wheezing and coughing, staring out the window at the stunning views of volcanoes, and wheezing and coughing some more.

Mountains from the bus. That beige triangle is a giant mound of ash on the side of the road from a recent volcanic eruption.

More ash.

I probably should have flagged down a taxi, but being now thoroughly used to being a cheap-ass backpacker the thought never crossed my mind after I arrived in Puerto Varas and then had a few miles to hike with all of my stuff to my hostel. Lots of wheezing, coughing, breath-catching stops, and I arrived dripping sweat and completely exhausted. The upside was that I looked so miserable (and potentially dangerous to others) that a single room was found for me in the hostel attic. It was the cutest room ever, and I quickly set to work napping.

Inside the Cutest Room Ever at the Hostel Margouya in Puerto Varas

Cutest Room Ever would not have been complete without a wood etching of Che Guevara

It was another miserable, feverish night, but I was waiting for a response from my travel insurance company about coverage before I checked myself into the hospital (which would have meant the emergency room, it being a Sunday, and I’m always reluctant to call anything short of profuse blood gushing an emergency), and never got that response so never went and checked myself in. Instead I laid in bed and watched movies that my friends had generously sent to me when I went begging for brainless entertainment on Facebook (I don’t know about you, but when I’m sick I feel like my skull is full of mucus, and my brain stops working) and ate from-scratch chicken soup I made from some chicken parts and veggies I bought at a market a block from the hostel.

That did the trick, and after a few days of that (including another hostel move when I got booted out of the original one), I was feeling better enough to move on.

Bacon Avocado? 

Inside my second quarantine room at another hostel in Puerto Varas

And right about then, I got a response from Amory, the female half of the team at the Chilean Ecocamp I had hoped to work at saying that I could come and see the place and talk about what I might be able to do there. And two days later, I was back on a bus, this time to the legendary Island of Chiloé.

It was a miserable bus ride, and I was two kinds of sick, still plugged up from my dying-of-pneumonia-turned-bad-cold, and also brutally hungover. Yeah, I’m an idiot. It started when I decided to celebrate my last night in Puerto Varas and my feeling significantly better by, rather than eating chicken soup for the 5^th night in a row (my kidneys were starting to complain about the sodium strain), going out to the restaurant next door and treating myself to some of the area’s legendary seafood. On my way out, one of the other hostel dwellers told me that I could get $1000 peso beer or wine there with a special hostel card, and although I was at first hesitant to drink anything while still somewhat under the weather, I figured a beer would be good. So I sat down, at the bar because there was no table room (my first mistake), ordered my beer and a ceviche, and started chatting up the locals around me.

Puerto Varas has a large lake and a huge volcano. Making it officially awesome.

There were some great stories and conversations and when one guy insisted that he buy me a wine I didn’t refuse and then another insisted that I try the bar’s pisco sour because they are reallyreallygood, and then the bartender got involved and started having me try things, and…next thing I knew I was god-knows-how-many wines and piscos and whiskeys and and and down and in another bar scrawling my name in magic marker on the arm of a stupidly cute guy from Texas while being gently pushed out by the bar owner because it was 3:30 am and he wanted to go home.

I’m starting to develop a habit of going out for an innocent beer only to stay up all night drinking with gregarious locals. I also only seem to do this when already sick (although, admittedly, my sample size is n=2 at this point). The gregarious locals part is a blast, but the drinking while sick part needs to stop.

My downfall: I took this sign too seriously.

Despite my questionable mental state, I made it back to the hostel without incident (which was conveniently right across the street from the bar, so literally within rolling distance), but was in pretty bad shape the next morning. And I showed up at my stunningly beautiful, peaceful, healthy site of potential temporarily employment—on one of the three buses per week that head out the long dirt road to Chepu from the town of Ancud on Chiloé Island—exhausted, grumpy, still somewhat inebriated, head throbbing, stomach uneasy, having horrible menstrual cramps, wheezy, sniffly, disheveled, and reeking of alcohol. Classy.

And when Fernando, the male half of the Ecolodge team, came out to meet me as I walked down his driveway and said, “Sorry, you can’t stay here, we have no water,” I momentarily considered puking  right there to express how I felt about that news. I didn’t, instead managing to get out a semi-coherent explanation out about how his wife had said I could come, etc. Given the shape I was in, I’m surprised he didn’t throw me out. But he let me stay—for two nights until I could catch the next bus back from whence I came.

Home sweet home in the Ecolodge Dormi

Laundryline in the Dormi

So I checked into the little “dormi” (essentially a non-mountain refugio room) which consisted of a bare room with two sets of bunk beds with naked mattresses), pulled out my sleeping bag, crawled inside it, and slept for a few hours. I woke up feeling significantly, if not quite 100%, better. Then, after dinner with two lovely couples from England and Germany, I went back to sleep. In the morning I was still sick with a cold and still suffering from cramps, but otherwise better. I went for a walk to the dunes at the beach a few miles away, enjoying the quiet, pastoral landscape, the river views, and the birds, and when I came back decided to talk to the owners again about working with them for a while. It was a nice, quiet place, and I needed a nice, quiet place to relax and finally get some writing work done.

View of Chepu Adventures ecolodge from the Río Punta

And guess what? They let me stay!

Two weeks later, I’ve done a little bit of everything:

• Woken up at 4am to prepare the lodge and get guests suited up and sent off on kayaks for the Ecolodge’s Kayak at Dawn activity, then pulled them back out when they were done
• Manned the safety radio from 4:45 – 8:30 am
• Made breakfasts
• Washed dishes
• Cleaned bathrooms
• Ripped the floor out of a rotting bathroom, re-framed it, and rebuilt it
• Redid their website
• Made dinner
• Stripped beds
• Entertained guests from Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Norway, England, Canada, and the U.S.
• Folded laundry
• Done translations
• Given kayak safety orientations
• Served coffee

Guests enjoying the sunrise during Kayak at Dawn

Arranging fruit plates for guests' breakfast

Re-building a rotten bathroom floor. Step 1: Rip up cracked tiles. Step 2: rip up moldy, rotten pressboard floor; Step 3: build a new frame to support a stronger floor. Step 3: install new frame. Step 4: put down new floor on top and secure to new frame. Step 5: clean. Step 6: prettify (in progress).

Current and upcoming projects include

• Making a promotional video featuring their sustainability efforts
• Programming their beer fridge to keep track of guests’ beverage consumption
• Installing solar panels on the lodge roof

I’ve also had a lot of fun and some pretty incredible experiences

• Watching the sun rise over the Río Punta and the Sunken Forest
• Saw a pudu (world’s smallest deer) drinking from the river while kayaking
• Watched a Kingfisher fish while out on a run
• Swam with a river otter, the huilin (an endangered species), when it came up to me while I was swimming and chatted with me for 10 minutes

Sunrise over the Río Punta

Kayaks at Chepu Adventures

Bird! Diana? Helpwhatisit!

Sand dunes at the Chepu beach

It’s been great, a lot of fun, interesting, and peaceful. It’s lovely here.

So glad it worked out.

Navarino Part III: Paso de los Dientes and Descent into the Swamp

Part III in the story of my 7-day solo trek on Isla Navarino, continued from Part II: The hike begins. To start at the beginning or to see the full list of Navarino episodes, click here.

The night had been rough due to the wind and rain. 

I felt like I had been rained on all night since every time a drop of water would hit the tent in the right place hard enough (which was often), a tiny bit of spray would hit my face through the tent. I woke up at first light at 4:30 am to puddles of water inside the tent from condensation and a very damp sleeping bag (my most prized possession—my 0°F down sleeping bag—is wonderfully cozy and warm, but the minute it gets wet it becomes worthless as an insulating layer, so the damp bag was not just annoying, it was potentially dangerous). The inside walls of the tent were dripping wet and I spent a good twenty minutes sopping up the puddles with my little camp rag, wringing it out on the ground outside through the bottom zipper, soaking up more puddles, wringing out the rag, wiping down the walls, wringing out the rag, wiping down my sleeping bag and sleeping mat, wringing out the rag, and starting over in what felt like a hopeless case of bailing water out of my tent. Exhausted, discouraged, and frustrated, I went back to sleep. I woke again at 6 am, repeated the process, went back to sleep, and finally woke up for good at 8 am.

View from my campsite after Night 1

After another wipe-down of the tent, I cooked water for breakfast (oatmeal with generous scoops of honey, as well as some cookies and a half-moldy mandarin—you take what you can get in Puerto WIlliams), checking the water periodically through the bottom zipper. The sun came out briefly, cheering me up significantly and giving me a chance to partially dry out my soggy tent and sleeping bag while I made lunch (Chilean flatbread, which holds up well to a beating and tastes fabulous, some slices of packaged salami, smeared with butter and avocado) and studied my maps and trail guides. My goal that day was to cross over the Paso de los Dientes and head down a side trail to the north shore of Lago Windhond, some 13 km to the South as the crow flies. By the time I had eaten and packed and hit the trail, it was already 11 am.

The first snowfield, the tops of the peaks I'd skirt in a blizzard later in the day peaking out over the top.

The trail from the frozen lake climbed steeply up a creek bed at the north shore to a wide white bowl that was another frozen-over lake buried in a thick layer of snow. From the bowl of snow, the trail continued up a shallow snow-covered ridgeline. The sleet started almost as soon as I began the climb and turned to increasingly heavy snow as I continued, postholing through the deep, crusty snow all the way to the top of Paso de los Dientes, the first of the mountain passes of the Dientes circuit. By the time I arrived at the top of the pass, I was in the middle of a blizzard. Visibility was poor at best and there was no trail as any signs or cairns were buried in snow. But I can read a map and a compass and when I repeatedly ended up at places that, at least in the limited visibility looked like they were supposed to, I felt pretty confident that I was on track. Every once and a while after carefully picking my way across a steep snowfield that fell down into the end of my field of view or scrambling along slippery, rocky ridges I’d come onto an unburied cairn, confirming my choice of path.  However, due to the snow, the hike had taken a full three hours instead of the hour and a half I had been expecting.

Me in the Dientes in the sleet.

The views, I’m sure, would have been spectacular. I had heard that on a clear day from the pass you have stunning views of the mountains and ocean in all directions. As it was I could barely occasionally make out the outlines of the massive peaks that I was skirting.

It was still beautiful though.

I descended from the pass past more frozen alpine lakes and the snow turned back into rain and the cairns marking the trail gradually became visible again. I reached the turnoff for Lago Windhond (marked by a little arrow and LW spraypainted on a rock in a boulderfield). Scree gave way to peat at the end of the descent as I approached the beaver-dammed lake at the other side of the pass. In theory, there was a trail (I was in possession of a map showing a trail and even GPS waypoints all the way to the north end of the lake). But I kept losing the trail as the area was a maze of fallen logs and the beavers had run off with, it seemed, all the trail markers (which at this elevation were red stripes painted onto tree trunks). My GPS signal kept cutting out due to the heavy cloud cover, so was little help in finding the trail. Studying the map, I decided to continue straight on past the lake and through the bog instead of fighting through trees up ridges—the route the map showed—without a clear trail. At least in the swamp I could see where I was going.

Beaver damage along the shores of a lake south of the Paso de los Dientes

It was relatively good going along the side of the lake with the exception of some fighting through bushes until I got to the bog. It was like that scene in Lord of the Rings where Frodo and Sam and Gollum pick their way through the Dead Marshes, an absolute maze of soggy spongy ground snaking around eerie-looking holes (hereafter called the Death Swamp) that, I would soon find out, would happily pull you in and keep you there forever. I was soaking wet after the hike through the snow, and was not getting any drier slogging in the rain through the mushy bog, often slipping knee or even hip-deep into soft spots in the moss. It was like walking on a giant soaking wet sponge, complete with holes to fall into. Progress in the Death Swamp was extremely slow and, in the freezing rain, I started to lose my happy. And that was when I came across a line of water as far as I could see in either direction, too wide to jump across, even if it had been possible to get a running start in the moss. It was either attempt to hike around—wherever around was, which as far as I knew could be all the way back to the beginning of the bog—or choose my steps well and attempt to wade through.

Figuring I couldn’t possibly get any wetter at that point and may as well wade, I stepped…and immediately sank chest-deep into the muck.

The Death Swamp. Looks innocent enough in this photo, but beware!

My now waterlogged backpack rapidly became heavier as it started to fill with water and pushed me deeper into the mud, which seemed to have no bottom. I tried to stay calm, remembering horror stories from childhood about people struggling and drowning in quicksand because of their struggles and wondered if this could be similar as I tried to swim my way through the viscous goo to the other side. When I reached the bank, there was nothing solid to grab onto. Only sponge, and I was still chest-deep in mud with a heavy pack pinning me down.

After frantically smearing my hands around for a bit and realizing I wasn’t going to find anything to grab onto, I dug my arms as deep as I could into the moss on the bank to serve as anchors, and pulled on all of my climbing muscles to heave myself partly up so that my chest was on the bank and then, holding my chest up with my arms which were slipping out of the moss, I swung a leg up, and face and belly buried in the moss I wiggled, slowly, miserably, up out of the bog. It felt like ten minutes but in reality I was probably only in the water for less than 30 seconds. Still, it was more than long enough to get very, very wet, and enough to scare me. Dying in an avalanche while doing some epic splitboarding? Fine. Dying by hypothermia because I couldn't crawl my way out of a stinky hole in a swamp? Significantly less fine.

The hole that tried to eat me alive, trekking pole stuck partway in the mud inside for scale.

I threw off my drowned pack and unzipped my jacket as water poured out of it. My camera had been tucked away inside my jacket, and it had been submerged. My pockets, too, were full of water and I emptied those, wondering if any of my stuff: camera, cellphone that I had been using as my GPS, chargers, water treater, etc. would ever work again. I tried to dry things out as best I could by wiping them off with my undershirt, patches of which had managed to stay dry, but the patches were small and the rest of me was just as wet as the equipment, so I wasn’t able to do much good.

But mostly I was worried about my sleeping bag. Down bags are totally worthless when wet, and it was cold out, and if my sleeping bag was wet it was going to be a very rough night. As it turned out, however, the bag was fine. I had stored it in a plastic garbage bag and that had kept the water out of it. Same with my thermal camp clothes which I had also stashed inside a garbage bag inside my pack. My electronic stuff was maybe fried, but at least I’d be warm and dry that night.

Raindrops falling in pools in the forest. Photo taken while I was still un-miserable enough to enjoy the beauty of the rain...and while my camera was still working.

Shivering, sopping wet, hungry, and without a means of catching a GPS signal with soaked equipment and heavy cloud cover, I gave up on WIndhond and decided to head for the woods on the horizon in an attempt to find a somewhat sheltered, not-waterlogged, somewhat flat place to pitch my tent for the night. I walked as fast as I could (mostly to warm myself up) across the bog, focused on stepping on safe spots and praying for no more long uncrossable lines of mud. About an hour later, at around 6:30 pm, I made it to the woods. In the first semi-level spot I found big enough to set up my little tent I dropped my pack and attempted to build a fire, no easy task given the downpour and how hard I was shivering. Miraculously, I succeeded, and as the fire grew I hung my clothes and soggy boots on branches around it to try to dry them.

I was shaking hard from the cold, too hard to get my tent out of its bag. Remembering stories about the island’s natives who had preferred nudity to clothing because the place was always so damned wet and wet clothes are colder than bare skin, I stripped naked next to the fire. I felt immediately warmer. The natives were right, standing next to the fire with the rain falling on my bare skin, I was far warmer than I had been all day, and was able to stop shivering long enough to set up my tent.

Campsite. Yeah, camera wasn't working too well after its swim in the Death Swamp.

I could see steam coming off of my boots and clothes and hoped that the flux of water out of my clothes via steam was greater than the flux in by rain dripping in through the trees. Item by item as my stuff went from soaked to merely soggy, I tossed things into the tent. There’s nothing quite like snuggling with wet gear, but I didn’t want stuff to get any wetter.

As I arranged things in my tent I suddenly smelled smelly sock…smelly sock…SMELLYSOCK! I bolted out of the tent and saw one of my socks on fire. I snatched it and the other clothes items away from the fire, but it was too late for the socks. The toes of one had burned clean off, and there were large scorched holes in all the others. Shit. I had brought my only two pairs of good hiking socks, planning to switch them out each day and wear one pair while the other dried, and now both were burnt. I had brought one other pair of thinner socks, and although the thinner socks were much harder on my feet and I had meant them as dry camp socks, they would have to do.

My sad-looking campsite the following morning.

I didn’t even bother to cook dinner. I ate the rest of my open pack of cookies, my second sandwich that I had been too wet to eat before, and a few handfuls of cold Garbonzo mash instead. It was damp in the tent but at least I was out of the rain. My phone hadn’t died during the swim, but I still wasn’t getting a GPS signal. Still, after looking over the maps again I thought I had a pretty good idea of where I was and figured I was within an hour or two of the refugio that supposedly existed at the northern end of the lake. If I could make it to the refugio in the morning, I could hang out there and dry my stuff. Although I had heard that the place was infested with giant somethings—the Spanish word wasn’t one I had understood sounded like some sort of rodent but could be mosquitoes. Also, I had seen a few fresh-ish footprints of a group of three or so men on the way down from the pass earlier that day so it could be infested with humans as well. Being alone I was even less keen on seeing a group of unknown men than giant rats or mosquitoes. So as I curled up in my sleeping bag wearing every item of dry clothing I had (including, thankfully, my down jacket) I prayed for a dry day, at least a day without any more dunks in the Death Swamp, and that the refugio would be empty when I arrived.

Despite the wet, I fell asleep early and slept well that night, no doubt completely and utterly exhausted.

But I survived, and the story continues in better weather: Navarino Part IV: Refugio Charles and Lago Windhond

My Hovercraft is Full of Eels: Adventures in Argentine Banking

I have no cash, it's snowing (actually objectively beautiful) in town, the ski area just closed for the season, the bus service to the mountains shut down, the bike shops don't accept credit cards...essentially, I'm stuck. Stuck until my ATM card shows up. So at this point I'm just blogging to keep myself amused.

But I had a VERY DRAMATIC, SUPER-RAD, EXCITING trip to a bank today! Read on for the full, uncensored, shocking account!

Completely out of cash, and with my Emergency Express debit card replacement not scheduled to arrive for another week (two weeks after ordering it),  it was time to try other options.

I had half jokingly asked a few places around town for temporary employment, but after a few very confused looks and one prostitution related response, abandoned that line of inquiry.

This was at lunchtime, when the place started to
clear out, but this is one of eight sets of seating
areas in the bank, and that was the only row of
seats that wasn't full in that particular moment.
It's Monday! Party in the bank!

Having money wired via Western Union or other agents (I keep hearing Xoom is great in Argentina, but only has 40 offices in the country and none even in the same state as where I am) wasn't an option:there were no offices in, or anywhere near town. I didn't have a PIN to use with either Visa card I brought, and Visa claimed there were no bank locations within 75 miles that worked with Visa where I could maybe get a cash advance.

But I was desperate, and determined to at least ask. So, after spending an hour looking up phrases I might need and copying them into my notebook, I headed to the town bank. And it was packed. At one point I counted 76 people (not counting 5 babies) waiting to be helped.

A22: The Winning Ticket?

I arrived at 11:30 and took Number A22, at which point the screen read E65. I took a seat and desperately hoped the ticker didn't run all the way through Z. An hour and a half later of playing with learn Spanish apps on my phone, I heard the familiar 'ding' announcing the next number being called, and was immensely relieved to see it go from E99 to A01.

Since it had taken an hour and a half to get from E65 to A01, I calculated that I now only had approximately 56.6 minutes of waiting left. But lo! only half an hour later, at A11, the Lunchtime Effect set in and as there was no A12, A13, A14, A15...you get the point...I started to clutch my ticket, get all of my important documents tother, and brace in a sprinter's crouch to be totally ready lest the the quick flipping of numbers stymie my chance to speak to the man behind the glass wall. A22 was called at 1:34pm, and I scurried up to the window just as the man behind the glass wall had his finger ready to call for A23.

Screenshot from my very helpful
Learn Spanish phone app.

I was ready. Sort of . Clearly whatever my opening line was wasn't making any sense (maybe because of things like the photo at right), so I passed my notebook with a carefully-written translated explanation of my situation through the hole in the plexiglass shield to the teller, and he read, and chuckled, and read, and chuckled, and read, looked up, and said....

"No."

I protested, "But I have two forms of I.D.! My visa card! I have no cash! Pleeeaaase?"

"No."

"Is there anyone, anywhere else in town who might be able to help?"

"No."

"No?"

"No." And with that, he waved me away, and A23 approached the counter.

At least I tried?

This is unrelated to the post, but if
anyone reading this is a bird nerd,
what is this cool dude?
Spotted him while walking at the
edge of town. He looked sort of
like a falcon, was about 6" big,
plump, beautiful gray-tan, white,
and black markings.

I returned, defeated, to the hostel, where Creepy Dude from the previous post was waiting, so I snuck out the back door and scurried off to wander aimlessly through town, letting the falling snow calm me down.

In an effort to cheer myself up by giving myself something to look forward to, I stopped by the bus station to see if there was any possible way I could pay for a ticket to Las Leñas with credit card since I had literally no cash (something they had scoffed at before). They replied that it was a moot point, Las Leñas  had just closed for the season and there was therefore no more bus. 

Even more dejected, I moped in circles around town until I was famished, my being famished falling conveniently at exactly the time when everything in town closes for the afternoon, but chanced upon a restaurant tucked quite a few blocks from the main part of town, that, like some celestial gift of mercy, had a Visa sticker on its window. And I drowned my frustration in a mini bottle of very excellent local Malbec while eating some very excellent local trout (a regional specialty), and decided that if I could just learn a few key phrases (like whatever "If you touch me again I'll feed you your nuts, creepface" is in Spanish), I could deal with this situation.

At least lunch was good. Excellent, actually.
And not only was that bottle of wine adorable,
it was also muy delicioso.

And, belly happy, I returned to the hostel, where creepface was gone, and here I sit, blogging, to decompress from what's been an upsetting and frustrating few days.

Except I have excellent news for tomorrow: I explained the latest news in the ongoing saga of my debit card and consequent inability to pay for my room at the hostel to Ramón, who once again was very forgiving. I asked him for advice on what to do to pass the wait time until the card arrives, and he again said "no problem" and offered to loan me his bike (for transportation to cool places) and his cell phone (in case I get stranded somewhere) and sending me off on an adventure to go see something awesome tomorrow. Once again proving that there is at least one shockingly, unnecessarily nice person for every creepface out there. Ramón, you saved my day. Thank you.

A few travel observations on my 2 week Travelversary

I've been in South America for exactly two weeks now. In that span of time, I've managed to:

• Visit two countries
• Stay overnight in three different places (way more if you count naps on the bus)
• Make several new friends
• Lose my debit card and barter credit-card-purchased groceries for cash for survival
• Go snowboarding, hiking, caving (the lite version), and scramble up several mountains
• Survive a bout of diarrhea
• Work off my Thesis Bauchlein (great German word for a little belly)
• Learn a whopping handful of Spanish phrases, and learn to speak them poorly
• Keep my 4 pairs of underwear relatively clean

When traveling, you expect to have stuff happen that is uncomfortable and/or unexpected, and you roll with it. But there are some surprising things I haven't managed to get used to yet. The biggest ones:

• Spanish. I don't remember traveling without speaking the local language well being so difficult from past travels, but maybe it's because I've never done it alone before. It's taken me a full two weeks to stop being intimidated by just going to the store without a translator. My Spanish is way better than, for example, my Greek or Croatian or Polish, but I feel like I've had way more problems communicating with people here than I ever did while traveling around Europe. I'm trying to learn, but I've been stymied by my terrible memory compounded by my brain's bad habit of finding German words when searching for Spanish words that I've learned.
• Throwing used toilet paper in the trash, not into the toilet. This is a required practice here in Malargüe, because supposedly the sewage system can't handle T.P. At first I found this extremely gross, then I reasoned it's no more gross than throwing used tampons in a trash can vs. the toilet. Still, old habits die hard and I keep praying my toilet doesn't overflow at some point from my occasional slip-ups. It already occasionally burps up unholy smells.
• Dr. Bronner's. I remember it really being the magic soap while backpacking and camping in the past, so I brought a bunch with me to be my all-in-one shampoo, body wash, laundry soap, hand soap, etc. It only took 4 showers with it for my hair to start forming dreads. I'm tempted to run with it (plus it smells so good!), but I'm already almost out from doing sink laundry every few days...
• Not having a desk. I never was one to do the whole "take the laptop to a cafe" thing, even if there were cafes with WiFi here or even if my battery would last long enough to get anything done. So the work I've done getting paper manuscripts revised, photos edited, and these blog posts written has been from sitting in bed, attempting the best posture I can manage, where I have some peace and quiet, power, and internet.

Nothing major, nothing serious, but interesting, the things that I didn't see coming, vs. the problems I expected. Travel...always an adventure!