The Midpoint

(EDITOR'S NOTE: The Great Plotnik and The Great Ducknik, as we speak, are already down to Commodoro Rivadavia, Argentina, after several of the most rewarding and pleasing travel days of their lives, where although there was certainly no phone or internet, they did have electricity every day from 8pm-midnight. And gauchos. Add wild guanacos and horses and cattle and Neolithic painted hands and a taste of a world that is almost dead, but not quite. One night they were by themselves at the estancia and the next night 13 Mexicans pulled in on motorbikes, on their way from Alaska to Patagonia. That was last night and there was tequila.

But Plot is way behind on his story, even though he has been writing almost every day in his travel journal, so he will continue the tale right here from where he left off.)

THE MIDPOINT

At more or less the midpoint of the Pata de Patagonia tour, The Great Plotnik and Great Ducknik find themselves on another long bus ride, this time traveling North through Patagonia on a gravel road towards the town of Perito Merino. They are moving at the speed of rocks. The bus is a cheerful place -- Plot had thought he and Duck might be the only people stupventurous enough to buy bus tickets a month in advance for the right to sit for fourteen hours on a dusty bus, but every seat is full, mostly with trekkers, and with a few older people too, which speaks volumes about the lengths to which trekker-types and their fellow travelers are willing to go to see something new and different.

There is not as much ambient noise as there used to be on long bus rides -- people talking, laughing, socializing. Modern travelers have I-Pods attached to their ears and the music probably makes their trip go faster but cuts down on the chances to hear a neat travel story from somebody who just took a 3-day pack train down from Mt. Huehuehue.

The view off the left side of the bus is the same as the view off the right side of the bus: brown, except occasionally on the left side of the bus when an azure blue Argentinian lake appears from out of nowhere, like a pulsing mirage from the dry scrub and rocks.



Every once in a while, on either side, you might glimpse a lone guanaco, or a family group, or a small herd, brown and tan patches perfectly camouflaged against the landscape where they live. You'd have to be a sharp eyed puma to pick one out, and by the time we four eyed humans have spotted one they have all disappeared, long before the camera can even leave the pouch.

Guanacos are not llamas, though they are similar looking. They are the size of ponies but they are actually camels. They don't gallop like all the horses you see out here, but instead kind of pogo. They are ubiquitous,wild, and also the original inhabitants of Patagonia. They haven't changed a lick since the cave painters painted them 10,000 years ago. They make Plotnik's heart soar every time he spies one.

Here are few observations from the first segment of PPT-1:

1) There are no gray haired women travelers in South America, though there are many gray haired men. Red, brown, blond-ISH. frost-ISH, even a very rare snow white, but as for gray, fawgeddaboudit. Women: yes. Gray: No.

2) You see couples, and groups of women of all sizes, but very rarely do men travel together. Maybe the men stay home and play golf or hunt while their wives go off looking for guanacos, or maybe they just drop dead and then the women dye their hair and spread their wings.

3) The kids on this bus, on every bus, on every street corner, look very young. Or conversely we look old, but this is my blog, so we're just saying the kids look young. Sometimes they are so hot for each other they can barely keep their butts in their seats. Traveling to Calafate from Puerto Natales the other morning, Plot and Duck sat in back of a young Argentinian boy and a young German girl and the only time the caballero stopped nuzzling the liebschoen's ear was at the border station.



4) The Great Plotnik's realization about hostels. They're fun when you're with your kids and they're mostly pathetic when you're not.

Here's how Plot and Duck had to start off the last two mornings. At Auberge Buenos Aires in El Calafate, there is no curb of any kind between the shower and the rest of the bathroom. The idea is that the tiles should be tilted towards the wall, so the water from the shower will run TOWARDS the wall and AWAY from the rest of the bathroom, and down into the drain.

However...it's trekking season. Maybe Auberge Buenos Aires was in a hurry to make hay off the trekkers, but they weren't paying attention. The tiles are tilted the wrong way at Auberge Buenos Aires. Worse, it takes, no exaggeration, twenty minutes for the hot water to come up. The only way to take a hot shower is to get up, start the water in the shower, and come back to bed, except that since the tiles are tilted incorrectly the bathroom immediately starts to fill up with water and would run right into the room where the bed is, and all your suitcases and drying clothing all over the floor, if you didn't shake your ass out of bed and take the (provided) squeegee on the end of the pole, walk into the wet bathroom and push the water towards the wall.

The water, remember, is COLD and it's very early in the morning, and there is a bus to catch and if water comes into the room it will be a disaster and it really ticks Plotnik off to have to squeegee the freaking bathroom in the freaking hostel before he can safely put on his shoes.

The room is cheap. True. So you squeegee and squeegee, and you bitch and bitch. If you think Plotnik doesn't like the Auberge Buenos Aires, you should talk to Ducknik.

Then you go to the communal kitchen for breakfast (included). The breakfast (included) consists of two pieces of white bread, in an envelope of plastic, with a little butter-like substance and some jelly. There is also hot water for tea or mate, and the delightful appearance of a carafe of hot milk to put into your tea so you don't drop the temperature of the tea.

You see hot milk for breakfast everywhere in the south of South America, but in most other hostels the breakfast (included) also includes a few slices of cheese and a few slices of ham-like substance, and rot-your-teeth-sweet yogurt.

In Southern Chile they had whole wheat bread. But somewhere between Puerto Natales and El Calafate somebody must have told all the hostel owners to go and buy economy loaves of white bread and reams of plastic wrap, make two-slice portions of bread and lay them out on the table, because the Germans and French and Brazilians and Americans love this breakfast, they CRAVE this breakfast, at home in Berlin they DREAM of two handiwrapped slices of sloggy white bread to eat with their butter substance, and, were you to add ham-like substance, they would be in absolute freaking Nirvana.

OK, what Plotnik is getting to here is that it seems likely that he and Duck are no longer hosteleros. These hostels are jam-packed with backpacker kids to whom a nice crappy shower and a breakfast with enough nutrients in it to power a spider mite for half an hour, is the perfect way to get ready for a 12 hour trek to the Fitzroy Range and a romp in the hay with your shickshe love goddess from Hamburg who hasn't shaved her legs since the summer Olympics.

Plotnik can hear his children laughing their asses off as they read this, because they KNEW all along that Plot and Duck were not exactly hostel folk. But Plot didn't know that. Duck...well, she was going along with Plot.

Well, we know it now. A hot shower, a good breakfast, a nice person behind some kind of counter who actually cares about his client, you know, perhaps a tip for a delicious restaurant that has something going for it BESIDES the fact that you can get half a gallon of spaghetti noodles for 45 cents, and maybe a view? And maybe, you know, a few other people you can talk to, maybe even about the EARTHQUAKE they just had in Chile, didn't you hear about it yet? well then why are you watching a freaking RERUN of freaking BAYWATCH on the hostel TV, dubbed into Spanish and subtitled in Portuguese, instead of the nightly news? You know, you dippy doodles, news?

Plot and Duck talk to no one down here. For one, they're speaking Spanish to each other and every other freaking person is from Nurenberg or Marseilles. English is the universal language, spoken by the young to each other, but the language used by young hostel kids to speak to old hosteleros appears to be silence, but that may be because these poor trekkers are running completely out of gas. Their kidneys really need an egg and their legs could use a slab of beef. What they get is two slices of white bread and Pam Anderson with a green face on a hazy TV being overdubbed so out of her mouth comes "Oye! Chico!"