Time Travel

Time Travel-

After returning from Antarctica to mainland South America most of the people I met on the trip went their separate ways. If there’s one thing you become good at while traveling is the ability to say goodbye. You just kind of say goodbye really and that’s it. Most of the people I know I’ll never see again, some I know I definitely will and some I hope to someday. Either way long, drawn out and tearful goodbyes, like its the last day of high school, are just pointless. I think it’s the reality that life goes on, or maybe you just become heartless. I’m not really sure. But I digress- One of the people I met on the boat I’m continuing on with, northbound in Patagonia I go with the Englishmen Tom from our Wolf Pack. Tom now joins a select group of only 2 other people that I’ve met along the way as solo travelers and teamed up with for a portion of my journey. The others are my man Dónal, the Irishman I met in Malaysia and then did northern Vietnam and Laos with, before he lost my debit card and broke his hand punching a wall. The other is Max from the UK. If you’re a diehard reader you may remember back to a post I had written over a year ago titled “One night in Saigon” Max and I met with a group of others that night. He and I stuck together after that night and traveled the length of Vietnam from Saigon to Halong Bay. About a year later while I was on my snowboarding road trip in Canada Max sees my Facebook update and messages me that he’s only an hour away in the exact direction I was heading. I stop by to visit Max and the guy from his home town he was then traveling with, Jack, and I rode the slopes with the both of them for a few days. Sure enough, as random chance would have it, when I posted on this site that I was returning to travel and concentrating most of my time in Patagonia I get a message from Max; “You’re not going to believe this, I swear our periods must me in sync or something, I just saw you’re going to be in Patagonia through March. Jack and I are flying into Buenos Aires on the 3rd and headed that way!” With that the wheels were in motion and I would be soon reconnecting with Max and Jack.

Tom and I leave Ushuaia and head to the town of El Calafete. In El Calafete there is really only one attraction, a day trip to a giant glacier. So what’s the one thing you do after spending the previous 11 days in Antarctica, you go to a glacier of course. Duh. Sure we’d seen our fair share of glaciers in Antarctica, but the contrast of seeing, and walking on one that’s surrounded by green forested hillsides provided a nice change. What I was a bit annoyed by though was how touristy of an activity it turned out to be. We walked, with crampons strapped to our shoes, in a single file line with about 12 other people including a newlywed couple that dropped a phone down a crevasse, a pair of teenage girls with ripped jeans that constantly lagged behind, the Go Pro selfie stick king of Argentina and a completely clueless couple from the UK.

From El Calafete we travel to El Chalten where I would be reconnecting with Max and Jack and as well as Kiki from our Antarctica trip. We caught wind through the rumor mill of the backpackersphere that wifi in El Chalten is spotty part of the time and non existent most of the time. This turned out to not only be rumor. We arrived on a day it was pouring rain so went to the bus station to watch a soccer match on TV. The bus station, we were to find out, was one of only two places in town that had satellite television. The other was the bakery. When we returned from watching the game someone in our hostels dorm room says something that I haven’t heard in a long, LONG while. “Hey someone named Kiki came by and was looking for you guys, she left you this note.” A note? An actual note written on actual paper? Amazing! With no wifi we were thrust back into the stone age and this would be our form of communication as long as we were here. We later found out that because Kiki wasn’t sure where we were saying at, she actually left this same hand written note in 4 different hostels. In the note she told us where she was staying and when we went there we asked the receptionist “Is Kiki here? Can she come out and play? We’ll have her home before the street lights come on.” She gave us a confused look, missing this 1987 reference, and pointed in the direction of the communal area where we were reunited. Later that day I also met up with Max and Jack in the same manner; “Um excuse me sir, have you seen a couple UK blokes hanging around in the commons area?” I had emailed Max 3 days prior telling him my arrival date, but since he never got the email I was lucky to catch him and he was surprised when I walked up to his hostels lunch table unannounced.

I’m reminded of a scene from Hot Tub Time Machine. If you haven’t seen it it’s a present day group of guys that get teleported through a hot tub wormhole thingy and end up in the 80’s. I think it won an Oscar, or Pulitzer or something. In this scene a guy is attempting to pick up a girl:
GUY: “Do you have a cell phone? Pager? Email?
GIRL: “Email? No what’s that?”
GUY: “Never mind, just tell me how to find you later”
GIRL: “You come look for me”
GUY: “LOOK FOR YOU!?!? That sounds exhausting”

It’s amazing how dependent we’ve (I’ve) become on instant communication. I wholeheartedly wish I traveled before the advent of Facebook or even email, it would have been an entirely different and I believe more rewarding experience altogether. That’s all just talk now though cause I’m an addict just as much as all of you reading this word. I definitely revel in the times I KNOW I’ll be going off the grid on long hikes, a boat in Antarctica, or whatever the reason may be. On the contrary though, when trying to communicate and connect with other travelers in an actual town, or even trying to reach your mother on her birthday, which was my case exactly. The difficulty or flat out inability of doing so can definitely become irritating. In a Cambodian village I get it. In a backpacker town, come on fellas pull your shit together.

On the morning of our planned trek we get up and make our last minute preparations. I needed to pick up some camping food and Tom needed a tent and sleeping bag rental. We stopped by the towns 3 camping rental stores at the marked time of the 10am opening and by 10:15 none of the 3 had yet open. We understood this posted opening time to be just a rough estimate and best guess… 10:30? Nope! Finally around 11:00 the shop owners begin their casual chore of commerce, a novel concept. The first store- out of equipment. The second store has a sleeping bag, but no tent. The woman at the third store just laughed at us when we asked if she had a tent to rent, followed my a simple “no”… “Well, when will you be getting one?”… “One what?”… “A tent! We are trying to rent a tent! when do you think you’ll have one available?”… “Um, next season, October maybe”. I just shook my head and walked out without another word. We were in a conundrum. After considering the nonexistent rental options Tom was forced to hike up with the group, then return to the town instead of camping overnight. Next order of business for me was camping food and the outcome was more of the same. No dehydrated meals, no protein or meal replacement bars, no peanut butter, no dried fruit, no mixed nuts and not a Snickers bar in sight for days. I loaded up with a bag of carrots (heavy), a few oranges (heavy) a few empanadas (heavy) and some chalky tasting chocolate cracker things. This grocery list would comprise my breakfast lunch and dinner over the next 2 days. Let me reiterate, we are in a town that has literally not one other thing to do except trekking. The ratio of backpackers to residents in this town is at lest 3-1. As far as we were concerned there are 4 basic things required to sustain the infrastructure of said place: 1) Hostels. B) Wifi. 3) Equipment rental and D) Camping food… The town failed miserably at 3 out of 4. But yes, I guess it was a charming little pueblo and in fairness some of the views on my 3 days/2 nights of trekking around the area were absolutely breathtaking. As far as the town specifically though it was sort of like the consolation of spending a sunny spring afternoon on a golf course, shanking every other ball into the forrest and ending with a final round of 120… “Well at least it was a beautiful day.”

And beautiful days they were. 2 great sunsets and 2 amazing sunrises later I meet Tom back in town for our onward bus. We are bound for Bariloche, but determined to break up the indefinite duration of the bus journey. When we asked somebody how long the bus was the Bariloche the timeframe went up 2 hours every time. The first person said 18 hours, the next 20, then 22, I know where this is headed… 24 hours to Bariloche? Yep. I’m not kidding. The next person said 26 and it finally plateaued at 28 hours. We knew one thing with relative certainty. The bus from El Chalten to Bariloche would LIKELY take SOMEWHERE between 18 and 28 hours. We wanted to break up the trip. Looking at the map the halfway point was a town called Los Antiguos. After the over touristed backpacker stops at El Calafete and El Chalten, both Tom and I were interested in finding somewhere off the beaten path that wasn’t on the main backpacker route and promised authenticity. We researched Los Antiguos only long enough to find out that there were zero hostels available on hostelworld.com and zero attractions on tripadvisor.com. A good start. When we arrived into town we found the third zero to be the amount of English spoken here. PERFECT! This place will do JUST fine, but there was still one last question: “Disclupe ¿Tiene wifi?”(Excuse me. Do you have wifi?)

Bob