Saturday, March 26, 2011

Oliver's Final South American Entry. "The best 4 weeks of my life."

I leave for Argentina – a new country to check off my list. It has rained a ton recently in Peru – in fact it has rained so much that on the morning of my departure an eighth mile section of road about one mile out of town (the only road into my town) has completely fallen 50 feet down into the river below; it no longer exists. Glad I was not on it at the time. Got a nice routine going - make it to Cusco, hit up the market for some new flip flops, hit up my favorite Indian Buffet, then off to the Indigo Lounge for pisco happy hour drinks before my 9:30 bus to La Paz, Bolivia..... and more. I did manage to find a decent sized book shop (for Peru) with a very small English section. I was hoping to pick up another Malcolm Gladwell but no luck, fortunately they did have a few Vonneguts’, all of which titles I did not know. Picked up a newly printed book called Vintage Vonnegut – Armegedon, in Retrospect. This is a compilation of 12 short stories written by Vonnegut previously unreleased. They all center around the idea of war and peace and as humans our unfortunate tendency toward destruction and violence – much of which is written from his recollections as a POW in Dresden during its firebombing destruction in WWII. A great book, quiet thought provoking. I also grabbed myself a Spanish-english dictionary, nicely done Oliver, you only waited 2 months into your trip. Bus was on time and no problems, wake up at the boarder of Bolivia, already got my visa so again no problems, wake up in La Paz. I have made absolutely no plans and have no idea how I am going to get to southern Argentina, I just know that it is likely I need to get to Buenos Aires first. I begin walking around the bus station getting quotes and info for Buenos Aires, looks like it is going to be a little more expensive than I though and also take about 3 days to get there. Not too sure I am feeling the combination so I cab it to a café I know with wireless for lunch. I jump on bing and start looking at flights from La Paz to Buenos Aires which it turns out are only $100 more round trip than the bus fare, plus I get 6 days of my life back where I can do other sweet shit. I book my flights with 24 hours in advance and the cheap way – so I will be leaving at 1:30 am the following night. Head to the Adventure brew hostal and get myself a room. Got the whole next day free and the weather is great so I head up to the center city park to check it out as I did not get to last time. Hit up Loki hostal for an awesome burger on the way and some beers. Thinking I am on to a good thing so I grab some more beers for my wandering. Got some good sun, checked out the parks, saw the sights etc. Shoot Mackey a message that I am setting this plan in motion and will likely be showing up a day or two earlier but not really sure – it is South American and literally anything could happen; I could even meet a cute girl in the hostal wondering if I want to go to carnival in Brazil in which case sorry dude. Well this did kinda happen except it was some carnival in Bolivia where it was very back to the basics, raw and hippyish sounding – she wasn’t even sure what music it was but it did involve camping in the rain. Ehhh I kinda did that last week, plus I am feeling a sunny hot vineyard in Argentina so I think I am set. Continue crushing Steins of Amber at employee pricing (how can you resist) at the hostal bar , this will make my 1:30am flight to Iquen, Chile, then Santiago, then Buenos Aires far more interesting and adventurous. 2 step into the airport, meet a decent Canadian kid at the bar, drink some more beers and I am on a plane! Unfortunately because I am flying on the cheap and they are zig zagging me all over South America on small ass planes each one of my flights is about an hour and thirty minutes, which when including take off and landing is just about enough time to do absolutely nothing – including sleep. By the time I was in Santiago I was feeling pretty frazzeled as there was no bar for a quick 7am re-up. Santiago to Buenos Aires I did manage to sleep, in fact I was out the minute I sat down and put on my seat belt. No take off, no landing, no nothing. I was woken up by the women next to me which gave me a startle, I jumped a little and smashed the top of my foot on a sharp piece of metal under the seat which was painful enough to almost make me cry. At this point my feet now resemble a severe burn victim, in fact I did not know sun burn could cause anything so ridiculous looking. It has been over a week since my sunburn machu pichu experience. Still too painful to wear shoes and the top of my feet look like a combination of someone taking a belt grinder to them and also pouring scolding hot water all over them. They also have a nice bluish purple tint surrounding the sunburn. To top it off I now have a 2 inch gash across the top which is bleeding. The dried blood mixed with 3 countries worth of crusty dirt stuck to the triple antibiotic ointment has a very aesthetically pleasing appearance; great conversation starter. (It took me the entire next week – 2.5 weeks since the initial burn with applying triple antibiotic to get them relatively back to normal.) Well I make it to Buenos Aires and cab it to the bus station for late lunch. I am generally taken back by all the beautiful girls walking around the streets. The terminal is HUGE, there are literally about 200 offices all selling busses to places, I begin to walk around asking prices to the city of Nequin (nearest big city to Mackey) but am so god damn worn out and can hardly put together Spanish words that I settle with the second kiosk I ask. Right now I couldn’t care less about the price, I just want to get on a bus and sleep. Score a 3:00pm bus out which should drop me in Nequin at 4:00am. The guy I buy the ticket gives me choice of seat, that’s right baby, gimme #1. I am pretty pumped getting on the bus as I am the very first seat on the top level of the bus, essentially surrounded by windows. To make it even better I have no one next to me so I am able to spread out all my gear and get comfortable. I force myself to stay awake and look at the views of the city as we head out on the road, then I am out like a rock. I wake up about 3 hours later which is enough to give me the final 2 to 2.5 hours of daylight. Throw on some Simon and Garfunkel as we are cruising through the Argentinean country side, perfect way to spend an evening. The rest of the night is followed by painful Stephen Segal movies. Someone shoot me this guy, he is such a bad actor, I actually loath him. His movies are like train wrecks, they are so god damn bad but you just cannot help it, you have to look. I manage to get some sleep in and wake up about 3:00am to ensure I get off at Nequin as I do not want to end up 8 hours further south in Baraloche. 4:00am in the Nequin bus terminal, nothing is open. I just have to stay awake and guard my stuff until the offices open around 7:00am. I sit in the food court and begin to plow through my Vonnegut. I get a couple coffees as the offices begin to open then I am off to find a kiosk that sells tickets to Mainque – the town that Mackey is in. I ask at about 5 or 6 places, all of which send me to another place which sends me back to the other place and so on with two general responses; “never heard of Mainque and Mainque, why do you want to go there?” Finally I get to booth 39, the final booth. I have no idea what Mainque is, or how big it is, or where it is but the guy sells me a ticket for a local commuter bus which costs me about $2.00. This is awesome except it takes me 3 hours to get there. I slowly leave the city where the bus stops every two blocks and we make our way into the country where the bus begins to stop at every two dirt roads. The country side is beautiful, full of vinyards and apple orchards, all of which are immaculate. It is like a little piece of heaven. The driver tells me we should get to Mainque about 11:30 so at 11 I tell him to let me know when we get there as I do not know what I am looking for and I have a feeling the town does not have a welcome sign. I am already beginning to find out what it feels like to be a minority as half the bus stares at me – this is certainly not a touristy area. I wonder if they have ever seen a white kid with a baseball cap and ipod before. Well we get there, I am dropped off the bus in the town plaza. The town is a shack like shanty town, it is tiny, the roads are all dirt and there is no one about. Hmmm how do I go about finding Bodega Chacra – all I know is it is about 5 kilometers from town. Ah ha, there is a gardener dude weeding the flowers in the plaza – I got a feeling he knows whats up. I walk over and ask if he knows Bodega Chacra which he does. I ask him can he point me in the direction so I can start walking, he looks at my feet and says I cannot do it. I say it is only about 5 km right? Yes, I can do that, I do not mind. He says no the road goes in many directions, I say I can ask people along the way, he says there are no people along the way. Riiiight ok, I follow him over to a house on a side street where he bangs on the door – I am assuming this is a friend with a car? An old fat guy comes out and I successfully have scored a ride to Bodega Chacra for $5. I walk into the winery asking for Mackey who I hear shouting my name from on top of a wine tank – he can’t believe I actually made it here.

I help finish up with some cleaning and we head back to his house for a late lunch. Pretty sweet pad, a very modern but minimalistic place with pretty cool architecture. It is set in the middle of a vinyard about a 20 minute walk from the winery. I am so, so happy I have finally made it. Mackey heads back to work at 2, I finally get a shower and wash my feet, then figure I will walk back to town see if I can suss out an atm and a store to buy groceries. Bad move Oliver, should have just been patient and waited for a ride from his boss after he gets out. Enough of this can do spirit, you keep getting yourself into trouble. To fill you guys in the dirt roads are long and straight. They are set into block formation surrounding vinyards and apple orchards, each block is either 1 or sometimes 2 kilometers long. There is no shade and it is hot and dusty. Poplars line some of the orchards making it very pretty, the trees remind me of England. As I thought I was only in for a 5km walk I boiled up some water (as Mackey was out) and hit the road with half a water bottle of very hot water. I tried to follow the route the driver took me to get here, I am kicking myself now as I was not always paying attention, I spent some time looking up words in my dictionary. Well my sense of directions is usually pretty good so I decided to kinda wing it. I walked and I walked. And I walked and walked and I drank my hot water and walked some more. A few hours into my walk I was out of water and should definitely be in town by now. It is hot as hell and I have my shirt wrapped around my head like a turban. I need a moral booster so I have to admit it, I jumped an irrigation ditch and stole an apple. I walked some more, I think I am seriously lost now. However I am seeing more cars pass up ahead, this is a good sign (by more I mean more than 1 every 30 minutes). This is still a km or so ahead so I walk some more. Slowly more cars are on the road so I decide not to turn back which would be an epic failure and huge blow to my pride. Besides, I do not think I could even make it without rations. Then I start to see a house, then another, slowly it looks like I am getting into a town. Finally I walk past a store which is literally in someones house and buy a liter of water and two beers. I immediately drink everything in about 5 minutes. I resume walking and come into an actual town, this is definitely not Mainque. Later I come to learn two things; the first is that its good I am not in Manque as there is no atm so I would have not been able to buy anything anyway. The second is that I walked over 12 kilometers each way – this becomes a joke that stays with me for the entire week - the white kid that shows up and impatiently walks to the next town over for food. Well I am here so I load up on food. They are out of bags so I have a big box of food which ways a ton and cost me about $30. I had cold cuts, cheese, pasta, sauces, a chicken, steaks, sausages, veggies, 2 liters of beer and a liter of box wine. I begin to trek back and slowly realize how miserable this is going to be. This box is heavy as shit and my $10 market shoes have given me awful blisters. I drink the first liter of beer to lighten my load. Then I drink the second one as this worked pretty well. I hitch hike with one of the only cars I see which is a nice guy that brings me only about 1.5 km as his house is just down the road. He cannot believe I am walking to Bodega Chacra with my box of food and gives me a lighter and his half pack of cigarettes. I found this funny. I really have no idea where I am because its dark and the land marks kinda blend together – a whole lot of straight dirt roads and fields. I honestly have no one to blame but myself so I try to find it more humorous than aggravating. I begin to break into the wine. Well the wine is finished, I am actually pretty hammered and stumbling around drit roads in the dark with a big box of food. I am at the point of intoxication and desperation where I will pretty much do anything so I decide that I am physically going to stand in the middle of the road and stop vehicles to try and take me in the right direction. This is tough as there are hardly any cars that pass and, well, people don’t really want to pick me up haha. I try to pay a guy with a motorcycle to drive me but he has no gas bla bla but does say I am heading in the right direction. I jump in front of a ladies car later and she very skeptically rolled down here window. She wont give me a ride but gives me more directions. 30 minutes later another car comes and I jump in front of it again. I begin my speal in broken Spanish to find out it’s the same lady saying “I know I know, Bodega Chacra, get in.” Fuck Yes. She drives me the final 2 kms or so, thank god. She drops me off at the end of the driveway and I begin to walk into the fields. Of course she stalls her car and cant start it. God damn it I believe in karma, put my box of food down and went back to see what the deal was. She was smacking what looked to be the fuel pump or something with a piece of metal rebar. It obviously wasn’t working and I was pretty sure it was just stalled and a pop start would work. She gets in and the other women in the car and I begin to push. Took a little bit but finally successful. Thank god, my night is done, I am home, it is midnight. That only took 8 hours.

I begin to work with Mackey for the rest of the week which is pretty hard. The first day was real physical and after that I begin to do more specialized procedures with him. We do pump overs where Mackey pumps out all the wine sunk to the bottom of these enormous tanks with a fire house. I have the other end of the hose and stand up on top of the tank and spray the floating grapes on the top with a jet of fermenting grape juice. It tastes good, we drink some. We also pump out the wine into other tanks and dump bucket after bucket of dry ice to cool it as juice fermenting at different temperatures creates different flavors. We do this to all 13 tanks 2 or 3 times a day, cleaning up after each time. I am a master squeegee-er. About once a day we also strip down into our boxers and jump in the tank of fermenting grapes. You sink up to about mid thigh and begin to trudge around for half an hour. Yup I haven’t showered, in my boxers, when this is bottled it will be $160 pinot. It is hot and the smell of carbon dioxide is quite strong. These days are long and we are often still working at 9, 10, 11pm, even mid night one day. Because of this we literally did not have energy to go out at night. We only made it out 2 times. The second night I was there some girls that worked with Mackey took us to a near by town of about 60,000. We crushed Fernet con coca at a lounge and went to the only club. This was a late night as you can guess – we hadn’t partied with each other since about early senior year of college. Its fun seeing good friends like that, it had been about three years and nothing had changed. Seems like I could have seen him the previous weekend. Another night we headed out to the harvest fest as it is peak harvest season. This is a mixture of a huge market where people are selling crap, food venders selling awesome junk food and liter cups of beer. We climb up this mountain to over look the town and get stuck in a torrential down poor with gale force winds. This is after Mackey has told me it literally never rains here, 2 cm’s a season or something. We have absolutely no cover or anything to hide behind so have to stick it out. Take off my shirt to try and keep it relatively dry in my back pack and thankfully I have my swim trunks with me. My previous days sunburn from my walk is pretty bad, the rain is god damn painful, feels like someone is throwing handfuls of pedals at me. It was odd walking around the festival. I really think many people had not seen white people before as this is a very rural area with no tourism what so ever. We had groups of kids following us listening to us talk. At one point I was ordering food and talking with Mackey and I had a little girl about 11 or 12 come up to me and ask what language (idioma) we were speaking. I said Ingles, then she put her hand over her mouth and giggled with amazement. Caught a cool fashion show at the end which was interesting, pretty un-fitting and odd (considering the location) as they were all super hot models in designer clothes. We enjoyed it, called it a night. About 1:30 am we missed the last bus to his town by 15 minutes. Begin to walk, I ask people to drive us at gas stations along the way. Finally manage to hitch hike with a nice couple who drop us in the center of Mainque. 5km walk home, we get back about 3:30am exhausted. Up for work at 6:30, brutal. My final night we went out for a dinner with some cool people he worked with. We celebrated our week with a final shot of Jameson and I was dropped off at the bus station.

In 17 hours I will be in Buenos Aires where I will stay for a few days. I am very excited. I stay with my friend Andreas, a Norwegian studying in BA. If you recall I met him randomly in the tour guide office in Arequipa Peru and climbed that ridiculous volcano together. I have about 4 hours to kill until he is out of class so I sit in a beautiful park near his apartment and write a bit, then walk around a bit. Andreas has a nice apartment in the middle of the city, great location. I spend my days exploring the city on my own walking everywhere, so many beautiful parks and things to see. The city has wonderful charm, an overwhelming European atmosphere with cafes and empanada bakeries on every corner. It is clean and beautiful. People don’t go out to dinner until 11 and we often didn’t finish eating until around 1 am. We would then spend our nights hopping around town to bars and clubs. Our first night was of course a pretty late one. In the morning one of Andreas’s roommates, Teah, is going for a run. It is her couch I am crashing in so when she asks if I want to go obviously I oblige. Very enjoyable, ran round one of the major parks – so many people out doing stuff. It was a great way to see areas of the city. It was also a great way to get insanely sore for my remaining 4 days there where I was hobbling around pretty bad. It had been a while since I have gone running, and these damn shoes. I could seriously live here except there are no mountains, this is a big catch. I think I will have to do some research on Mendoza which sounds like a great city. Well we ended up having a great time and I ended up staying for a few extra days. Get a cab to the airport and I am off to La Paz with a layover in Santiago, then Iquiqen. From La Paz I will stay a day or two and bus it back to Cuzco. Well of course I miss my flight out of Buenos Aires. In the US check ins remain open, it is up to you to make it through security in time. In South America they close all check ins about an hour, more or less, before each flight. I am on stand by in the airport for 7 hours. God damn it, I sit and drink fernet and cokes. By the time I got on a flight I have missed my layover in Santiago. I am now forced to buy new tickets and because of that have to also buy a visa as there are no flights to La Paz for 2 days. Well I got no other options so I might as well try and make it worth it.

Man was it worth it. I found the coolest hostal called La Caja Roja, a huge red mansion down town transformed into a hostal. It has a sweet pool, pool bar, poolside lawns, huge commercial kitchen etc. It was clean and well run, I am in an 8 person room which is huge, certainly the best hostal I have stayed in. Fits roughly 120 people in it and was only $15 a night. I ended up staying a full week because it was so much fun. Got the place going pretty good, met this Israli kid that liked to party and each day, after I spent the morning till about 2:00pm exploring the city we went to the store and got booze and food and turned it into a week long pool party bar b que. When it came time to leave I had met so many cool people – more than all my traveling combined, that I found it very hard to leave. I’ll just say that I was pretty sick on the way to the airport, it was a tiring week. Flights were tough, long layovers, made it to La Paz at 2am. Spend the following day walking around, headed to the Gravity Bolivia office to pick up my riding shoes I had forgotten. After dinner I met up with all the guides that were not working the following day and we bounced around some hostal bars, played pool, got all our drinks at 40% off everywhere which makes them cheaper than water and hit a club for some South American dancing.

In Review:

I finish up my 4 weeks on the road now sitting on a bus from La Paz to Cusco. I will go back to Ollanta tonight and rest, then head to Cusco again in the morning to pick up Mike at the airport, then hit the road for another two weeks. This past trip was originally meant to be a one week visit to Mackey in Patagonia, Argentina to work in the winery. From there is snowballed to one of the best 4 weeks I have experienced. You learn a lot about oneself when traveling alone; the experiences, situations, beauty, sights, living out of a small backpack with no real specific plans besides a desire for adventure, new people and new things. Missing my layover in Chile cost me a lot of cash however, it was one of the best weeks I have ever had. I will be concluding my South American adventure shortly where I will return to the US broke. However, I have become rich in relationships and experiences and memories that will remain with me my entire life. It is good to have friends in powerful places, it is also good to have friends everywhere. I have come to learn that one cannot put a price on traveling; I would accept no monetary value in exchange for what I have done this winter. After all, you only live once, the world is vast, each place unique, and I want to see it all. When growing up you often throw about the idea of a genie giving you three wishes. It is typical to imagine wealth, power, your ideal profession or supermodel wife. I would now choose one wish to be granted - that I could be conversational in every language. After all, isn’t human connection and communication a basic and instinctual want we all yearn for? I would then decline that high powered, high salary job easily acquired with this new skill and do this all over again. I am young now, and healthy, and curious and there is much I have to see and do. I am not saying this will change with age, but what if something were to change? It would be a shame to miss out on all that is offered, all there is to be had.

I am off to the airport to pick up Mike!

Ciao – see everyone shortly!

Oliver