Happy holidays to everybody! I was going to go make some surprise phone calls, but of course I then realized everything is closed on Christmas day. I also should probably have at least mailed some postcards, but didn't think of that either. Fail. It is a rainy Christmas morning on Chiloe. So rainy, in fact, that I am doing nothing but lurking in the hostel and lurking my way around the internet.
Been quite a while since the last post, my apologies. I'm still alive, and things are going well. This is going to be a short post, because I'm a little short on time. When I was sill in Santiago the Australian couple put me in contact with an author they had met at one of their fancy parties. He was in Santiago but was going to be leaving for southern Chile to return a rental car, and, never having met me, offered me a spot so I could tag along.
I got into Santiago some days ago. The bus ride across the Andes was incredible, and often found us freakily close to the edge of sharp drops over cliffs. I think I posted at least one picture, but it's hard to convey the "oh my god he's not going to turn in time and they don't have guardrails why don't they have guardrails oh my god we're all going to die"
I brought only three pairs of boxers with me on my eight month venture. Every night, washing clothes in the sink. One pair is now officially MIA, lost in the hostel washing service. It was 20 pesos for that laundry service, too. My go-to pair of shorts was also temporarily unaccounted for, but I found them still hanging on the line outside, ignored but not forgotten. I didn't account for attrition in my packing.
I'm in a bus station in the town of Rio Gallegos on my way to El Calafate. Yesterday was an adventure. The national park outside of Ushuaia is a 15 minute drive, but you have to pay 50 pesos to get there via a bus service. The "bus" was in fact a van, and the 50 pesos included drop off at the park and pickup at set times throughout the day.
Ushuaia is awesome. It feels like Juneau. Yesterday I hiked through the town and into the forest towards a glacier with yet another friendly German, this one named Cedric. He had some great quotes, including "everywhere you go, you find a German guy." I agree with him. About the view, which pictures can't do justice, looking out over the Beagle Channel, he said what I've appropriated as the title of this post, as well as "
I'm about to catch a bus to Ushuaia, a city which calls itself something like the city on the edge of the world. It's about a 30 hour bus ride, assuming I make my connecting bus at 5am tomorrow morning. Hopefully it's an hour or two late so I don't have to wait a long time in the bus station, but not so late that I miss it. Puerto Madryn was amazing.
I am on the bus to Puerto Madryn. My last day in Buenos Aires was ominously Friday the 13th, and I started the 20 hour bus journey during a thunder storm complete with lightning and torrential downpours. It's day two of the journey and the bus is actually quite comfortable. There are televisions, and they played some strange but very cool DVD that was a medley of hit music videos from the 80s that went on for about an hour.
I think that eight days is too long to go without a post, as I've gotten a number of "are you alive?" emails. I am indeed. As proof, I've posted some more pictures, which can be found here. I can't get the embedded link function to work, so you might have to copy/paste. Sorry. EDIT 2016-04-09: changing to link. Most are from Buenos Aires, but there are some from San Antonio de Areco as well.
Heard today: Prince, Cake, Robbie Williams, Toto, Greenday, Survivor, Earth Wind and Fire, The Verve, A-ha, Wang Chung, Billy Joel, Lenny Kravitz, Paul Simon, Laura Branigan, Marvin Gaye (you know which song), Vanilla Ice, The Beatles, The Cure Trick learned today: An incredibly dense, very weird looking gourd, called a calabaza, can be slipped into your produce bag to add weight and increase the price. The gourd is often not discovered until you get back to the hostel and wonder where it came from.