The doctor returned with a needle that would have frightened a rhino, and a painkilling tablet the size of a small loaf of bread. With little ceremony he jabbed the needle into my backside. Miraculously, within minutes the writhing subsided, and soon I was feeling fine; in fact I felt so good by the time I made my way back through the hostel doors that morning that I was a little embarrassed. Anything that simple to cure shouldn’t have needed a doctor, I felt, blushing as I thanked Julio.
‘De nada,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’
I returned to the dorm room as the first light seeped through the curtains, disturbingly illuminating just how skimpy some Italian underwear is, and managed to sleep for an hour before the alarm beeped rudely in my ear, waking me for the Perito Moreno hike.
In that state of near drunkenness that exhaustion can induce, I could scarcely recall the agony of the night before. I was excited. Finally I was going to see something special, I was sure of it.
And just for once, I was right.
•
I watched in wonder as a minivan-sized piece of ice dropped from the sheer face of the Perito Moreno glacier in front of us. ‘That was huge!’ I exclaimed, my voice hoarse from lack of sleep.
‘Not so big,’ one of the guides said nonchalantly.
We were on a boat that would take us to the base of the glacier, the sight of which had already stunned me into rare silence until the enormous block of ice fell away.
Moments later we were docking, and a group of us then began walking on a trail through light forest. Sheer cliffs launched skywards to our left, with waterfalls that regularly sprayed us as we walked. I tilted my head to catch some moisture on my tongue and almost toppled backwards.
A condor soared from over the ridgeline; even though it was hundreds of feet overhead its almost three-metre wingspan was staggering. ‘Wow,’ I said, my wildlife-spotting grin already in place.
This was what I’d been searching for when I came to Patagonia, but hadn’t found in either El Calafate or Ushuaia. Patagonia had inspired writers, artists, naturalists and soul-searchers for hundreds of years; its remoteness had attracted the mad, the adventurous and the hunted. I felt sane enough, and while I was fleeing the mundane, as far as I knew I wasn’t being chased. All I sought was the wildness and isolation that I’d missed so much living a ‘normal’ life in Sydney.
Still grinning, and lagging a little behind the others, I brushed my hands against lichen-heavy tree trunks, savouring the sensation of soft mosses underfoot. I caught up to the rest of the group at a staging point where the guides were putting them into uncomfortable-looking harnesses that bulged in unflattering places, making all of us, even the women, look like we’d sprung a grand tumescence at the activity planned.
I was soon rigged up and then the guide handed me what looked like a grand inquisitor’s roller skates. I’ve always thought ‘crampon’ is one of the language’s least attractive words, sounding like the bastard hybrid between something that causes pain and an item men are mortified to buy on behalf of their wives. But crampons on our boots would be essential here, their jagged metal teeth giving much-needed traction on the ice.
Clumsy at the best of times, I teetered as I hesitantly stepped onto the ice from the gravelly surface where we’d geared up, immediately forgetting any concerns of balance or verticality as I soaked up the view in front of me. The glacier was inconceivably vast. On my right it stretched back down to the lake from which we’d come. To the left it was a daunting, chunky, corrugated mass of blue and white for miles until it disappeared into mist, from the top of which poked snow-capped Andean peaks. This was totally unlike the jungly, fetid South America of my imagination, and the surprise thrilled me.
If I’d done more research I might have had the foresight to pack some warmer clothes. I had thought that the light sweater I’d put on after my brief sleep would be adequate, but most of the group were wearing coats so thick and shaggy you’d think they’d skinned Chewbacca’s family.
‘What makes the ice so blue?’ an American woman in the group asked the guide. On our walk to the glacier this particular woman had delayed us twice by getting lost in an area only twice the size of a shoebox, and the group’s collective patience with her was wearing a little thin.
‘Smurf piss,’ I answered; though I was joking the colour of the ice was so vivid it seemed as if it could only be fake. I’d never seen such an intensity of blue outside of a butterfly’s wing, but unlike the flash of blue from a tropical moth in a forest, this went on for miles.
The woman looked at me blankly for a long moment.
‘The ice crystals are packed so densely that the only light that reflects off it is in the blue spectrum,’ our guide replied.
When I was a guide I might have run with the Smurf-urine theory just to see how long people believed me, but this guy was apparently more professional than I had ever been.
‘Here’s something,’ said another guide, a New Zealander, as he hunched over a small dark object on the ice.
I clomped over, the crampon blades crunching into the ice with each step, and looked down to where he was pointing. Incongruous in this pristine environment, a turd sat starkly on the ice.
‘Well hello, Roy,’ I said. ‘You following me?’
‘You name your poo Roy?’ the guide asked.
‘Um, no, that’s puma poo, and I had a puma named Roy.’
That undoubtedly made as much sense as my previous statement so I shut up. In Africa I used to hear stories of leopards turning up in unexpected places (a sports stadium in Cape Town, the summit of Kilimanjaro, and on a small island in the middle of the vast Lake Kariba). The leopards’ adaptability and ability to survive in any habitat were legendary. While the jaguars I yearned to see might look more like leopards, I was learning that pumas were the continent’s real equivalent.
As we went deeper into the glacier I concentrated on lifting my feet cleanly with each stride rather than shuffling lazily. If I put the spikes down on uneven ground or they caught because I dragged my feet I could be felled like a tree, hitting the hard blue ice face first. A slip and slide away from the carefully chosen route the guides were taking us on could lead to any number of deadly chasms. The guides pointed out one of these, and the sheer scale of the glacier became shockingly apparent as I peered down a shaft of over thirty metres, at the base of which water rushed as if possessed of a ferocious hunger.
My fear of heights kicked in and I was glad of the firm hold the New Zealand guide took on my belt. ‘Easy, mate,’ he said casually, and I realised I’d been swaying as I looked down into the chasm. With enormous concentration I lifted my clawed feet one by one and backed away from the hole.
We ate lunch soon after, some of us sitting on cloths that soon grew damp as the ice melted through them. Those who had brought plastic sheets probably felt smug—until their body heat melted a slick layer underneath the plastic, causing them to toboggan forward into the nearest obstacle (usually someone sitting on a cloth).
After lunch we were allowed to wander on the glacier by ourselves. I split from the others and made my way over mounds of ice carved into sensual shapes by wind and water, walking until I was out of sight of the group, then pausing, watching the steam of my breath plume in front of me in short bursts. It had taken Roy four weeks to get me fit and slim me down to wiry, and I’d spent the six weeks since piling weight back on at such a rate I was now fatter and less fit than when I’d first come to South America. After Roy I had the dedication to exercise of a sloth, and was rapidly getting the physique to match. I’d begun to find myself out of breath at the mere thought of doing something strenuous. Like chewing. I probably needed to do something about my weight, I thought, then stopped myself with a mental slap. I was trying to leave such city thoughts behind, avoiding places where what you looked like was important. In the wild, experience and ability are all that matter.
I stopped worrying about my gut and took in my surrounds. Around me was nothing but b
lue and white patterned ice, and I thought, ‘If I was left behind here, I would surely die.’ It had been years since I’d had such a thought, the last time being in the very different landscape of the deserts of Namibia. It was exhilarating to be able to think it again. In places where man is not dominant, but dwarfed and made insignificant by nature, I get an adrenalin rush. My time with Roy had been a rollercoaster-ride of adrenalin, but this was different. It was what I’d been missing for seven years. I promised myself to never again go without it for such a long time.
The feelings I had on the glacier have no name in English that I am aware of. It was a blend of respect for a place so inhospitable to my existence, coupled with gratitude that thus far it had not snuffed me out. Awe was also in there, as was a sort of love, both words so overused that they’ve lost much of their power. Contentment, that underrated emotion, was also present, but not for any good reason I could think of. (What sort of person mellows out on a chunk of ice destined, albeit slowly, to go off a cliff?) All I knew was that right then if I’d had a tail I’d have wagged it.
Funnily enough, I hadn’t expected to feel like this here, having previously only felt it in places where animals might eat me, and—snobbishly, naively—I hadn’t expected to experience it on a group tour. I realised my guides would probably scoff at such feelings, just as I had once scoffed when people on my safari tours told me that they’d been sure they would die after receiving an aggressive look from some lion/elephant/sparrow. Maybe I owed a few people some apologies.
My reverie was interrupted by one of the guides, come to check that I hadn’t fallen into a ravine. ‘You okay?’ he asked.
‘Better than okay!’ I shouted back.
Then it hit me: I’d just been soul searching. ‘Well, I’ll be,’ I thought, surprised at myself. ‘The place works!’
The Road from Patagonia
After the awe-inspiring magnificence of the Perito Moreno glacier I was brought back to earth with a thud by my next Patagonian stopover in a place called El Chaltén, a day’s bus ride from El Calafate. My stay there turned out to be pleasant but unexciting; the rare and endangered deer species I had hoped to see turned out to be as elusive as a park ranger had predicted, and the pumas he’d told me other tourists had seen also stayed away. Even the well-known peak of Mt Fitz Roy stayed shrouded in fog.
El Chaltén’s bars were filled with glum-looking climbers, some of whom had been waiting weeks for the notoriously temperamental weather to clear enough for them to summit. I was amazed that any cloud could stay put, as the wind was even fiercer than the other places I had been in Patagonia so far. It shoved me around like a schoolyard bully, making me wonder if maybe I should join the climbers for a few beers and fatten up even more.
As it turned out I might have been able to keep a better eye on my backpack in the bar: I returned from a trail walk to find my wallet emptied (I hadn’t taken it with me due to stories of banditry on the paths, which in hindsight was ludicrous as the trails were too busy for a mugger to choose a target). El Chaltén’s only cash machine was as empty as my wallet, and the nearest bank was in Bariloche, whose townspeople had figured out being considered part of Patagonia was a good thing, so had redrawn the region’s boundary to include themselves. I wasn’t sure that the small change in my pocket would be enough to buy food until I made it there, and was not looking forward to the trip. Little did I know how it would change my travels.
•
The crowd that formed for the bus to Bariloche was made up of a broad cross-section of humanity. All continents, ages, colours, shapes and heights were represented. Spotting an unusually tall blonde woman with pretty features, I wished (not for the first time) I had more confidence when it came to talking to attractive strangers.
Argentinian buses are remarkably punctual, and this one took off promptly at the time advertised. Within minutes we were chugging through spectacular mountain scenery, made all the more striking because the clouds had finally lifted. At each sharp turn in the road there was a small shrine, often in gaudy colours, marking the place where one or more vehicles had gone over the edge. These markers reflected a mix of Catholicism and the more ancient local traditions, with statues of Mary and Jesus as well as the brilliant colours and animal totems that harked back to a time before the Incas. As perturbing as the sheer number of these markers was, any anxiety was forgotten in the thrill of the falcon-haunted cliffs, multicoloured rock faces and distant snowy caps. (I resolutely faced these rather than looking at the terrifying drop off the other side of the road.)
I kept my face turned to the window, but happened to spot the tall blonde woman sitting a few rows back from me beside an even taller man. I envied him for a while until I noticed they weren’t talking. ‘They must be fighting,’ I thought, and as a shorter man often will when a taller one suffers, felt a small pang of glee.
After a while, the engine noises changed from a hard-working grumble to a smoother purr. We had levelled out and abruptly left the mountains behind. The arid plain we emerged onto was so featureless that the world seemed nothing but horizon. Despite its silken-smooth appearance outside, the bullet-straight dirt track we were driving on was pitted and corrugated, making everyone’s cheeks jiggle and teeth chatter.
I can find beauty in the stark, and I appreciated the view outside as much as any other. Occasionally the flat stretches were interrupted by a glimpse of a distant lake in shades of the most impossible deep blue or green. As the glaciers that fed these lakes ground away, they crushed rock into such a fine powder that when it reached the lakes it stayed suspended, and only allowed certain wavelengths of light to reflect, creating marvellous palettes. Just as colourful was the odd shrine, similar to those in the mountains but to my mind even more perturbing on a dead-flat road. The monotony was clearly soporific for some drivers and, judging by the slack drooling mouths of many around me, some passengers too. I started looking at the driver periodically to check whether the long straight road wasn’t acting as a lullaby for him too.
Though I was happy taking in the view outside the window, some of the passengers who weren’t sleeping wanted more stimulation, and to appease them the driver put on some videos. First was an American action film; the video had clearly been pirated and was dubbed into Russian, then translated back into English subtitles. Whoever had written the subtitles wasn’t a native English speaker, or perhaps they had a juvenile sense of humour, for the word ‘bomb’ had been incorrectly translated, leading to not-quite-Shakespearean lines of dialogue such as: ‘Oh no! He’s got a bum!’ and ‘We don’t know how big his bum is, but we do know it is powerful. It might take out a whole city.’ At the film’s midway point, translation duties must have been handed over to someone else, since one character’s name suddenly and inexplicably changed from Gordon to Norman and all the unintentional bum jokes stopped.
The action film over, music videos began with a much more local flavour. Reggaeton originated in the Caribbean but spread quickly throughout South America. It has a jangly beat and is invariably accompanied by a clip of a man in large dark glasses surrounded by impressively proportioned dancers. The men snarl and rap, making hand gestures that I presume are meant to look like they’re holding guns but make them appear palsied instead. After five hours of the music I was afraid my ears might vomit, but no relief was in sight.
While the videos alternated between bad and worse, the view outside retained my interest (with an occasional glance in the window’s reflection to check on relations between the tall blonde and the man beside her; to my satisfaction, it didn’t appear to have thawed). We stopped every few hours to stretch our legs and once for lunch. The bedraggled store we visited had a gutterless roof weighed down with stones, suggesting a place of howling winds but little rain. The soil was clearly poor, and it seemed all that grew here was despair. A sad-looking lamb near the store bleated at us plaintively, then went and sat beside an outdoor barbecue, as if aware of its eventual fate and more than ready to accept it.
The wind soon drove everyone back into the bus, and we hit the plain again, leaving the hapless store and suicidal lamb behind. At times the only feature outside at all was the bus’s shadow, expanding and contracting as we rocked from side to side.
As night fell we reached a one-taxi town with the same name as the glacier I had fallen in love with, Perito Moreno. This place had far less charm though, consisting of a few stores selling auto parts and gasoline, and a single hotel run by a bear of a man and his three tiny daughters, all under ten, all working behind the bar. The cost of the bus ticket included accommodation, and I was billeted to a room, arriving at the same time as a slightly built German man who smiled heartily at me. Though clearly from a place where dentistry wasn’t in vogue, he was very friendly and spoke perfect English. We spent at least five minutes insisting the other person should have the larger of the three beds in the room before agreeing to take the smaller ones and leave the bigger for whoever else was sharing with us.
The door opened and in walked the tall woman’s even taller boyfriend.
‘Where’s your girlfriend?’ the German and I asked almost simultaneously in Spanish, and I wondered if he of the bad dentistry had also shared rooms before with couples whose sense of discretion was no match for their randiness.
‘I don’t have a girlfriend,’ the newcomer replied, looking at us as if wondering why he had to share a room with two deranged midgets.
We quickly established that he was French, that our only common language was a smattering of Spanish, and that the woman he’d been sitting next to on the bus was unknown to him, and that they’d hardly exchanged a word all day. He didn’t know her name nor where she was from.
How to Walk a Puma Page 6