It's 7:30am on Christmas morning in El Chalten, Argentina. Tara and I had been up late chatting, drinking beer and wine and singing Christmas carols with citizens from various countries of the former British Empire. A festive evening which continued long after Tara and I went to bed. Needless to say, I now seem to be the only one awake. Reading Cryponomicon, taking in the view of Mt. Fitz Roy, and drinking coffee in the sunny living room of the hostel, I yawn. Loudly.
There seems to be a house-fly infestation at the hostel. I've grown used to having several of them on me at any given moment and casually waving them off the rim of my mug. The hostel owner, who doesn't not share my "it's-all-good" view, unholsters his can of RAID and fogs the room. It's early and I've only gotten a few hours of sleep and it takes me a moment to realize whats going on.
Yes, now I see, he's using an aerosol insecticide to kill the flies. I begin thinking that perhaps I shouldn't be breathing this stuff in. It certainly smells and tastes hazardous, but the hostel owner doesn't seem to notice so I figure I'm fine. Glancing up from my book, I hone in on a buzzing fly which happens to land on my coffee cup. I lift my arm to brush it away but before I can swing it dies and falls on the floor.
Staring at the dead fly, I stand, gather my things and move to the front yard. Ahhh, now this is Christmas. Listening to the flowing Rio Blanco, feeling the sun, and seeing the mountains, with book and coffee. I look over the yard and see that I'm not the only one awake. A quiet mountaineer, whom I know to be recovering from a strenuous rock/ice climb, is sitting in the grass and leaning against the hostel. He's got a 19-inch laptop on his lap, headphones, $150 weather-proof pants and a tattoo on his foot that says, "SIMPLICITY." Smiling a little, I recall what Cormack McCarthy said about "the wonderful invention of folly in all its guises and forms." But as always, with thoughts on folly, immediately after projecting them on someone else, they turn and stare you in the face. I self-reflect a bit. Folly morphs into vanity. Parts of Ecclesiastes stream by. Flashes of Evan Wilson using the term "futilitarian." I blink a few times, shiver, and return to my interrupted toil.
After a bit, Tara and I have a big breakfast, exchange gifts and wander around the mostly abandoned town. We notice a bar with outside seating happens to be open. We stop, glance lazily at the menu and, BAM! There it is. A word we haven't seen for what seems like years. It's just a word, but it seems to glisten on the ragged, oft-soaked paper menu: "Ale." We stare at each other and slump onto a bench. An actual pale ale is brought. Then an IPA. In the overwhelmingly lager-loving Patagonia we know exactly what this is: A Christmas Miracle.
Over the next few days of constant bus travel and finding last minute lodging (or not and just pitching the tent) we scour the markets of various one-horse towns and find several more ales. Believe it, people, hops do exist down here! And everything continues to come up Oar.
We managed to get out of Southern Patagonia. It was breathtaking and soul-rending at every turn, but it had some typical hyper-tourism drawbacks. Now being in the central region, things are very much to our liking. The Austral Highway is the main attraction here. It takes weeks to see and effectively weeds out the short-time tourists. Roads are bad, internet is basically nil, travelers have the thousand-yard stare... but we've got Ale! Oh and there's the still-breathtaking, still-hike-able Andes Mountains, loaded with hot springs, flyfishing, fjords, volcanoes, glaciers... all that vanity.
Well, citizens, it's been a month and of course, we've been having a phenomenal time. We began the trip with about a week in Buenos Aires, Argentina. That city is absolutely frenetic. It was a bit overwhelming, really. We're still unsure about when exactly they work. Things seem to open up around 10 or 11 am. Everything closes for 3 or 4 hours from anywhere between noon to 6pm. Even the grocery stores just shut the doors. Restaurants start opening up around 8pm, but nobody is really eating until 10 or 11 pm. Then everything is open all night. All the while, the streets, parks, public spaces are all absolutely packed with people. Packed.
From Buenos Aires we got on a boat to Colonia, Uruguay, spent a few hours in this beach town, then headed down the coast to Montevideo. It was a wonderful, slower change of pace from Buenos Aires. A large city with beautiful architecture, boulevards, and lovely people. Everyone is incredibly friendly, speaks nice, slow Spanish, and is generally quite relaxed. They are obsessed with drinking yerba mate, making gigantic sandwiches and putting strange and delicious condiments / pickled veggies on everything. You should look up pictures of chivitos... their "national sandwich." One easily stuffed both Tara and me.
After 5 days in Montevideo, we headed back to Buenos Aires and were surprisingly happy to be back. We were swept back up in the constant-action and it was great to see some old familiar faces of people still lounging at our hostel. People would seem to get stuck there for weeks. This very thing happened to us...
We were planning on a couple more days, then heading south, but we kept finding ourselves adding more time to our stay. We took some Spanish lessons, which really helped. The local dialect is pretty gnarly, but just as we were starting to learn the tricks, we flew to Ushuaia, Argentina.
This town was absolutely gorgeous. Claiming to be the southern-most city in the world, it's actually just north of a Chilean naval town... but who wants to see that, right? Sunrise is at 3:30AM and sunset is 11PM. It's surrounded by the snowy and rocky Andes Mountains and the Beagle Channel. Stunning to say the least. We managed to avoid getting ripped off by the National Park down there and instead just hiked out of town and up to the base of a glacier. All in all it was about 10 miles a day and very picturesque. We sprang for a b&b with our very own room here, too! After a couple weeks of dorm life, we relished every moment of staying in this little chalet. We also met an old gentleman from Salem, OR, there. Of course we did.
From there we took a 16 hour bus-ride to Puerto Natales, Chile. This town is sort of the jumping-off-point for hiking in Torres del Paine National Park. At our hostel we made quick friends with a young couple from New York City, Eaman and Archana. They're also traveling for a year or so, and it turned out they were planning the very same route on a 5-day hike as Tara and I. It was nice having some buddies on the trail.
The hike out there was all kinds of majestic. The first day we took a bus to the park, got on a ferry across an ultra-marine blue lake , which then dropped us at the trail head. We hiked up a valley and camped at the terminus of a massive glacier. This thing flowed out of the of the mountains and ended on a minty green lake. It appeared to taper from about 1000ft thick to the 30 ft vertical wall that would drop large chunks of ice into the lake (though we never saw this). We sat watching and listening to it rumble and crack for several hours until sunset. Being from states which have glaciers all over the mountains, we'd never had much interest on the subject. But we'd never seen or heard anything like this. We are glacier people now. Deal with it.
The next day we hiked all day to the base of a valley and camped. The following morning, we left our stuff, took some water and went up the valley 4 miles to this humongous three-sided bowl. One side was covered with snow and glacier-plastered mountains and the two other sides with glacially-carved granite towers (torres). On the one side, snow and glaciers were breaking up and shifting sending avalanches of varying size down the banks of the mountain every 15 minutes. It was a thunderous and again, ethereal experience.
We returned to camp, packed up and hiked down to yet another camp, one which had showers, beer, wine and snacks... roughing it! The next day we hiked to, and camped at, the base of the Torres del Paine themselves. That evening, climbing higher and higher, the 50mph wind gusts began to contain hail and ice. Freezing, we reached the Torres and were again blown away (pun intended). Such strange beauty... check out the photos, which of course don't do anything justice, but will give you an impression.
We hiked out the following day and then caught a bus to El Calafate. Now sitting in our comfy hostel's living room and looking over the town, we're taking a down-day. Tomorrow we head to El Chalten and begin a 3-day hike around Mt. Fitz Roy. Another strange spire-like granite peak surrounded by beautiful tooth paste-green lakes. Or so they say. We'll hike out on Christmas Eve and enjoy Christmas at a hostel in El Chalten. Being beef country, they'll undoubtedly slaughter a beast for the occasion.
Needless to say, after a month, all is well here.
Yo, Camera! Great to see you again! It's been ages... man, it's like you've been avoiding me. Haha!
Yeah, man, I've been totally great! Thanks for asking.
Oh, you meant them, of course, yeah, Tara and Patrick are doing great, thanks for asking? Man, the three of us totally slayed Torres del Paine. Seven nights, 90 miles, it was epic brosef!
What? You were there? What the heck, chief, I didn't see you at all! Was it just 5 days and 53 miles? Yeah, I guess you're right. I must have gotten mixed up. Heh... stupid.
Come on man, give me a break...
Fine. Yes. I exaggerated, but it's all good brother!
Yeah man, I did great out there man. Man, it poured one night and I just got all flexed all night and they were just cold chillin' driz-eye, you know?
No bro, come on man, they weren't cold... they was cold chillin'. Man, its like we're not even speaking the same language. Anyway, they couldn't have done it without me.
Dude, you don't gotta be like that, come on! I mean, yeah, they could have rented a tent. But it ain't the same, you know? We've got a rapport going here and we're a pretty tight unit. G-Unit!
Yeah, it was sick man, Grey glacier, flowing from the mountain and ending on the lake with a 30ft wall, dropping big icebergs into it. Not to mention the snow breaking up on the glaciers in the mountains. They must have seen like a dozen avalanches! Just boom boom BOOM! Snow and ice crashing, just all nutty. Oh, and don't even get me started on the Torres themselves. Those things is sick! Man, you seen 'em didn't you, bro?
Hay-ull yes brother! Bump it. Hey, come on, bump it chief. Bump it. What heck, you can't be leaving my knuck's in the wind like this... hit me... bump it chief! Cheesy. That's just a cheesy way to treat... Hah! There you go! You like that don't you? You leaving? Bump and run, I see how you is!
Maté, pronounced "mah-tay," is an herbal tea service. I'm not surprised if you've heard of it, or even drank it, as I'm sure Tom Cruise or Sean Penn or Brangelina popularized it at some point in their never-ending quests for happiness and their general affection for introducing something into American culture whereupon it immediately becomes "hippie crap." Like slack-lining. Or self-worship.
However, here in Uruguay, maté is actually something. Something great. I don't want to say its "a way of life," but more of a "life-support system" without which the citizens would certainly shrivel up and cease to exist. Though it's also traditionally enjoyed all over Argentina, Paraguay and southern Brazil, here in Uruguay it's a ubiquitous, all-day affair. And rightly so, considering they pride themselves in enhancing the system with the use of a thermos. Which, of course, "liberated the maté from the home." That's right, here in Uruguay, its all about equality.
So, you have your maté (a hollow, cured gourd) usually a small pumpkin roughly the size of a coffee cup. You fill it about 3/4 full with yerba (an herbal tea mixture pronounced "shaer-ba.") You've got a bombilla (a metal straw with a filter on the end) which you stick in the dry yerba. Add some cold water and the yerba will expand so the gourd is mostly filled with yerba and your bombilla is stable and secured... think fence post. Now, you add hot water from your thermos and drink. Usually you can only get about a 1/5 cup of water in there, so just a few sips and you're adding more water. This must be drunk all day in every circumstance so one must pack a thermos of hot water everywhere.
The most common way of thermos-transport is under the drinker's non-dominant arm with the maté in the non-dominant hand. I'd say about 50% of the people are walking around with a chicken arm, thermos tucked in the wing and their lips wrapped around the bombilla. Having the dominant arm free allows them to do just about anything else whilst enjoying yerba maté. Standing on the bus? No problem. Breast feeding? No problem. Riding your motorcycle with your dog on the gas tank? Again, no problem... dominant arm operating the vehicle, thighs clutching perrito, mouth suckin' away and the thermos at the elbow you've got yourself a typical Uruguayan. This person even waves leisurely to friends at 40mph with the dominant hand. Go ahead Sean Penn, give it a try. Please.
However, the real beauty comes in the social aspect of it. It's meant to be shared and there are some serious customs when it comes to this. I won't go into them here but basically if you're talking with a Uruguayan, you're gonna be getting some yerba maté... and it'll keep coming so long as you don't say, "gracias."
It's 7:30am on Christmas morning in El Chalten, Argentina. Tara and I had been up late chatting, drinking beer and wine and singing Christmas carols with citizens from various countries of the former British Empire. A festive evening which continued long after Tara and I went to bed. Needless to say, I now seem to be the only one awake. Reading Cryponomicon, taking in the view of Mt. Fitz Roy, and drinking coffee in the sunny living room of the hostel, I yawn. Loudly.
