Punta del Este

After all my travelling during these past vacations, pretty much the only thing that I didn’t get a chance to do was go to the beach. I’d pretty much given up on that for this year when my host mom announced that they were thinking about spending Easter weekend in their beach house in Punta del Este, Uruguay, and would I like to come? I thought very hard for about 1.4 seconds before I headed to my room to pack my swimsuit.

I got to cross another thing off my tourist to-do list when I stopped in Colonia on my way to the Punta. Colonia is a UNESCO World Heritage Site — basically a tiny little historic town just across the River Plate (but it’s a big river — 3 hours by slow boat to get across) from Buenos Aires. The town is very touristy but the historic district is adorable, all cobbled streets and little houses and old Spanish-colonial buildings. There are even some little beaches, although the river water is such a distubing brown that I can’t imagine who’d really want to go swimming there.

On the way from Colonia to Punta del Este, I got to see a bit more of the Uruguayan countryside… and I have to say that except for the shape of the houses and the occasional palm tree, it looks, well, a lot like Iowa. If you find that disappointing (people seem to enjoy thinking that all of South America is jungle or desert or mountains), rest assured that Punta del Este bears absolutely no resemblance to the American Midwest. The beach is gorgeous, and even though the city is extremely built-up, I didn’t have to look at skyscrapers except from a distance — my host family’s house is well away from the crazy city.

So it was a quiet few days, although I did try out surfing. And honestly, it was less exciting than I was expecting. I wish I could say it was so easy because I’m just a natural, but I think it had more to do with the circumstances. For starters, the waves there aren’t huge by any means, and in the lesson I took to start out, they put me on a longboard easily twice as tall as I am, the kind that could catch a pond-ripple without much help. The instructor guy took me out to where the waves were breaking, held onto the board while we waited for the wave, and then gave me a giant push onto shore. All I had to do was stand up — I didn’t even need to do my own paddling. So it was fun, but not much help really, because the next day, with a normal-size board and no outside assistance, I froze before I managed to catch even one good wave.

I spent most of the rest of my time on the beach, reading or swimming or whatever. I didn’t have any homework worth speaking of (It did seem sort of silly to have a “spring break” (or rather, fall break… ack, seasons are so confusing when you’re trying to explain things between hemispheres) just a week and a half after the start of classes), which meant that I got to read some books of my own choice — probably the last ones that I’ll have a chance to look at all semester. However, the fact that my reading material was extremely interesting was actually a mixed blessing. I kept getting so caught up in my book that I’d forget to reapply the sunscreen, and I now have what can only be described as a laugh-out-loud sunburn. I can now trace on my skin a pretty precise history of my weekend on the beach… this is the outline of the shirt that I wore the first day, here’s where I forgot to put sunscreen on the backs of my ankles… here’s the shadow of my ponytail when the sun came out after I put my hair up to go swimming, here’s the splotch that my host mom missed when she put sunscreen on my back… here’s the general pinkness on my arms because I was silly enough to think that because I already had a “base”, 1 thick coat of SPF 45 would be enough to protect me from the autumn sun.

Week 1

Oops. I thought I posted this last week but turns out I actually just saved it as a draft. Sorry about that… but if you like old news, go ahead and read anyway.

As I predicted, it’s been a long week. Not bad–actually, really good–just long. Ironically, and in spite of my best intentions, I’m finding that it’s actually harder to be regular about updating this thing here in Buenos Aires than it was while I was traveling. I guess it’s because things here just seem so normal by now–I have classes instead of cross-country bus trips and dinners with my host family instead of long hikes and camp food–that it’s hard to think which random parts of my life deserve to be mentioned.

Actually, this week has seemed more like a continuation of my vacations than the beginning of another nose-to-the-grindstone semester. I had a lot of hours of class, but not much reading to do in between, and things were even more chill because the Easter Holidays next week mean that I don’t even have the normal amount of first-week work. My internship hasn’t started, my first day of Portuguese class is still a week and a half away, and I’ve delayed getting back into my last semester’s extracurriculars until I can get a better idea of what my courseload and class schedules are going to look like. So I had a lot of free time, and I spent most of it pretending that I was still a tourist. I became addicted to really long, lazy lunches at the sidewalk cafes in Palermo Hollywood–I’d go with a book and peoplewatch while pretending to read. I went to San Telmo fair last Sunday, which is one of the most touristy things you can do around here, and I’ve also hit up a couple of the museums that I didn’t get a chance to check out last semester. Plus, we had all these orientation activities for the group from Middlebury, so even though I felt not much of a need to be “orientated”, I figured it was a good chance to do some other typically Argentine things on someone else’s tab. I think I might have mentioned that the group from Middlebury is huge (19 people, compared to 8 last semester), but so far pretty much everyone seems cool. I expect that soon people will start breaking off and doing their own thing, but for this week it was fun to hang out with that many Midd kids and meet the ones that I didn’t already know.

My classes seem pretty good also, at least as far as I can tell on the basis of one week’s class time. I definitely dropped my class on Regionalization and Globalization, but I’m still trying to decide which two out of the three that are left I’m going to keep. The choices are The Information Economy, Right to Information, and Latin American History. I just have to keep doing the work until I can make up my mind, but I guess I can’t lose too badly–they all seem pretty good. I’ve also been trying to educate myself a little bit on general Argentine history, especially the more recent stuff. I read a really good book of 20th-century history while I was on break, and when I finished with that I started up with a book that talks about the most recent dictatorship, the “dirty war”, and the “process.” That’s been tough, because what happened under the direction of the military junta here between 1976 and 1983 was so awful that even though the book is extremely well-written and really doesn’t dwell too much on the horrific details, I still have trouble reading more than 30 pages a day. And after a couple of days of that, I started having nightmares–there were a couple nights early in the week where I woke up 6 or 8 times a night, only to fall back into the same dreams when I closed my eyes again. Ick. My solution to that was to stay up late so I’d be tired enough to not dream. It wasn’t too hard because there was a lot going on at night, but I discovered that it’s not much fun to have more hours of class in the morning than you had hours of sleep the night before. But luckily I’m almost done with the book, and then I’m thinking I’ll go out and buy a nice big volume of bedtime stories.

One of the major nighttime activities of the week was the St Patrick’s day celebration downtown. I think the official count is somewhere around 50,000 people descend on this 3-block area where there are 3 “Irish pubs”. It was actually more intimidating than enjoyable trying to fight my way through a crowd like that, but luckily one of the s on the Midd program (Rachel Sommers, for those of you who are interested) is staying in a house that overlooks the street, so we could get a good view without feeling like we were going to be trampled. Later, I was even happier to be out of the swarm and the bar area, because it just got more and more packed, it started to pour, and then a fight broke out and the police came and teargassed a couple of bars. I don’t want to sound lame, but the reality is that it was kind of scary — not because I was in personal danger (I wasn’t at all), but because normally Argentines are really moderate drinkers so those kinds of scenes are extremely rare and somewhat unsettling.

But like I said, it was a good week overall, with the promise of an even better (and lazier) week to come. I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do over the long Easter weekend, especially since all the traditional tourist destinations that I was thinking about will be absolutely packed with vacationing porteños, just like they are in the summer (But don’t worry — I’m not such a snob that I’ll turn down a vacation just because other people had the same idea.). And I’m determined to keep updating this — if I start to slip, yell at me by email and make me stick to it.

PICTURES

Lucky you, the pictures are up. Most of them, anyway. I took one roll of film with a regular camera, which has the pictures of the Uyuni Salt Flats, some views from San Pedro and Chiquicamata, and I think a few other random shots. But for now, go ahead and go crazy with these: http://share.shutterfly.com/osi.jsp?i=Eegsmjdi2bOoA

In other news, Buenos Aires is its usual fantastic self. I didn’t realize how much I missed it here until I got back, but the past few days have been a lot of fun (in spite of the mild sniffly cold that had been following me across the Patagonia and tracked me down as soon as I stopped moving). I’ve been doing a lot of post-summer catching up with friends and my host family, and I guess you could say also with the city itself. It’s really cool to see how things have changed, even in the short time that I was gone. I counted 3 new stores on the way to the subway today, and the apartment building that has been under construction since I got here last august has finally been painted in shockingly bright colors. There’s a new restaurant that opened down the block, although the little boutique two doors down has a For Rent sign in the window (not much of a surprise, I guess, because in 4 months I never saw a single customer there). And most dangerously, there is an excellent new bakery right across the street from my house.

I love having familiar things around me again, not to mention that it’s nice to be able to unpack my backpack for good and put away my sleeping bag. But aside from all that, I’ve mostly been trying to get things together for the start of the semester. Classes begin this week — my first one is on Tuesday morning. I’m only taking 2 UBA courses this semester (my 3rd course is an independent project, and I’m also going to keep interning a few hours a week at the Senate), but at the moment I’m signed up for 4. The plan is to eventually drop 2 of them, it’s looking like kind of a long few days until I can decide which ones I want to keep.

And one more thing. I’m really sorry, cause I promised myself I wouldn’t do this… but to all of you who are struggling through the last icky bits of winter, I’d just like to say that the weather here is FABULOUS, couldn’t be nicer… and now, go ahead and hate me. I was just leaving anyway

FAQ

Wow. Goooooood thing I raced back to the city like I did–turns out we don’t register for classes til Friday, so I got back just in time for the sort of registration warm-up that we had today. But oh well, it’s good to be back, really. And since now I won’t have an excuse for being slow responding to my emails, I decided to just put up the answers to all your questions now, to save you the trouble of asking. I’ll probably be adding to this list, but here goes for starters:

Q: What was your favorite place to visit?
A: Good grief, I hate this question–it’s not hard to tell who’s going to be asking me which of my children I love most, a few years down the road. But if you promise to keep the words “favorite” and “best” out of this, I’ll tell you a couple of things that were highlights: the Uyuni salt flats, because I really have never seen anything as crazy and amazing as 12,000 sq. km. of reflected sky, El Chaltén because it’s just plain gorgeous there, in spite of the weather, and it’s still off the beaten track enough to be cool, and Torres del Paine, because I’ve never shattered so many personal limits so quickly and brutally. But I’m serious when I say that I loved pretty much all the places I visited–my only regret is that I didn’t have more time.

Q: How could you stand all those long bus rides?
A: Believe it or not, you get used to it. Especially if the bus is nice, which most of them were. So really, I didn’t suffer that much, although the 40 hours (including connections) from Santiago to Esquel might have been a mistake. And as a general rule, I think that if you’re planning a bus trip over 24 hours, it’s good to have more than 6 hours of music with you. Let’s just say it’s going to be a looooooong time before I’ll be able to listen to Cat Stevens again…

Q: Was it boring traveling alone?
A: Nope, it was actually fantastic, and I highly recommend it–you get to know so many people that you’d never have talked to otherwise. It was a tiny bit scary at first, since I’ve never done a long trip like that alone–and at times it was a definite pain, for example when I wanted to use the restroom in the bus station and had to figure out a way to fit BOTH my backpacks inside the stall and then close the door. But once I got going it was actually easier than I expected, and really fun. And on a selfish note, it was kind of fun to be able to do whatever I wanted to without having to discuss it with anyone or coordinate schedules and things like that.

Q: Hiking? Camping? You?
A: Yeeessss…. and just because I’m answering this doesn’t mean I’m not slightly offended by that tone.

Q: Why didn’t you at least tell us you were planning on doing all that crazy outdoors stuff?
A: Um, basically because I was afraid you’d talk me out of it. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t at least have tried.

Q: Why didn’t you stop in Usuaia?
A: A lot of people have been asking me why, since I was so close to Tierra del Fuego (at least in relative terms), I didn’t just take a little side trip to Usuaia so I could say that I’d been to the “End of the World” (that’s what the city calls itself). The answer is that I’m sort of against the kind of tourism that involves going to places just to say that you’ve been there, and since I didn’t have any particular reason to visit Usuaia for anything else, I decided to skip it and save the money and the time to go somewhere that I was really interested in.

Q: So, are you all tan now or something?
A: How long have you known me? Actually, I think my shoulders, nose, and collarbones might be a slightly brownish color, even though I was using my SPF 45 pretty religously. However, by brownish I also might mean brownish-white, or maybe just plain white. (Don’t worry, Anna

Q: I heard you named your backpack… that’s weird, what the heck?
A: It is not weird–would you like traveling with an anonymous lump for 6 weeks? And for your information, my backpack has a lot of personality. For those of you who don’t know, my big green pack is named Mo (short for Mochila, and also for Monster), and I also have a little one named Rick (he came with his name, so it doesn’t really count). But anyway, I’d like to make it clear that Mo is not your average pack. Mo is a large, vintage, bright green external-frame backpack, and I’m quite sure that he’s already a legend in every hostel we visited, since as far as I know he was the ONLY external-frame backpack in the entire Patagonia. In Salta, the kid on the bunk below mine spent several minutes just looking at Mo before turning around with a “wow, I didn’t know they even made those anymore.” Pretty soon, everyone else in the room was crowded around to see the phenomenon. Yep, Mo’s a star. You’ll understand when you see the pictures.

Q: What kinds of people did you meet?
A: There were people from all over… up north I met tons of Brazilians and Austrailians/Kiwis (who would be really offended if they knew that I was grouping them all together like that), and as you know the south was pretty much all Israelis. I also met a lot of English and Western European tourists. And obviously, Argentines and Chileans. Not so many Bolivians, but I guess that’s not really all that surprising. Which actually reminds : where are all the Americans? We need to represent a little better on this side of the world, guys.

Q: Where’s the next trip?
A: Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil are at the top of my list right now, and Tibet, Nepal, Bangladesh, and India are also priorities. After that I’m thinking about a little tour of Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. Or something.

Q: I WANT PICTURES. Get them online, now.
A: That’s not a question, and you should be more polite. But since I’m in a good mood at the moment and since you all have been pretty patient overall, I’ll be nice and make it a priority to get the photos up. Just to warn you, I didn’t take as many pictures as you might have expected–I decided I’d rather have good memories than good photos. But don’t worry, I still have a roll of film and about 100 digital pictures from the trip, which will be online as soon as I figure out how best to do that.

Navimag and back to BA

I got back to Buenos Aires late this afternoon, just in time to register for classes tomorrow morning. At least, I hope so. Claudio (the Midd program director, for those of you who don’t know) told me that we register tomorrow, but when I got back to the house, the first thing that I saw was a note from my host mom saying that someone from Middlebury had called about a mandatory meeting this morning. Oops. I haven’t been able to get ahold of anyone who can tell me what’s going on, so I’m hoping that the meeting was only semi-important, and semi-mandatory. I’m also pondering the best excuse to use if it turns out to be otherwise.

Actually, I feel pretty lucky to be here at all, considering how many last-minute travel plans I’ve made in the past 2 days. Once again, the travel gods were with me. Sort of. If things had gone according to plan A, I would have arrived in Puerto Montt on the Navimag at 8am on Monday, gotten a bus to Bariloche at 9am, with a 5pm connection to Buenos Aires. Of course, by now I just know that something’s bound to go wrong with a schedule like that, so I wasn’t too surprised when we ran into worse-than-usual weather halfway through the cruise and spent half the day in a holding pattern before heading out into the open ocean in the Golfo de Penas.

Oh, actually I did want to talk about the boat itself. The Navimag is sort of a funny cross between a cruise boat and a cargo ship. It wasn’t Carnival Cruises (which actually was fine with me, since I’m not in general a cruise ship fan), but it wasn’t bad, the scenery was pretty, and the other people on the boat were great. The passengers ran the gamut–from little kids, to quite a few people my age, to a few 80-year-old ladies. It was a fun group, which turned out to be a good thing, because the weather was icky almost the whole time. I spent the whole boat ride thanking each of my lucky stars individually and by name that I’d had such good weather for my hiking trip. It was actually crazy how well it worked out for me–I’m pretty sure I got the last 4 nice days (and they were perfect!) that Torres del Paine is going to have for the rest of the year, no joke. The day after I left the park, I woke up to gray skies, steady drizzle, and a temperature that had dropped about 15 degrees, and by that night, the wind was picking up again. (I think I’ve explained already about Patagonian wind, but if that doesn’t ring a bell, go back and read what I wrote about the wind in El Chalten.) The gross weather lasted for most of the time we were in the Patagonian Channels, although it was slightly better in Puerto Montt. It was a bummer in a way, because it wasn’t much fun to be outside on the boat, and especially when we were passing through the open ocean bit, the wind made the waves a bit larger than my stomach could comfortably handle (luckily, that bit only lasted 12 hours, and also luckily–unlike many people–I did not get sick. However, I also did not do anything else). But in spite of all that, I still had fun, and the scenery–when it wasn’t foggy–was desolate and beautiful. And believe me, I wasn’t complaining about the weather. I was just thrilled to be watching the rain from a comfortable seat, INDOORS, and to know that by the time I had to do more walking than between the dorms and the dining room, my sprained ankle would be allllll better.

So it was a nice 4 days. But although I just said I didn’t mind the weather too much, the atmospheric ickyness meant that we got into Puerto Montt about 6 hours (6 CRUCIAL hours for my carefully timed plans) late. Which meant that there was only one bus that hadn’t left for Bariloche. And of course, it was full.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve figured out that by now I’d already missed my Bariloche-Buenos Aires connection, so my brilliant plan A was pretty much in ruins. Plan B was to fly, but the problems started when I figured out that there are no flights at all between Puerto Montt and Bariloche or Buenos Aires, so if I didn’t get across the border that night, there’s no plan left at all. There was only one thing to do: I put on my most irresistible lost-tourist face and begged the bus driver to please please please let me on. It worked… sort of… meaning that I got on the bus, but didn’t get a seat.

It’s a bit of a long trip to do standing (6 hours or so) but for most of it I was relieved enough to be on the bus at all that I didn’t really care. Anyway, I got to Bariloche around 9:30, found a hostel then went out to eat with a group of Israeli kids I’d met on the bus who had taken pity on me and shared their seats. I went to sleep praying that I’d find a flight out the next day.

As it turned out, finding the flight actually wasn’t the hard part–there was plenty of room on the planes. The biggest problem was a sort of internal struggle when it came time to actually buy the plane ticket. For one thing, it was expensive… but also, I felt like I was sort of compromising my principles–I’d managed to literally cross the continent (multiples times!) and get all the way to the end of my 6 weeks without getting on a plane. Planes are for wimps. Rich wimps. Real travelers take buses. But when it came right down to it, I didn’t really have a choice. I bought the ticket (wimp!), bought some last-minute souveniers (i.e. chocolate), and headed to the airport.

And just like that, my trip’s over. What an anticlimax–my plane wasn’t even late. Although now that I’m back in the city, I’m realizing how much I have to do before classes start. For example, FIND my classes. Where did they go??? Looking online just now, I realized that for some reason the course listings and schedule are no longer posted on the UBA site. Does that mean that registration really was today? (cue ominous music…)

Torres del Paine

If feet could talk, mine would be screaming right now. I got back late last night from 4 days of backpacking in Torres del Paine National Park in the Chilean Patagonia, and… yes, you read that right. Backpacking. Coming from me, I guess that requires a little explanation. As you know, I’ve never been much of a hard-core hiker (or, let’s be honest, much of a hiker at all) so it’s kind of a mystery, even to me, why I decided that I couldn’t leave Chile without spending 4 long days dragging a Grace-size bag up and down a few mountains. True, I love pretty scenery, and the landscapes of Torres del Paine are quite famous… and never having done something like this before, I naturally figured — how hard can it be?

So with a nice big tent, a camping stove, plenty of trail mix, and that mixture of excessive optimism and excessive naivete, I left Puerto Natales early Sunday morning. Luckily, I’d met up with some Israelis that were going to hit the same trails that I was, so I ended up spending almost the entire 4 days as part of their group. They were fantastic — they helped me set up my tent the first night, told me army stories, and made sure that I ate plenty of hot food, whether I wanted to or not. And after a month traveling alone, it was kind of nice to have a “group” again — but also nice that I only had to pay attention when the conversation was in English. Of course, after 4 days of intense effort, I did pick up some Hebrew — I can now say “hi”, “no”, “what”, “everything’s okay”, “good night”, and “let’s go.” Which has actually been a blessing as well, because I swear that at least half the tourists here are Israeli. By the end of the hike, I got used to introducing myself by saying “hi, I’m Grace and I don’t speak Hebrew” whenever I meet someone new.

And the park? Let’s just say it was impressive enough to make me forget (at least most of the time) about little things like bruises, sore muscles, and aching feet. Oooh, my feet. If I had known how much it would hurt, I probably would have skipped it (especially since hiking and camping in the park ended up costing me 4x more than just staying in hostels in Puerto Natales)… but then again, I guess it’s good that I didn’t know, because in spite of everything, it was a truly incredible experience. Seeing starlight on an enormous glacier, watching the peaks of the Torres change color when the sun hits them, and hearing the crash of distant avalanches as I was falling asleep were things that I couldn’t ever have done without the dirt and blisters… and every time I saw a new vista, I knew for sure that I’d earned it.

We weren’t setting any speed records, but we got the job done — a total of around 65 km in those 4 days. I almost couldn’t believe it when I added up the distances last night, back in the warm hostel in Puerto Natales, and finally and completely clean (although there’s some dirt under my fingernails that doesn’t seem to want to go anywhere, even after 2 long showers) . I’m glad that I did it, and a little amazed. And also glad that the next part of my trip involves no walking whatsover — tonight I’m getting on the Navimag to spend 4 days cruising the Patagonian Channels on the way to Puerto Montt.