Route 40

The storied Route 40 stretches the entire length of Patagonia in Argentina, running north to south along the eastern side of the Andes. The majority of it is unpaved and in many places it´s too narrow for two vehicles to pass each other. The landscape in this part of Patagonia is remarkable mostly for the vastness of it´s emptiness. I was literally on a bus for two days, rambling over washboard roads and watching the exact same scrub brush passing by like so many dead, dull-green porcupines. Everyone warned me about this trip -- it´s actually faster to take a bus on decent roads all the way the east coast to get to where I´m going -- but it seemed like one of those things that a person should see.

And it is. You get the impression that the land allowed this tiny road to be cut across it the way a heavyweight would offer you one free shot at his chin just before pummelling you. Just because you´re on a road and in a vehicle doesn´t for a second mean you´re in charge.

Two days. Fortunately, there was a pretty fun crew on board and once the cabin fever set in things degenerated into borderline madness. Our overnight stay in a Perrito Moreno (hardly even a town) motel with holes cut in the floorboards for toilets spilled over into the poolhall across the street and lasted much later than it should have, making day two kind of brutal for a slew of folks.

Would write more on this, but have to go catch a bus. Today was a day of tracking down literary ghosts in Esquel, just off Route 40, before heading off to the hippy outpost of El Bolson. I talked an off-duty cabbie into letting me pay him way too much money to drive me out to the cabin where Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid spent a couple years in semi-retirement before returning to a life of crime. Bruce Chatwin writes about this in his Patagonia book. Also went to see "La Trochita," the train Paul Theroux nicknamed "The Old Patagonian Express" in his book of the same name, which chronicles his train trip from Boston to Argentina.

My fantasy football team continues to impress me.

All for now. Gotta catch a bus.

Coming Soon: El Chalten

This town doesn´t have a single square foot of paved road, but it´s
completely zoned out and the area they´ll be using for Main Street is
already a 4-lane parkway with a decorative median. It´s tucked right
into the Fitz Roy range of the Andes and dramatic snow-capped peaks
jutt up everywhere you look. Right now, there´s nothing to offer
beyond a modest system of trails providing access to the mountains,
but in five years it will surely be Aspen.

Unfortunately, the word is out and the tourists have a head start on
the contractors, which means four out of our five visits to the
coolest little bar/brewpub I´ve ever had the pleasure of patronizing
have been ruined by large groups of well-heeled, smugly-dressed,
over-fifty British tourists who delight in mocking the owners´
generous (and relatively skillful) attempts to address their
complaints about the menu in English. It made me want to start
swinging a two-by-four.

Enjoyed a gluttonous Thanksgiving feast with The Duchess at a
restaurant named after one of the Tierra del Fuegian Indians Fitzroy
kidnapped and and brought back to England for training in manners and
language (see "in vein of literary tradition stretching from Pygmalion
to My Fair Lady") only to see his efforts fail miserably (due to
several factors, not the least of which were the mid-20s male Indian´s
obsession with and frequent attempts to rape the adorable
12-year-old-girl-and-namesake-of-aforementioned-restaurant), inspiring
him to find a ship to haul their asses back to South America ASAP (a
role which was filled by a boat undertaking a scientific trans-world
voyage several years longer than what Fitzroy wanted to sign up for, prompting the
vigorously-Christian captain to tragically invite a young student
named Charles along to keep him company) where the dinners all actually came with sides rather than just being enormous chunks of meat on plates.

Got a little tongue-tied while trying to explain the American
tradition of Thanksgiving, and am convinced that I´ve forgotten some
very important part of it. I got through the part where we give
thanks for all our blessings on Thanksgiving because in late November
a few hundred years ago some Indians bailed out a bunch of hapless,
white settlers on the East Coast who were about to spend the winter
starving to death, for which we repaid them soon thereafter by systematically exterminating them. After that, I got stuck. Is there something more in there that I´m forgetting?

El Calafate, Argentina

Went to see another glacier today, this one with enormous chunks of ice calving off and tearing into the aqua-blue lake below. Ho hum. Had another steak as big as my head for $5 last night that was so tender I cut it with a butter knife and am getting quite bored of this kind of thing. More insanely good local red wines that I´ve never heard of and the only real treat was that I finally got a real cup of coffee. Not sure I can take this much longer.

Had a good night at the casino on our last night in Ushuia with Alex and Fiona (Aussies) after draining down beers at John Lennon´s bar and feasting on king crab. This was a good thing, but also brought back memories of the rather bad night at the casino in Puerta Natales, which I had somehow managed to completely forget. So if you´re counting, Tindall, that´s even-steven in match play on the "Gambling South of the Equator Scorecard" though I fear I´m still way behind on strokes.

Rented a car last night to take to the glacier this morning with a British guy from the Ushuia hostel who´s had malaria before, a pretty wet-behind-the-ears vegetarian kid from Birmingham, AL, who is about to go into med school because he couldn´t find an investment banking job, and The Duchess. I stood there with the two other guys after finishing off the paperwork. We intended to leave the car at the agency overnight and return the next day for our departure. The car, however, had to be moved from the driveway into the street.

I, unfortunately, am still suffering from severe tennis elbow which has rendered me incapable of skillfully operating a manual transmission. The British guy looked at me and said, "I´ve had a beer, so I´d rather not operate this vehicle." The Alabama kid, being somewhat in awe of this older, distinguisted-sounding Brit, concurred.

"Yeah," he said. "I drank a beer, too."

"Jesus," I said. "Are you guys wasted?" It was only eight o´clock in the evening. The dinner restaurants weren´t even open yet.

"No," said the Brit. "But I´ve had a beer."

"Me too," said the American kid.

"For the love of God," I said to myself, preparing to go move the car myself, tennis elbow and all.

"Do you think you can just, you know, pull the car 15 feet to the curb?" I asked the Brit.

"Surely," said the Brit, "This fellow has another key and can move the car for us later.

He then proceeded, in broken Spanish, to make this request. It is a request that would be absurd in any language under the most ideal conditions, but in broken Spanish I´m sure it sounded even more ludicrous. The owner of the car shop looked over at me and made a gesture like, "Is this guy serious?"

I had no choice but to nod back in grave affirmation.

"No," said the man in Spanish. "I do not have another key."

"Do you think," I asked the American, "That you can move this car 15 feet to the curb without crashing it?"

"I don´t know," he said. "I´ve had a beer." He said it exactly the same way his hero, The Brit, had been saying it.

"Surely," said the Brit. "Surely we can just leave the car in the driveway tonight."

More broken Spanish.

"No," said the owner. "The car must go in the street."

Finally, the British guy assented and got behind the wheel to move the car 15 feet to the curb.

And sure enough, he just about damn near pulled into traffic the wrong way and killed himself.

Ushuia, Argentina - Tierra del Fuego

Ushuia, on the island of Tierra del Fuego, bills itself alternatively as the "Southernmost City in the World" (Geographically Inaccurarate) and the "Ass of the World" (Anatomically Inaccurate and Exceedingly Self-Depricating). It´s situated on the Beagle Channel, and I´ve absorbed more Darwin history in the past 48 hours than in the rest of my life combined. Need to do some more investigating, but was shocked to know that the HMS Beagle originally sailed with half a mind to validate the Christian Genesis story, and that it´s pivotal role in Darwin´s development of the most heretical scientific theory of all time drove the ship´s captain, Robert Fitzroy, to eventually do himself in.

Took a boat into the channel the other day and climbed to the top of an island where it was possible to see both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Then took a walk down the harbor and found a bar named after John Lennon. Then stood in the middle of an intersection with jagged, snow-capped mountains down one street and the the rough blue sea down the other.

I like this place.

There are two Irish bars and no Irish people. The prices (now that we´re back in Argentina) are much nicer than in Chile, where I was absolutely scandelized by the $17 I paid nightly for the hostel in Punta Arenas.

(Incidentally, on my last day in Punta Arenas I stopped on the sidewalk for 10 minutes to watch a small, wiry man mop his brow with a handkerchief in between brief sessions of attempting to break up the concrete in his driveway with furious swipes of a woodaxe while his daughter practiced doing handstands a few feet away. He seemed slightly perturbed and confounded by the task, but not the least bit discouraged.)

Have met several people here on the way to Antarctica, one of whom was going to attempt to retrace Shackleton´s embattled route across South Georgia Island.

Rented a car yesterday with Alex and Fiona (Aussie couple), The Duchess, and Pedro the Columbian Lion, whose driving was absolutely fearsome. We took gravel roads over mountain passes at speeds I wouldn´t have thought possible even on a flat grade in such a vehicle (VW Golf knockoff) and saw more of the island in 12 hours than most people probably see in a week.

Pedro really wanted to see penguins, and when it became apparent that our day was going to end without having seen any penguins he got angry in a way that I can only describe as "Columbian." It was at this point that the driving became particularly acrobatic.

The electricity went out in our hostel today and I didn´t even notice it for two hours. I´m not exactly sure what the significance of this is, but it struck me as being somehow poignant and a good sign.

Punta Arenas, Chile

Arrived in Punta Arenas last night with The Duchess and we proceeded to gorge ourselves on the King Crab and Scallops that are the local specialty. Could barely move afterward.

Spent the day wandering around the local Municipal Cemetary, where a person can be dead in some serious Catholic style or some serious Catholic poverty, depending on your preference. Saw everything from the massive mausoleum of the main local sheep baron, which supposely is a scale model of some famous monolithic European monument that I´ve never heard of, to a hand-pained wooden sign announcing the premature death of a nine-month old child hung over a small patch of fenced garden about the size of a notebook. The graves are all decorated with that enthusiastic disregard for symmetry and composition that typifies the religious Latin American aesthetic, with as many flowers, figurines, framed photographs, grisly crucifixes, beatific Madonnas, thick candles, and tacky plaques crammed into the colorfully-painted plastered concrete-walled sites as possible. Enormous Marge Simpson topiaries separate the rows and the outer edges are lined with vaults about eight high where a coffin is inserted morgue-style behind a small picture window displaying the various aforementioned devotions. A wheeled ladder of the kind you might see in a nice bookstore allows people to pay their respected to loved ones in the upper rows.

Heading to Tierra del Fuego tomorrow by the usual route after our plans to take busses across a less-trodden path were foiled by the destruction of a gravel road somewhere in Argentina.

Learned this today: Even though the water flushes in a different direction and the constellations are all different down here, the smell of freshly cut grass in the sun is exactly the same as back home.

Also: This may be the house where Shackleton came to ask for a Chilean boat to go rescue his men when he finally arrived in Punta Arenas:

Torres del Paine, Chile

Just finished four days of backpacking in Parque Nationale Torres del Paine and it was among the best I´ve ever done, due in no small part to the fact that we experienced the nearly uheard-of phenomenon of nearly 100 consecutive hours of beautiful and wrathless Patagonian weather. Hiked up to the terminus of the South Patagonian Ice Field, which was a little too to wrap the noggin around, as well as two groups of bizarre rock formations called The Horns and The Towers.

Managed to negotiate the park with an unwieldy but outstanding group of ten folks, which was a feat in itself. Pedro the Columbian Lion ("I went to college in the United States, at Lehigh in Pennsylvania. You know, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Lehigh...") led the charge. Also present were Paul and Tony Finn (the crazy Irish cousins with the traffic cone company) and Graham the Brit (who you might remember from such adventures as "Bombarded with Snow and Misery at Salcantay Pass in Peru" and "Abandoned by the Side of the Road in the Middle of the Night Somewhere Outside La Paz, Bolivia." Tim and Faye, who were in on Freddy´s Bolivan Jeep Ride also made it, along with Alex and Fiona (really cool Aussie couple I met on the bus from Pucon to Puerto Montt and who came madly correct on The Boat), some random Israeli guy who actually disappeared halfway through the trip, and a marathon-running, wise-cracking, PR/Investor Relations-slinging girl from London who actually says things like, "I waited diligently for the chap ahead of me to cross the suspension bridge before proceeding as per the notification on the signpost only to find the Irish lads bouncing about behind me, sending the bridge asway to and fro like a couple of muppets," and who I suspect may also be a Duchess.

Was introduced to a different philosophy regarding backcountry eating on the first night when Graham and the Irish lads scoffed at my dehydrated pasta held forth with a sumptuous dinner of asparagus soup, crackers with pate, a can of corn, a can of pork and beans which they ate with hotdogs fried in butter (from a tub), a whole loaf of baked bread (with more butter from the tub), condensed milk, a liter of wine, and (I shit you not) a *whole* roasted chicken in a plastic container. I immediately tore into them, mocking their big-city ways relentlessly until they finished eating and offered me their leftovers, which I devoured ravenously in what would become a ritual I craved and anticipated furiously for the remainder of the trip.

Back in Puerto Natales now, where the church in the main square has been piping secular music into the air all day long through god-awful PA speakers in a scene reminiscent of the detainment camp where the Russians throw the parents in Red Dawn. A few minutes ago, some guys set up a stage with a somewhat bigger PA *directly in front of* the church, pointing straight at it, and are in the early stages of organizing what I can only assume is going to be a kind of "Karaoke in the Streets" festival, blaring "You Can Leave Your Hat On" directly into the face of the church´s choral music. As you can probably imagine, watching this happen was a rather bizarre experience.

Saying goodbye to most of the crew yet again tomorrow as they head toward New Zealand and I start the push down to Tierra del Fuego.

Amazingly, I´ve run out of books and was reduced to picking up a Spanish translation of Bukowski´s last novel to practice my Spanish. Not sure it´ll be the best primer but it´s sure to be full of some colorful new words.

Puerto Natales, Chile

Trying to recover this afternoon in Puerto Natales, Chile, having dug down deep to make sure I did my part to contribute to the festivities and reveries aboard the cargo ship Magellan over the past four days while it passed through various fjords and channels in Chilean Patagonia. After years of taking bribes from eager travellers seeking passage, the owners of the Magellan finally just added "tourists" to the array of freight they´re willing to transport and built some no-frills accomodations into the vessel. The result is kind of a backpackers´ Cancun on water, complete with "pub," "dining room," "meals," a visit to South America´s largest glacier, and a heavily-encouraged day-trip to a completely uninteresting island community which survives by giving tours highlighting the degree to which the island is unremarkable.

Spent days lounging on deck in the sun while mountains rolled slowly by, catching up with various folks I´ve met along the way, getting sunburned, reading, and then tearing into a vastly enjoyable string of grade-school era cocktail activities, most of which were initiated by the Brits who apparently have elevated the common "Drinking Game" to a form of High Art. A Columbian guy we met introduced elements of counting in Spanish to a game I remember from 6th grade Algebra and I´m quite certain that I remember another game we played, which combined stomp-clapping in rhythm and various ludicrous hand-gestures indicating the identities of various participants, from my brief stint at Aunt Betty´s Pre-School in Wheaton, IL.

Also, the views and vistas were breathtaking.

One of the Irish guys was up all night last night and arrived at breakfast this morning insisting that he´d slipped undetected into the bridge during the early morning hours only to be confronted with the alarming and stupifying reality that the boat had been navigating through twisting, 80-meter wide channels on auto-pilot for the entire night.

It is not known for certain whether this is true.

Tomorrow we head to Parque Nacionale Torres del Paine for 4 days of hiking along a route we´ve coined "The Bolivian Prance" in honor of Pedro, the Columbian guy with all the good info.

In other, more important news, Tom Brady and Marvin Harrison went absolutely berzerk last Monday and led my fantasy football team to a stunning, 60-point comeback victory over the Montlake Maulers.

Puerto Montt, Chile

Nothing happened today, unless you count the merciless beating my fantasy football team suffered for the third straight week. I'm worried that Cadillac Williams' career might be finished before it ever began.

Spending the next four days on a boat, and am hoping the medicine I bought for motion sickness is actually medicine for motion sickness and not for heartworms.

This is a picture of me standing on salt:

Valparaiso, Chile

Went to visit Pablo Neruda´s house only to find that Pablo Neruda no longer lives there. Apparently, he´s dead.

This may have worked out in my favor, however, because I´m not sure the living, breathing incarnation of the Nobel-honored poet would have invited me in and let me go through his stuff the way it turns out I was able to. Photographs were strictly forbidden, and though my secret plot to sneak a shot of his fourth-floor writing desk at the changing of the security guards during lunchbreak was foiled, I did manage to smuggle out a photograph of his third-floor bar.

I walked past a metalworking shop today where four Chileans were rocking out to "It´s So Easy" under the sultry gazes of three dozen naked women pinned to the wall.

They still say Pinochet´s too caved in the brain to stand trial for disappearing half the population of his country during his reign. What a sham.

Finished the Che biography, and though he turns out to be a character I could never really get behind (Heavy suppression of the free press, compulsory executions for *all* post-revolution political dissidents, insistance that armed conflict is the *only* way to effect political change, etc.) there are too many Clint Eastwood anecdotes about his superhuman dedication to a cause he truly believed in for me to resist admiring, to some degree, certain aspects of his life.

I should say, however, that if any knee-jerk lefties out there are considering getting a Che tattoo, t-shirt, or towel rack, you may want to read up on him a little. He´s not the exactly the kind of guy you´d want your kids looking up to.

Been trying to find a Spanish edition of one of Jorge Luis Borges´ books to practice with, but having a devil of a time. The Chileans hate him because he´s Argentinian and the Argentinians are down on him for being too European. On top of this, bookstores down here are not only lacking in any kind of alphabetized schema, but also full of translated novels by Elmore Leonard and Tom Clancy.

A girl from Buenos Aires asked me why American movies are so violent and I told her I honestly didn´t know. She said that Sex and the City was much better than any American movie and I found myself unable to argue.

Mendoza, Argentina + a bizarre episode

After some mellow time in Argentina´s northwest it´s back cracking again in Mendoza.

On the night bus here, my vaguely prayer-like superstitious nagging to be seated next to a Brazilian supermodel was nearly answered when I awoke five hours into the trip, around 2am, to find an exotically stunning Argeninian girl hovering over me and declaring that she´d been assigned the same seat as me. My brain immediately snapped into action and came up with about 74 different ways we could go about sharing the luxurious semi-reclining window seat but just when I´d narrowed it down the the five most attractive ones she stormed off to find a conductor.

I suddenly became afraid that I´d missed my stop and was supposed to have vacated seat 33 several hours ago, so I asked the other folks in my row where we were. One of them responded that we were in seats 30-33. I then yawned, rubbed my eyes and said, "Yes, but in what city are we?" to which they responded with laughter and the answer, "Catamarca." I was safe, hadn´t missed my stop, and was suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of warmth and goodness at having actually cracked what was apparently a joke for a handful of locals.

In the end, the situation was unfortunately sorted out and I spent the night alone in my seat.

Spent two nights in Mendoza hanging out with a pretty colorful array of characters from my hostel, including an ex-pat Canadien who´s been down here for three years, a German pharmacist, a 22-year old dreadlocked hippy from Amsterdam who´d just finished medical school and was on her way to a Rainbow Gathering in Uruguay, and most stunningly of all a 23-year-old blonde, vegetarian, deaf, Swedish girl who was travelling by herself through South America for two months and, by her own admission, doesn´t even like soccer.

Since no one else knew sign language, much less European sign language, we spent our time communicating by scribbing things on pieces of paper and passing them back and forth, eventually even resorting to this method between the people who weren´t deaf. At one point it occurred to me that this didn´t seem the least bit strange, which in turn *did* seem strange, until I realized that I´d been in training for that moment for some time due to the ridiculous explosion of cell phone text messaging I´d been caught up in over the past year.

The Swedish girl was devastatingly sweet and funny, firing off missives in perfect English like "You guys are such *dudes*" in response to an episode of scar-and-injury show-and-tell and, "It´s too dark to talk out there," when someone suggested stepping into the back yard for a cigarette.

I´m pretty sure I wasn´t the only one smitten.

(Incidentally, it would be irresponsible of me not to report that *every* woman in this city is a walking magazine cover.)

Hopped on a bus with some folks to go see the 6,900m Andean mountain Aconcagua, the highest peak outside of the Himalayas, and was treated to a furious lunchtime discussion between a Spanish family and their future Argentinian daugther-in-law about the lingering effects of regional rivalries in the two countries and whether those rivalries were subsiding in favor of intra-city political rivalries. A couple other guys jumped in on the Argentinian side and I busted my ass to try to keep up, occasionally being called on by Pepe´, the Spanish family´s chainsmoking, gravel-voiced patriarch to throw in relevant testimony from the U.S. perspective, which I was actually able to do with a little help from the others. All in all, it was the best 20-minute meal with a 2-hour argument I´ve ever been a party to.

That night at dinner I ordered a half of a steak that looked like three cows sewn together.

Today, spent the afternoon drinking coffee in a shady, sidewalk cafe and enjoyed one of those moments where an otherworldy sense of sublime peacefulness descends on you and everything from the size of your socks to the temperature of the air seems absolutely perfect. Flipped through a book of Pablo Neruda´s poems in preparation for a visit to his home in Valparaiso, Chile, tomorrow, and was delighted to find that in addition to being touristically relevant they were also profoundly absurd, hilarious, poignant, humane, and sharp, especially for a person who usually isn´t into poetry. Score 10 points.

The reason I add this last, rather melodramatic anecdote is because the other one I have is rife with profanity and I promised my mom I would try to stop using the F-word in this blog. Ask me later if you want to hear it.

Ginobli and the Spurs are apparently being joined by another Argentine superstar who will no doubt be causing my Pistons even bigger headaches this year.

Finally, and most absurdly, I have to write about this:

Two nights ago, the television was on in the background at the hostel when suddenly everyone became hushed, the volume went up, and the attention of all the Argentinians went straight to the tube. A small, stocky, dark-skinned man was speaking to a large studio audience in Spanish and I suddenly realized that he looked very familiar.

"Is that Maradona?" I asked. The entire roomed turned to me and fired deathlooks that made it quite obvious I was an absolute moron for having to ask. Over the next few minutes it became quite clear that Diego Maradona, the soccer star from the 1986 World Cup, is now an absolute God in Argentina despite numerous stints in drug rehab, the siring of dozens of illegitimate children whom he refuses to support, and a bizarre episode in which he ballooned up to well over 200 pounds and then lost it all by having his stomache stapled shut. He is now the host of the most successful television talkshow in South American history. A girl from Buenos Aires told me there is a church and religion dedicated to him in Cordoba.

But wait, there´s more...

After dropping a multitude of balloons and confetti in celebration of Maradona´s birthday, the show inexplicably turned to an introductory reel of scenes from the Cuban revolution, starring the main generals Raul and Che and, of course, Fidel himself. This was strange enough, but when the conclusion of the reel gave way to an image of Maradona embracing the olive-clad, bearded Cuban dictator on an interview set I just about messed myself.

"That´s Castro!¨ I shouted in Spanish, pointing my finger at the television.

More angry looks from the locals in the room.

"Of course it is," said one.

"They´ve been close friends for over ten years," said another.

"Fidel saved Maradona from the demon of his drug problem," said yet a third. "Fidel saved our Maradona´s life."

With that, all attention returned to the interview, which apparently was only a 20-minute clip of over five hours that was recorded. I was afloat in the world of the surreal and began writing things down, the way you do in the morning with a dream that you don´t want to forget.

The kicker (no pun intended) came at the end, when a producer tossed a soccer ball to Maradona, who in turn tossed it to Fidel, who caught it somewhat awkwardly and then tossed it back to Maradona. (Maradona, if you remember, is quite skilled at manipulating a soccer ball with his hands). Then Maradona tossed the ball back to Fidel.

I´m serious. This really happened.

Then, holding the ball, Castro instructed Maradona to stand up and make a hoop with his arms. Fidel stood up as well. He bent his knees, sized things up, and then proceeded to bank a three-foot jumpshot off Maradona´s chest and into the makeshift basket.

With that, the interview was concluded, the television was turned off, and a reverant silence pervaded the room for about five minutes.

Then one of the employees unlocked the hostel´s refrigerator and we drank all the beer that was in there.