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!

The rolling list of lost items

As anyone who has spent a day with me probably knows, I am hopeless at losing stuff. I am the sort of person who regularly locks her keys in her car, leaves her wallet at the check-out-counter, drops cell phones out of her back pocket into the toilet, forgets nice cameras on train rides, etc. My nickname in high school was "spaz" because of my record of doing stupid stuff (losing things, falling into creeks, forgetting it was a weekday, tripping down stairs...). During my first year of grad school at USC, there was a poster in the building bathroom taped to the inside door of the women's restroom that read:

Carie:

do you have

-your keys,

-your wallet
-your glasses

-your phone?

I have often thought that the only solution to this problem would be to get a bunch of those big ring piercings all over my body and just clip things (my phone, my wallet, my keys, my computer, my camera, etc.) to them. But I don't even have pierced ears, and that sounds painful.

But in addition to my incredible knack for losing things, I also have had incredible luck with recovering lost items. Like the time the camera that was left on the train was turned into German lost-and-found and mailed to me. Or the time my male professor emailed me telling me he had found my phone in the womens' restroom (he got strange looks for that one). One of my most memorable stories is the time I thought I left my cell phone at a gas station in god-knows-where Wyoming, and after two hours of driving on bumpy dirt roads and going out sample collecting, the phone was found on the hood of the van, and on the phone was a butterfly, peacefully sunning itself.

So, for everyone's amusement, here is the current updated list of things I've lost so far on this trip.

Item	Lost	Recovered
BECU debit card	Sep 4, Viña del Mar bus terminal?	Sep 18, replacement arrived by FedEx (2 weeks "emergency express"...right. But finally! Hooray!!
Snowboard boots	Sep 6, left on Las Leñas ski bus	Sep 6, bus driver found them and chased me down
One liner glove (brand new REI gloves! Aaargh!)	Sep 12, mountains around Pozo de las Ánimas	Need to purchase new gloves before my hands freeze off
One pair of quick-dry anti-microbial ExOfficio travel panties	Sep 19, Malargüe, Argentina: Melted while trying to dry them on the heater after a sink-washing.	Need more! SOS! Somebody!
Quick dry ultralight camping towel	Sep 20, left to dry and forgotten on the balcony of the Princessa Insolente Hostel, Santiago	Still searching for a replacement...so far no luck.
1L Nalgene water bottle w/ a rad sticker collection	Sep 27, left behind in Las Trancas (the BackChillan cabin)	Think I can sweet talk the guys into mailing it to me?

Boarding Las Leñas Days 2-3: Hiking off the thesis belly and a day so exciting I almost pooped myself

With a few minor excursions, I have maintained a pretty constant weight since I was 15 (enjoy it while it lasts, I know). One notable exception was my first exchange in Germany, where the food my host parents cooked was soooo good that I ate everything I could, and came back almost unrecognizably fattened (love you Martin & Beate, and the butter sandwiches, looooved the butter sandwiches). But after returning home, a semester on the soccer team took care of that problem pretty fast. Prior to this trip the combination of sedentary lifestyle and stress-eating during the final push to finish the thesis defense--there were entire weeks where I only moved from my seat to pull something out of the fridge and use the toilet--gave me what Germans call a "Bauchlein", which is one of my favorite German words because it sounds so adorable (whether or not mine actually was adorable is up for debate), and translates literally to "little belly".

It took less than a week in Argentina for the Bauchlein to disappear.

I thank Tom, Ellen, and traveler's diarrhea.

Ellen and Tom. Badass mountain couple extraordinaire. Tom has a face (at least the parts not covered in mountain man beard), it's just not in this picture.

The night I arrived home from Las Leñas Day 1, I sat down with Ramón to explain the latest in the debit card situation and he pointed across the room to where a couple was sitting and eating dinner. I waved and said Hola, they waved back and responded, and I knew immediately: my people! Within five minutes of conversation it was established that all of us were splitboarders here to make the best of the rainstorm. I don't know many splitboarders. I know a fair number of Randonee skiiers, but until Tom and Ellen, my sister and her ex were the only splitboarders I knew. It's not a very common thing. Yet here were two people, doubling the number of splitboarders I had ever met, and they were fellow granola Pacific Northwesterners. I had a friendcrush.

Tom and Ellen had been splitboarding in Chile and Argentina for two months. They had been to all the places I wanted to go. They spoke Spanish. They knew the ropes as much as I had arrived utterly clueless and unprepared. I latched onto them like a flea to a dog's ass. When they said they were heading back up the mountain the next morning to check it out and go splitboarding, I tagged along.

We arrived at the mountain and despite another "snow and sun" forecast, it was raining. Again. When we checked in with the ski patrol team to ask about backcountry conditions, they said "absolutely not, avalanche danger is extreme." Raining. No backcountry. No bus down out of the rain until 5:30 that evening. We sat down for an overpriced coffee to discuss the situation (hitchhike down? play cards in the lodge all day? cough up the $80 for rainy lift skiing? nothing sounded appealing). We decided to hike, despite the rain. I mean, if you're going to be stuck in the rain, may as well be moving, right? The weather gods rewarded us for our courage: almost as soon as we decided that and grabbed our gear to set off, the rain started to clear up.

We decided to hike the resort. Splitboards were broken down, skins strapped on, and off we went. At first we worried that we'd get stopped and asked to not hike on the resort, since we weren't paying and were taking up precious run space. The only people we got stopped by were folks skiing who asked:

(1) why are you going uphill? (Tom's answer: "No hay dinero para un boleto!")

(2) isn't it hard? (My answer: [pant, pant])

(3) what are those things? (splitboards are pretty rare)

Tom and Ellen on their way up the mountain

Two and a half quad-burning hours of climbing later, we got to the top of the lift, and then came the hard part on exhausted quads, boarding down the slush. At the bottom I was done. Done done done. My legs were screaming in agony. So of course I got talked into doing it again. At which point we met David, who was so impressed by our badassery that he asked if he could buy us a round of beer. Within half a millisecond we had all independently answered "Yes! (Yesyesyes,ohgodyes)"

Ellen afterwards: "Did I answer too fast? I didn't mean to sound that desperate..."

Me: "Whatever, we are desperate."

Surest way to make friends with a bunch of filthy splitboarders: say the word "Beer".
Drinking on the lawn with David, Tom, and Ellen.

There's nothing quite like skiing uphill for
working off a Bauchlein.

The forecast for the next day looked good, if warm: clear skies and balmy temperatures. Not good news for snow on the bottom part of the resort, not good for avalanche conditions, but great for hanging out in t-shirts on the mountain. We decided to head up a different side of the mountain in hopes of getting up the back all the way to the top, and continuing from there to some of the really cool-looking stuff above the resort. The avalanche bombing we were hearing made us nervous, but after an hour or so we rounded a corner to see that the upper lift was open and rejoiced! Because that meant at least they had cleared some of the area as safe.

And even better, when we made it to the base of the upper lift, the lifty waved us over and let us sneak onto the lift! Proving that while ski resorts may be run by soulless vultures who charge $80 for a day of skiing slush in the rain, the people who work on the slopes tend to be broke-ass ski bums and totally get the "I want to ski this but can't afford it" desperation that drove us to ski uphill for hours instead of just coughing up the dough to take the lift.

At the top, we ran into two guys we had seen the day before (who, and some of you will get a laugh out of this, tried to start a conversation with Ellen and me while Tom was in the bathroom with the ever-classy "Heeey laaadies"), and they offered to show us around the off-piste. Awesome, except that just as we got to the sidecountry entrance, just as we were doing a quick avalanche beacon test, ski patrol came by and closed the area, which had just avalanched (we later found out that our friend David from the day before was there when it happened, and caught it on video).

A bit discouraged but still psyched about our free ride to the top, we sat on a pile of rocks with an incredible view and had lunch as the wind attempted to blow our assess back down the mountain and succeeded in stealing one of Tom's sandwiches.

This view. Didn't suck.
OMGIMINTHEANDES!!!!

As we were sitting there, debating what to do next, we saw a little black spot appear on the ridge across from us (in the photo above, right at the end of the line of rock that starts at the upper right). "Wait...is that a person? Holy shit, it is! Whaaat?? Is he seriously going to do it?" And he did. Dropped right off the ridge and into what looked like a giant gnarly slide zone, but as we held or breaths waiting for his certain doom by giant avalanche, nothing slid. And just as if to throw a giant middle finger to the fate that let him live, the dude dropped two cliffs in a row before making perfect turns down to the basin below.

Tom: "I want that."

Bootpacking up the backside of the ridge.
This was steeper than it looks.

We debated safety, egged each other on, psyched each other out, all while subconsciously walking toward the backside of the mountain so we could climb up and around. And climb up and around we did, until before we knew it (okay, we knew it, it was exhausting), we were standing at the top where the little black dot had been close to an hour before.

And one at a time, we dropped in.

And it was good.

Until about halfway down, when, mid turn, the ominous gurgling of my stomach from some previous meal it was less than happy about hit my bowels and I suddenly, desperately, needed to shit. So I dropped faster, and the fun and adrenaline must have convinced my system to contain itself because I miraculously made it down off the mountain and survived the sprint to the toilets before exploding in the first of several rounds of toilet emergencies from my first bout of traveler's diarrhea on this trip.

Upon emerging from the restrooms and meeting Tom and Ellen where they were drinking beer on the lawn I had only one thing to say:

"Well, that was exciting!"

Tom and Ellen standing across from the Awesome that we got to board. It was a good day at Las Leñas.