It was supposed to happen any day, so for this entire week the Glacier Cam was trained on the glacier. Tourists also flock to the region for the “rupture,” to sit and stare and hope that they catch it. I found this entire thing very funny, and yet I also found myself turning on the Glacier Cam feed whenever I was back in the apartment. The hope that you would catch the moment was catching.
And it turned out to be incredibly relaxing to just stare at a glacier. Sasha, Hope, and I took to lying in Sasha’s big bed at the Four Seasons together, watching it as we fell into an eight p.m. pre-dinner nap, a necessity in the seemingly sleep-free world of Buenos Aires. When a hunk of ice would fall, it was exciting, like a great plot twist in a thriller.
“Whoa! Can you believe the size of that splash?!” one of us would exclaim.
“Awesome. Didn’t see that one coming,” we would agree.
Ultimately, the bridge fell in the middle of the night, when no one, including the cameras, could see it. The glacier would not perform on command.
One wet, gray night, Sasha went to bed early, still trying to fully recuperate, and my bartender, Oscar, took me and Hope out for a drink. It was Sunday, and most things were closed, but he had a friend who owned a bar named Sálvame María—Save me, Mary. It turned out that the “María” was not the Virgin Mary, but Oscar’s pudgy male friend Jose-María, who owned and ran the bar. We were the only customers, and I was disappointed I wasn’t showing Hope a better time. I needed a great night of South American travel magic, preferably involving romance with a local, and my conscience really needed to deliver something great to at least one of the friends who desperately needed some fun, too.
Oscar tried to do his part for my romance needs right there on my barstool while María fed Hope approximately as much wine as was probably consumed by the other María’s son at the Last Supper, but I eventually extricated Oscar’s hands from my clothes and the four of us went on a hunt for some fun. The guys took us to a lively Irish bar nearby, where, unfortunately, Oscar, Hope, and I were waved in, but María wasn’t. He apparently didn’t make the once-over cut. The night looked ready to stall out there, but Hope gamely suggested we all move the party to María’s house.
“Are you sure?” I asked her, Oscar’s hands in my clothes.
The sweetest wingwoman in the world nodded drunkenly, flashing me a purple-toothed wine smile. “Why not?” And not much later, my dear, dear friend made out with a fat man named María who was not good-looking enough to get into an Irish pub.
It came time for me to go on my solo adventure to Tierra del Fuego. I had introduced Hope and Sasha to Father Juan’s brother, Fefe, who was as bad as Father Juan was good, just like in a telenovela. But they shared their family’s physical genes, at least, and so Hope was delighted to make his acquaintance. Fefe invited Hope and Sasha out to Punta del Este, Uruguay, for a few days, where their family had a beach house. Punta is the beach resort of choice for porteños, sort of a Hamptons/South Beach of South America.
Hope and Sasha and I said our good-byes. They hadn’t had my experience of Argentina. It hadn’t saved them during their times of crisis the way it had saved me. But they hadn’t expected it to; only I had. I realized they didn’t look at travel the way I looked at it, like medicine, like my chance to right all of the wrongs that might exist in my life. They just had a few interesting days in South America, and went home not too disappointed, but not too changed, either.
I sent them on their way with Fefe, and they were hit with more rain on the beach. It seemed their trip was not destined to succeed. But they apparently played a lot of hands of poker in the casino, and Fefe gave Hope a nice heap of attention, and we do still have a handful of stories from that week we can laugh about. When Sasha went home, she picked up her husband from rehab and got pregnant with her first child a month later, a new life officially begun.
As for me, after my friends left Buenos Aires another travel mishap intervened: I discovered the morning of my flight to Tierra del Fuego that I had left my passport at an Internet café the night before. I discovered this at five a.m., the flight was at eight, the café was not open until nine, there was only one flight a day, which was going to get me to Ushuaia just hours before the one boat of the week would leave … Basically, I had to get on that plane, or not go at all. I decided to just see how far I could get.
Buenos Aires Ezeiza → Ushuaia–Malvinas Argentinas
Departing: March 15, 2006
I had a copy of my passport, and so managed to get on the plane that took me to Ushuaia, a little town at the Argentine tip of Tierra del Fuego, but they would not let me on the boat for Chile without the real thing. My big, expensive, carefully planned trip, where I imagined myself as a lonely, romantic figure staring out at the icebergs, was not to be.
So I cried a little, and watched the other passengers load onto the boat, all fifty- to seventysomething couples who would have been my companions on the trip. I then found a liquor store, and a little hostel above town, which happened to be new and clean with heated wood floors for twenty dollars a night, which I knew would attract fun single travelers. I regrouped, drinking beer in the warm upstairs lounge that looked down at the ocean, and up at the glaciers above town.
After a few minutes, three young Israeli guys sat down nearby.
“Grab a glass,” I said, holding up my big bottle.
They did, and we shared my beer while we watched my boat literally sail off into the Antarctic sunset, blowing its horn like the Love Boat.
It turned out that the Israelis were fresh out of the military, where one of them had flown F-16S. South America and Southeast Asia are lousy with backpacking Israelis, all having a year or so of low-cost travel fun between their military service and college. Sometimes they get a little “stuck” during this travel time after the army, and the year turns into longer. The Indian, Thai, and Brazilian branches of the Israeli embassies have taken more than one frantic call from the parents of these wayward beachcombers, requesting that they retrieve these nice, stoned Jews and ship them back to their families in the Holy Land.
Anyway, wherever in the world you find these ex-soldiers, they’re always up for a good time. So my boat sailed away, and then I went to dinner with my new buddies who couldn’t believe I was as old as twenty-eight (I was thirty-two), and then the four of us met a posse of other foreigners who became my travel compadres for a few amazing days.
A brief breakdown of the crowd: first there were the three Israeli pilots. One of them, Avi, had ice-blue eyes, a crazily naughty smile, and, despite the fact that he was built like Kate Moss and was probably too young to legally drink in the U.S., both he and his friends seemed confident that he would be taking me to bed. (In Israel I was told a joke about fighter pilots, and the punch line had something to do with them thinking they could cut diamonds with their penises. So, there’s a swagger.) Later in the night we met Alfred, a German hippie mountaineering guide who was taking a few days off from his job in Torres del Paine—the national park in Chile where I was supposed to be. He was as goofy and cheerful as Germans rarely are, with white-guy dreads and a deep joy from getting to sleep indoors for a few days. There was Elizabeth, the tall, blond Australian student/waitress/singer, who was traveling around the world for a year on her own. There were Noa and Eli, a lovely Israeli couple on their post-army trip together, who had met during their tours of duty in the Israeli equivalent of the USO. She sang for the soldiers, and he set up the sound system, and they were the kind of in love that made you want to take pictures of them in the sunset. And, lastly, there was Nick, an adorable blue-eyed science teacher from Maryland who had just come in from a week backpacking alone in the cold wet tundra of Tierra del Fuego, and who, it turned out, was hungry for some warmth and company. But more on him later.
They were all a little younger than I was, and in different places in their lives, but together this crowd saved my trip. The Israeli pilots took me flying, in a tiny little plane over Cape Horn, and o
ur heads smashed into the roof of the plane as the winds tossed it about like a toy. I was still determined to see the penguin colonies, and so the next day I corralled some of the troops to go on a boat trip out to visit them.
It was the year of March of the Penguins, and there was no one from anywhere in the world who had not seen the movie and become enthralled with the funny little creatures. We piled onto the boat, which pulled out into the freezing, windy harbor as the fog came in and the rain began to fall horizontally. It was too miserable to stand outside, and the fog made it impossible to see land anyway, so we all found ourselves inside the boat, drinking cafés cortados and watching, yes, March of the Penguins on the boat’s TV system. Dubbed in Spanish.
Just when we had resigned ourselves to the fact that we had flown to the bottom of the world to sail around in the rain rewatching a penguin documentary, the clouds lifted enough that three small islands came into view. And they were covered in thousands of penguins. The thing in the place, at last.
We spent some time watching the hilarious little guys waddle and roll like thousands of tiny Charlie Chaplins, which delighted us all exactly as much as we had hoped it would, then sailed back past seal colonies through a frigid and glorious Antarctic sunset, cool silvers and golds and blues replacing the tropical oranges and reds that seemed to have no place down there.
After the boat ride, we bustled back to our cozy little hostel shivering and windblown, a couple of new Kiwis in tow, to find the lobby filled with music and the smells of food cooking.
“Shabbat shalom!” the Israelis called out.
It was Friday, and the Israeli boys had skipped the penguins and cooked us all a proper Shabbat dinner. We sat down to eat, and they said a quick prayer that was the first Jewish prayer many of the crowd had ever heard, and we ate Argentine steak and grilled veggies and hummus.
Nick the cute American teacher blew in through the door, smelling like rain. He had made a run for beer and ice cream, and pulled up a chair next to me. We talked about his week alone hiking through the rain and wind and tundra. He said he wasn’t sure where he was going next.
“Well, I’m heading up to El Calafate and Fitz Roy, if you want to come with,” I said, casually. “I could use a hiking buddy who actually knows how to not get lost in the Andes.”
“Hm,” he said, buttering his bread. “Maybe I’ll check into flights.”
It was also St. Patrick’s Day, which some of the crowd had never celebrated. As an almost 25 percent Irish-American mutt who used to live in Chicago, I took it upon myself to lead a St. Patrick’s expedition, and found Dublin’s Irish Pub in Ushuaia, purportedly the world’s second-most-southern Irish pub. (The winner is the Galway, also in Ushuaia but half a block south.) I introduced many of my new buddies to their first green beers. We jigged in the pub with some French guys wearing elephant trunks, then moved on and merengued to the Manu Chao album that was constantly on that month in a tiny, ancient fishing-shack-turned-bar until the wee hours of the morning.
Years later, I’d have dinner with Elizabeth the Australian when I visited her hometown of Sydney, and she would come stay with me in Los Angeles, and Avi the sexy Israeli would deliver me from an Israeli beach to the Jordanian border on my trip to Israel. The people I met during those three days in Ushuaia all exchanged love notes for years—“That St. Patrick’s Day was the best day of my yearlong trip … You guys were my favorite people I met in South America …”
It was the kind of travel chemistry that doesn’t happen all the time, and it all happened because I lost my passport and my plan. If I had gone on the trip I originally booked, I would have been with older, rich, married couples. It was a reminder for me that reinforced my travel rules—don’t overplan, and don’t book expensive trips if you want to meet fun, single people. The experience also illuminated another fact: regardless of how you travel, as you get deeper into your thirties you might be the only person your age out on the road at all, whether it’s in the hostels with the twentysomethings, or on the fancy cruises with the sixtysomethings. In your fourth decade, your compatriots are mostly at home, working, raising humans, getting husbands through rehab, living for someone besides themselves.
Suckers. That’s what I told myself.
Ushuaia Malvinas Argentinas → El Calafate International
Departing: March 18, 2006
Nick decided to come north with me to El Calafate. We said good-bye to our new hungover friends the next day, leaving them to their collective discovery of what comes out of one’s body the day after drinking a dozen green beers, and traveled north to the portal town of the famous Perito Moreno Glacier, star of the Glacier Cam. We were a week late for the big movie moment seen by no one, but just missing The Thing You Were Supposed to Do seemed perfect to me on this trip of misses.
Nick and I were a little shy about deciding to travel together, our relationship as yet unclear. When we were confronted with the question of how many rooms we wanted at the hostel in El Calafate, there was a lot of mutual bluster:
“Well, I mean, we can get a double, I guess. Cheaper than two singles,” I said “casually,” not at all worried about cost.
“Yeah, and it’d be nice to not be in a big dorm room of snoring people,” Nick agreed, “not caring either way.” “A double, yeah. And … I guess … two beds?”
“Yes, please, two beds,” I agreed, like a “lady.”
Of course the only room available had one queen bed.
“Well, if that’s the only thing available,” I said, happily.
“Yeah, if that’s all there is, sure, we can get by with one,” Nick agreed, quickly.
We went to our room to change clothes, I noticed that Nick had a smooth, muscled back and flat belly, and then we took ourselves quickly out of the room for yet another steak in town. As we sat in the parrilla in front of the room-size fire, where goats were sizzling, each splayed on its own crucifix, we got to know each other better. Nick didn’t love being a high school science teacher, yet didn’t know what else to do with himself. He knew a lot about mountaineering, but oddly very little about a lot of other topics, topics one would hope the teachers of our children would be knowledgeable about. But he was handsome and sweet, and, it turned out, my knight in shining armor in several ways.
I managed to leave my cash card in an ATM that night, meaning I was now at the bottom of the world with both no passport and no way to access cash. It was just one of those trips. Nick said he would take care of me, though, and we agreed that I would cover anything that could be covered with my one remaining credit card, and he would take care of cash needs. I couldn’t help but think about my prior magical year in Argentina, which had been absolutely hitch-free. It seemed like God was trying to tell me something, not just about overplanning, but maybe about money, too. I had tried to make this a much more opulent vacation than I ever had before, straying from my history as the girl who “didn’t need fancy hotels to have a good time.” But all of those opulent plans had blown up, and I had ended up a girl in a hostel who had to borrow money from a near stranger.
Who, granted, was about to sleep in her bed.
Now, was there electric chemistry between me and Nick? Not especially. But, much like with my Patagonian Spanish-teacher boyfriend the year before, there was enough. And in the same way I’d needed Diego to turn a flawed travel situation into a great (unlonely) story, Nick was now on deck.
Nick and I went back to our big bed in our little room, and lay down awkwardly on top of the covers in our clothes. We chatted some more, about how he had been a little disappointed by his experience of trekking around alone—he hoped he wouldn’t get as lonely as he had. I told him about the dramatic difference between my two trips to Argentina, and about how I was feeling a little lost and banged up by this one. But I was also kind of peaceful—the message of all of the events, from Father Juan to the less-than-stellar experience with my two best friends to the lost passport and cash card, seemed to be the same one Hope was trying to
send me. You can’t control everything. Just enjoy what the world is giving you. And that message was actually pretty relaxing.
Eventually it got quiet, and Nick and I just lay next to each other, on our backs, staring at the ceiling, waiting to see what was going to happen next. Would we roll over and go to sleep, or do something else? Slowly, strangely, Nick raised the hand closest to me into the air, his elbow still on the bed … and just left it up there, his arm at an odd right angle. I looked at his very weird first move, an open palm, a quiet question floating above us, and then reached up and took his hand in mine.
Deal.
We did not just go to sleep.
The next day, holding hands easily now, Nick and I went to Perito Moreno. The sky was blue, the sun was warm, and the air was cold, blowing off the ninety-five-square-mile glacier that could hold the entire city of Buenos Aires. We took a boat along the turquoise lake, and snapped pictures of ourselves kissing in front of the two-hundred-foot-tall wall of ice that, somehow, was advancing forward six feet a day. This three-mile-wide ice mountain was moving a little bit faster than a tree sloth.
Inexplicably, there were flocks of tropically colored parrots in the trees across from the ice, and the green, red, and blue birds against the miles of glacier made us feel like we were in some kind of J. J. Abrams Lost universe—polar bears on tropical islands being the clue that you were in another world, or a rule-free TV show. It turns out that if you plan on seeing the glacier fall, it will happen in the middle of the night and you will miss it. But an unexpected trip to that same glacier, days after you theoretically missed the big moment, might lead to a sunny, spectacular day with a new friend, who might kiss you in front of glacial parrots while the ice falls.
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding Page 10