18: "To the north, to the jungle: Part 2"

I got up at 7:45, before my alarm. I left my dorm and went to the hostel lounge and ate breakfast. There was no one else there. I took a couple of trips to the buffet and filled up on sweet bread and coffee.

I packed up and left and walked to the plaza to take a bus north to Puerto Iguazu. There were parents walking their kids to school, carrying their miniature backpacks for them, holding their hands.

I got to the plaza and saw the same kid as the day before. He was sipping a mate. He waved to me and raised his head. I waved back.

I sat in front of the souvenir stand and waited with some locals for the bus. I saw a man greet an old lady and give her two kisses, one on each cheek. I’d never seen that before in Argentina.

They didn’t show any movies on the four-hour ride. It was quiet and bumpy and relaxing. We drove through rolling, green countryside. We passed yerba mate factories and pine tree farms. Misiones used to be famous for its jungle. It’s got a subtropical climate. Now, most of the forests near the highway have been clear-cut, scorched.

We got into Puerto Iguazu, where the ground was orange clay, like in Georgia.

I got off the bus and walked around a few blocks looking for a hostel.

It was too late in the day to try to go to a national park and see Iguazu Falls, so I walked down through town to the river, to the Paraná. It was overcast and humid.

Down at the port of the river there’s boats that go downstream to Paraguay. Across the river is Brazil.

I walked past the port, across a creek, to a grassy corner near the bank. There was a picnic table under a tin shelter. There was a big boat rusting, grown-over, in the weeds.

I sat down under the shelter and it started to rain.

I listened to an Entitled Opinions on Kurt Weill and wrote postcards for friends in Canada and Israel, for my grandmas in the U.S. I read some more of Brief Interviews. I took pictures as the rain stopped and the sky lightened. There was an empty, rusting oil drum in front of the shelter, in the grass. It was Shell; red and yellow.

I walked back up the hill, to town. I looked up the addresses I hadn’t brought with me and walked back down the hill, downtown, and mailed my postcards just before the post office closed. I stopped at a tourist restaurant and ordered a pizza and a Coke. I was the only one in there.

I came back to the hostel and wrote a blog entry. There was a girl at the computer next to me looking at her pictures from Machu Picchu. The Internet wasn’t working and every few minutes someone would come in, check, see it wasn’t working and leave.

I sat out on the patio lounge and read and borrowed a cigarette from a girl sitting across from me and wrote. There were only a couple other people sleeping in my 10-person dorm. They left before I woke up the next morning.

* * *
I got up late. My alarm didn’t go off.

I went to the bathroom. The toilet wasn’t flushing.

I went down to eat and sat and was reading. They served coca tea and buns and toast with dulce de leche and jam. The girl I borrowed a cigarette from the night before came down to the kitchen and took her plate of food and looked for a seat. She sat at my table.

She’s from Asturias, in Spain, but lives in Barcelona and is a civil engineer. This was her first time in South America. She pronounced her s’s and c’s with a lisp.

I left. I took a bus to Foz de Iguazu, to Brazil. We crossed the Argentine border and we all had to get off and get our passports stamped. We crossed the Brazilian border and some people got off but most stayed on and I stayed on. We drove into the city, which is bigger and more cosmopolitan than Puerto Iguazu.

I got to the bus station and bought a ticket to the national park. I didn’t have any Brazilian reales, and didn’t have any small peso bills. The guy at the gate converted the bus ticket for me. I think he ripped me off.

We drove back out of town, back past the road to the border crossing, and down to the park entrance. I got off the bus and bought my entrance and a salami sandwich. I said obligado like I learned in Sao Paolo.

I got on a double-decker bus and went to the upper level where the plastic drape windows were pulled back. We drove to the waterfalls. The breeze made people zip up their coats and cross their arms and tuck their chins.

We got off. I could see a glimpse of the falls down through the trees. I followed the path to the first overlook. I stopped, stared. I leaned against the railing, gazed. The waterfalls were coming from everywhere, from the forest, from cliffs. The part I was looking at wasn’t even half of all there was.

I continued on along the concrete path, stopping and staring, looking at other people looking. The din from the falling water would fade away then come back again when you realized how loud it was.

I walked onto a concrete overlook. I saw a pair of pants floating down the river, away from the biggest, most violent falls.

They were black, fanned out. They looked like slacks or maybe cargos. No one else seemed to notice. They bobbed around, were turned in the currents, and kept going down the river, through the rapids. I didn’t see anything come after them.

I walked along the trail to an overlook that stretches out over the crest of a waterfall. You can look right down on top of the void. The railings seemed well-built, but had gaps in between each other. People were posing for pictures, getting soaked by the mist from other falls higher up. Others stood off on the main trail, looking nervous and waiting for their friends or family to come back from out over the water.

Some people had plastic ponchos on. I zipped up my coat up all the way.

It was nice to be so close to something so dangerous, to something loud and old and that would destroy you in an instant. I felt like the narrator in a Poe story, like in Descent into the Maelstrom, awestruck before some terrible, enormous thing.

I walked back to the main path. There was a concession stand and a gift shop and photo booth, and an elevator to go to another observation deck. The employees had that amusement park employee stare.

I left the trail and walked to the park restaurant. There were coatis wandering around everywhere. They look like armadillo mixed with raccoon. They say they’ll bite if you feed them. Some people were feeding them. The park employees would chase them away when they’d creep towards the picnic tables.

I ate a sandwich and drank some water. The day was overcast and cool.

I walked on the waterfall trail again. The clouds were parting and the sun came out and there were rainbows, like they say there’s supposed to be, and butterflies.

I took a bus back to the main gate and listened to an Entitled Opinions with Paul Ehrlich on the fate of the earth in the 21st century. It was finally sunny and bright while he was talking about population disaster and the earth’s carrying capacity.

I got back to the bus station and got on to go back to Argentina and Puerto Iguazu. When we got off at Brazilian customs they stopped me and said I hadn’t gotten a stamp when I crossed that morning. I told them I’d read that one-day visitors didn’t need visas. I was speaking Spanish. They were speaking Portuguese. I couldn’t follow them.

The girls stamping the passports called for a manager. He was a young guy, probably 20 years old. He said they’d let me go just today but don’t do it again or there’ll be a fine. I said tudo bem and tried to give a thumbs up and left. I waited in the late afternoon with some Australians for another bus to come by.

I got back into town. As I walked to my hostel I saw the Spanish girl with her backpack heading to the terminal. We didn’t say anything to each other as we passed.

I ate pizza again at a different tourist restaurant, then came back and wrote and read. The Internet still wasn’t working.

I went to bed.

The next day my alarm worked and I got up and ate breakfast and packed my bags and stored them in a closet and then headed out. I bought cheese and bread and a tray of fruit and took a bus to the Argentine side of the falls.

It was a clear, warm day. I walked along all the catwalks and trails and stairways that wind through the jungle and over and around the falls. I saw monkeys and coatis and a toucan. The highlight of the Argentine side is something called the Devil’s Throat, which is an overlook above the most intense part of the falls.

There’s a miniature train that takes people out to that point. I walked along the train tracks, on a mud service road, to get there. It was a mile or so and quiet, except when a pickup truck or a train would come by. There were all sorts of butterflies along the way. A few other people were walking on the trail. I saw a big bullfrog squished flat. Its body was in the trail of a tire.

The Devil’s Throat is this big half-circle waterfall that’s probably a couple hundred feet high and wide. The overlook is a concrete platform with two sections to it. There’s photographers who stand-up on ladders and wear ponchos and take portraits with the falls in the background. They have clipboards for you to fill out forms and a poster board showing examples.

Big clouds of mist fall down on the platform every minute, soaking everybody. It’s like standing on the walkway over a flume ride at a theme park.

You can’t see to the bottom of the falls, there’s so much steam and mist. It’s an abyss, I guess. I thought about that Nietzsche quote of looking down into the abyss and only seeing yourself.

I took some pictures when the mist cloud wasn’t there so my camera wouldn’t get wet. I left the platform all wet and dried off in the sun and walked back to the park entrance. I took a bus back to town, grabbed my bag, and headed to the bus station.

The only bus going back overnight to Paraná was a luxury busline called Espreso. I bought the ticket anyway. It was about 40 pesos more than usual.

After we’d gotten out of town we were stopped at a police blockade. Some national guard people got on the bus. One guy came up, looked down at me. He asked to look through my bag, then see my passport.

I gave it to him.

He looked at it, then me. He was about to hand it back, then took it and sniffed it and looked at it again. He gave it back and said thanks and left.

I listened to a radio show about the historical Jesus as the sun went down over the Misiones hills and tree farms and what’s left of the jungle. Flocks of white birds were flying around and glowing in the twilight.

I got back into Paraná early in the morning.

17: "To the north, to the jungle: Part 1"

I had another week off school because of board exams. Sunday night I’d gone to the Paraná Costume Party, dressed as Tintin. I was writing an article about the party for 054, a travel magazine from Buenos Aires.

I’d gotten back at 3:00 in the morning and went to bed. I woke up Monday, wrote my article, packed my backpack, and went to the bus station for an overnight ride northeast, to Posadas, the small capital of Misiones province.

They served us dinner after the sun went down. First they gave us a plastic-wrapped Styrofoam tray. Inside were a plastic knife and fork, wrapped with a single-ply napkin; a toothpick, wrapped and sealed in plastic; a roll; a chocolate alfajor snack cake; crackers; and a lemon-flavored lozenge. Next they brought out tiny foil trays with our main course.

Inside were steamed rice and chicken rolled up with hard-boiled egg and vegetables. The windows on the bus steamed-up when we opened our foil trays.

The steward poured us Pepsi in little plastic cups, like they have at the dentist.

I was listening to old episodes of Entitled Opinions. First one about Proust, then one on Thoreau, then one on Virgil.

They started playing a Kevin Bacon movie on the overhead TVs. I think it was called Death Sentence. He played a vengeful father. There was a lot of stabbing and beating and running people over with cars deliberately and swearing, too. The TVs were turned way up.

A guy sitting up front had a loud message alert on his phone that you could hear through the whole bus. It played the first half-dozen notes of a Cumbia song; a trumpet and an accordion and a shaker all starting-up.

That guy kept getting messages every few minutes.

It was hard to listen to the radio show.

My seat was in front of the coffee and water dispenser, which is in front of the stairs down to the lower level. After they’d turned the lights out and most people were covered with blankets, a guy came up to the console and leaned against it to steady himself. He took a plastic cup from the cup dispenser, had a drink of water, then put the cup back into the bottom of the dispenser. He returned to his seat.

The guy with the noisy phone sneezed three times in a row up into the air. His phone stopped making so much noise, at some point.

* * *

We got into Posadas at 7:00 in the morning. It was gray and cool and drizzling. I sat in the bus station café and had a cup of tea and a croissant. I bought a bus ticket for San Ignacio, a village north of Posadas that’s got some Jesuit mission ruins and the old home of Horacio Quiroga. It’s along the highway to Puerto Iguazu.

I got into San Ignacio by 8:30. I got off the bus with a couple other people in the main plaza. It was humid and cool and still overcast. There were only a few people out.

A pasty blond-haired kid came up to me, carrying a mate and a notepad. He asked if I was looking for a place to stay. He told me about a hotel down the road, his brother-in-law’s place. He said they can sell me bus tickets there, and watch my bags, too. I asked him the bus schedule for the next day.

He seemed nice, like he wasn’t trying to take something from me.

I left him and walked toward where a Hostelling International place was supposed to be.

An old man was standing on the porch of a souvenir shop and stopped me and asked where I was headed.

He said that there was a cheap, nice hotel in the other direction. 25 pesos he said. I asked him how much the Hostelling International place cost.

He looked aside. 100 pesos, he told me.

I said no thanks and got to the HI place. It was 35 a night. I had a four-person dorm and a private bathroom all to myself.

I dropped off my bag and walked back to the plaza and bought some bread and cheese and apples. I walked to the Jesuit ruins. The site’s called San Ignacio Mini.

It was the middle of the week, and the end of winter. Most of the souvenir stalls were shuttered. It was quiet and damp. I sat on a bench under a tree and made a sandwich and ate a mandarin orange.

I entered the ruins.

A tour had just started so I hurried and caught up with them. The site was one of several in the region that was founded by Spanish Jesuits. The missions were havens for the Guaraní, havens from the other Spanish who wanted to kill them, make them leave, etc.

They say it was a flourishing a project, for the few decades it lasted. That the Guarní mixed their culture and style with that of the Catholics, and in exchange for a few not-so-bad compromises, got to live in pretty well-built, well-run, mostly-autonomous communities.

You can see that in the façade of the church, that’s got Catholic figures sculpted in a pre-Colombian style.

After the tour ended I hung around the ruins some more. There weren’t more than a couple dozen people in the whole overgrown, spread-out site. The main plaza - now just a grassy field - would´ve been a good spot to throw a Frisbee, I thought.

I went to the souvenir shop in the main plaza, where they were selling a lot of Guaraní-style wood carvings. The lady working there liked my hat, one with a knit llama pattern I’d gotten in Jujuy, in the northwest. Her son was sitting there listening to his MP3 player the whole time, not talking.

I walked out of the town, past an army base and down a flooded mud road to get to Quiroga’s old house.

Horacio Quiroga is one of the best-known Latin American writers. He was born in Uruguay in the 1870´s, but spent most of his life in Argentina, and especially in the Misiones jungle.

His best stuff is short stories. He’s influenced a lot by Poe and Maupassant.

It started raining as I got to his house. After you buy your entrance you have to walk down a narrow path through the forest, through a lot of bamboo, to get to the house. There’s signs that explain Quiroga’s life and have quotes of things he’s said about writing and art.

One of his best short story collections is called Tales of Love, Madness, and Death.

Quiroga’s father was killed in a hunting accident when he (Quiroga) was a little boy. Quiroga’s step-father, who he got along well with, committed suicide when he (Quiroga) was a teenager. Quiroga found the body.

When he was a bit older, he killed one of his best friends in a hunting accident like what killed his father.

He married a couple of times. The first wife he brought out to this house in the jungle in San Ignacio, where they were raising their kids. She couldn’t stand the isolation, the heat, everything, and swallowed poison and killed herself.

Quiroga committed suicide when he was in his late 50´s after he was diagnosed with cancer.

There were two houses Quiroga built, by himself, at this place in San Ignacio. The first house has been re-built, but the second is original. The lot is up on a cliff that used to look down to the Paraná River, the same river I live on further south in Entre Ríos province.

Now the trees and bushes have grown and blocked the view.

Inside the house there’s a lot of Quiroga’s actual stuff – his writing desk, his insect collection, a big snakeskin, his radio, his tools and workshop.

There wasn’t anyone else there when I went through the house. I thought I heard people coming along the path but they never showed up. I took some photos, walked around, tried to conjure the atmosphere. There was a sign in one corner of the yard that said “Place of Inspiration”. Next to it was a trail leading into the forest.

I followed the path. I thought there might be a lookout to the river. It got overgrown quickly and I had to turn back.

I left and walked back to my hostel. When I got back into the town a horse-drawn cart came down a sidestreet and turned a corner in front of me. A fat man was driving. He whipped the horse on the side to make it go faster. He keep hitting it on its leg. The horse tried to hurry and trot down the street. There were no traffic, no cars. It was empty, quiet. He drove on down the road and I turned a corner to another street.

I slept a few hours then got up, walked to town, ate a milanesa sandwich at a big empty tourist restaurant. There were some French girls at one table, but they left. Then it was just me and the waiters, standing around. I was reading an article in Ñ by JM Coetzee on an anthology of early Beckett letters. I came back after dark. There weren’t many streetlights and it was hard to see the road.

I read some of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, then went to bed early, about 9:00 PM.

16: "To the north, to the desert: Part 5"

Lucy and I got into La Serena just before sunrise, Saturday morning. We took a cab to her house up on a hill high up in the city. You can see a peninsula in the distance lit with hundreds of street and house lights. Next to that is the ocean. It was the first time I saw the Pacific.

A lot of Fulbrighters were coming to visit Lucy that weekend. There was Sam and her boyfriend Lucas, who were already there when we got there and asleep in bed. There was Andra and her boyfriend Andy, who were staying in a nearby apartment. There was Matt, who got into town just after us. The next day more would be coming.

We slept a few more hours then got up for breakfast.

Sam cooked eggs. I had some cheese leftover from the day before. The paper it was wrapped in had gotten wet and stuck to it. I peeled off the paper and washed the cheese and threw it into the skillet.

Andra and Andy brought Nutella and mandarin oranges and bread.

We sat and ate and drank tea and juice.

Matt showed up. After he got into town he took a shower at the bus station and was feeling good and decided to walk around town and try to find a Laundromat. He’d just gotten back from Peru and a village in the Andes and his clothes smelled.

After breakfast, Andra and Andy took a bus out of town to a valley, to visit a vineyard.

The rest of us walked down through town to the beach. I felt like I was in southern Spain. The sidewalks were continuous and unbroken. There were big clean chain superstores and big smooth parking lots and a lot of cars. There were billboards for luxury apartments and luxury apartments being built in a field near the ocean.

We got to the beach and stopped to eat at a Lebanese stand. I got falafel and an empanada and a Pepsi and a Nestle ice cream cone. Sam and Lucas got a schwarma sandwich.

We went to the beach. It was sunny and clear out on the water, but misty down the beach and to the mountains in the distance. The silhouettes of horses and their riders were coming to us out of the haze.

We walked along the sand and I was talking to Lucas about the University of Illinois and its Chief mascot and how I’ve been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace recently who grew up near Champaign and how I identify myself with him through that.

Lucas looked at me and said, “Dude, I went to Pomona.”

DFW had been teaching at Pomona College in California until he hung himself last year.

Lucas said he’d thought of taking one of his classes but they were hard to get into and he didn’t want to take a spot away from someone actually studying writing. He had studied geology.

Lucas said he was actually in the middle of reading Infinite Jest, and that him and Sam had a couple DFW anthologies down here with them that they’d been reading.

We sat down on a circle of boulders and talked about DFW and sports journalism and Dostoevsky and 9-11. You could see snow in the peaks of the Andes from where we were on the beach. It was warm and breezy and the sun was getting low and mellow and orange.

We left the beach and walked to a big mall. I said this reminded me of southern Spain. Lucas said southern California. We stopped to check our mail then walked back up into town to Lucy’s place. I explained to Matt a long essay I’d just written, about wonder and interpretation and how it’s all based on this Walt Whitman poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”.

We stopped for ice cream cones and I kept going on about this essay and the point I was trying to make about interpretation and wonder not being opposed to each other.

Andra and Andy came back and we went to an Italian and Sushi restaurant for dinner. I got spicy tuna rolls.

We came back. I packed my bags and said goodbye and walked to the bus station. I got on an overnight bus to Santiago.

* * *

I got into Santiago just before sunrise, Sunday morning.

I sat in the bus station café and read and drank coffee and ate a pastry until it was light out.

I walked along Alameda – the main boulevard – to get to a hostel that Sam and Lucas had stayed at a couple days earlier.

Nobody was out. Everything was shut and locked. It was grey and quiet and cool.

I got to the hostel. It’s in an old, preserved medieval-looking courtyard. There’s no sign on the door, just one for a café upstairs.

I rang the bell.

Nobody came to the door.

I turned away, thinking I’d walk around for a while.

A man opened the door. He was bald and thin and wore gym shirts and a fleece and looked tired and impassive and annoyed. He spoke quietly and asked what I wanted.

A woman was standing back in the foyer, looking at him and me.

I said I’d called the night before for a bed.

He let me in and showed me a bed in a dorm. He walked with a hard, slow limp. I tossed my backpack on the bed. He told me don’t put my backpack on the bed. It’ll make the sheets dirty. We left the room and he gave me a map of the city and told me some things to do and see.

I left.

I got to the center of the city and walked into the cathedral and stood by the entrance to a chapel and watched the mass. A priest was at the altar blessing the Eucharist and chanting his prayers. There were Chilean flags behind him.

I left and sat on a bench and finished reading A Scanner Darkly until the Pre-Columbian museum opened up.

The museums are free on Sunday in Santiago. The Pre-Columbian one has just one floor of cases and displays, but it’s got good interesting stuff from almost every early culture from Mexico south.

I spent a few hours there then walked back to the hostel.

There was a group of French kids sitting around the table in the lounge, cooking breakfast, talking, stepping outside to smoke.

I went to a computer and checked my e-mail. I finally got a response from Frithjof Bergmann, a philosopher I’d been trying to get in touch with. I’m trying to go to South Africa in January and spend some time with him there and see these community projects he’s working on.

A couple of French kids were having sex and making noise in the bedroom across from the computers. The door was cracked open.

A hunched old lady came out of another bedroom and said her watch was missing, that she’d gone to take a shower and put her watch down on the bed and now it’s gone. She was telling this in English to a French girl who tried to help her look for it.

I sat down in the lounge and talked to Paola, who was the woman in the foyer when I arrived.

She had made a dessert of rice mixed with raisins and cream and apples and cinnamon. She scooped me a bowl and warmed it in the microwave and we sat and ate from our bowls on the sofa while the French kids took all the seats at the table.

She’s from Santiago but has spent a couple years in Europe. She’d met an Italian guy at an airport. He was a figure skater who was performing in Peter Pan/Magic on Ice all through the continent. They met and fell for each other and she got to go with him to Turkey, to the Netherlands (she hated Amsterdam and all the bikes), to Venice (she hated it there in the winter, too humid).

Now she’s back here and working at the hostel and living with Scott, the owner, who’s an ex-pat from Minnesota. He was the one who answered the door.

She said he’s in a bad mood because the French kids were up ‘til six the night before playing music and drinking and partying, and because he’s got gout in his leg.

Paola said she has seasonal affective disorder and in the winter takes medicine for it.

A lot of French and Japanese tourists have been showing up lately. Too many. She told me how she asked a Japanese girl if she’d ever seen her parents kiss and how embarrassed the girl got.

I finished my bowl and got up and left.

I walked back downtown to a cinema at the Catholic University and saw Kim Ki-duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring. I’d seen Time, another one of his movies, at an art cinema in Granada two years earlier.

I stopped at a diner and read and had a cup of coffee.

I walked back to the hostel.

The French kids were sitting all around the table, making dinner, chopping onions, slicing potatoes. There were big liter bottles of red wine and sausages boiling in the kitchen. They stepped outside for cigarettes. They were talking and laughing.

I made sandwiches with bread and avocado and salami and cheese.

Scott, the owner, was sitting in a chair in the lounge, next to a gas space heater, telling people to please shut the door so that the warm air in there wouldn’t go out.

I sat down and tried to talk to him.

He said he hasn’t been to the U.S. in ten years. Even when his dad died a few years ago he didn’t have the money to fly home so he didn’t go back.

He’s always owned a hostel in Santiago, though he just moved to this building a year ago.

In the U.S. he’d been a carpenter, working in the South, taking winters off so he could be mobile and move around and travel when he wanted.

He’s got a brother who just retired from the State Department. He had done the Peace Corps in Brazil, then was in Vietnam for several years, then went to Africa.

Now his brother owns a flower shop in the U.S. with his wife, but his health is bad and he has to takes pills every day for diseases he got in other countries.

Scott’s got two little girls growing up here in Santiago. They live with their mother.

Someone came in and left the door open. Scott pulled himself up and limped to the door and shut it and limped back to the chair.

He said being a hostel owner’s not for everyone, that you have to be a giving person. He nodded his head towards the French kids.

He said with this hostel he only made $3000 profit, last year. He just wants to have enough money to get his teeth fixed before they all fall out.

Even the clothes he wears – a black fleece, yellow t-shirt, nylon shorts, hiking shoes, wool socks – are left-behinds from backpackers.

A French girl asked us if we’d like some of their food. I said no, I’d already eaten. Scott said no, he couldn’t, because of his leg, the gout.

The girl asked him that he couldn’t eat because of his leg?

No thanks, he said.

I was telling him about Frithjof Bergmann and his philosophies of freedom and working and these New Work centers he’s started around the world and how their ideal is that people can work less, divide their work, so they have more time to pursue what really matters to them.

Scott said that if people were working less they’d be more selfish and lazy and all the progress and development that’s been made in the past century would disappear. That the last thing anyone needs is more time off to indulge themselves and take vacations and be selfish.

That all any person wants is pleasure, which is really equal to power, which is really equal to freedom, the freedom he felt when he would be on a plane leaving the U.S. to get away and travel and he could breathe deep and know his time traveling was only beginning.

A French kid turned his head and looked at us talking.

Scott said everybody’s instinct is to be selfish, that that’s biology, that’s machismo and power – like in the Middle East where the travelers say everyone’s so hospitable and caring but that’s really just them men protecting their egos in front of other men – that that and wanting to have sex and enjoy yourself and be happy is all we care about. That there used to be community in the U.S. but money ruined it and more vacation time would just indulge people even more. That Ghandhi or Mother Teresa have such simple and true messages no one can deny but no one wants to follow. That kids down here idolize Che Guevara but Che wanted to kills tens of thousands of people and is disgusting for that.

Scott said his carbon footprint is one-third to one-fourth less than the typical Chilean’s, and one-twentieth than the typical American’s. He doesn’t own a car. He shops at a farmer’s market that he walks to. He recycles. He used to have a compost pile at the other hostel.

These Europeans that come here burn as much fossil fuel flying to Easter Island way out in the Pacific as they did crossing the Atlantic to come here. Maybe he’d go to Easter Island if he were already traveling west to Asia. But it’s all a huge disaster for the flora and fauna of the island, people just going there to see these statues that are a testament to human ignorance.

He could be kind of impressed by a cathedral, but couldn’t help but think of all the people who died building it.

The U.S. is headed for disaster, downfall. He’s got no desire to go back.

He could show me the good hiking routes through Patagonia in Chile and then into Argentina, the next morning, Monday, before I left, if I wanted.

Maybe, I said.

It was 10PM. I got up and left the room and went to the computer. It’s clock said Tuesday, February 24th, 4:54PM.

Scott had put me in the same room as the old lady.

She came in the front entrance, hobbling, wearing a beret, with a man who called her mom, who dropped her off and said he’d be back in the morning.

I went into the room to get my toothbrush. She saw we were in the same room and said in other hostels the women are in one room and the men in another. She had several pairs of low-heeled shoes lined under her bunk.

I went back to the computer. She walked out then returned with Scott. She said I was a stranger to both of them.

Scott winked at me and helped move her bags to a new room.

I brushed my teeth and washed my face and went to sleep by myself in the six-bed dorm.

I woke up at 9 the next morning. The hostel was dead. The computers were off and the wine bottles were empty. The hot water hadn’t been turned on.

I ate bread and an orange and drank tea and read.

The phone rang. Scott limped into the kitchen and picked it up and said “Good day” in Spanish. Nobody was there and he hung up.

He came into the lounge and told me to please shut the door so that the warm air wouldn’t go out. The space heater wasn’t on. I got up and shut the door.

I was thinking of leaving without paying. I put my backpack on and was double-checking my room. Scott showed up again.

I paid him the 5000 pesos. He asked didn’t I want to hear about the hiking routes in Patagonia? I said I had to get going.

He brought me over to a map on the wall and told me about a route he took, that the Chilean side is beautiful and the Argentine side is ugly and has got nothing until you get far south.

He gave me fliers for the hostel and told me to e-mail him about Frithjof Bergmann.

I left and walked to the bus station and drank a Nescafé. I got on a bus to cross the Andes again and pass near Aconcagua and then get to Mendoza. From Mendoza we went to Cordoba. We got in before dawn. I got off the bus, bought a ticket to Parana, drank a cortado, then got on another bus to get home by midday.

It was cold and grey and raining when I got into Parana.

My trip north had been a big right triangle. It lasted two weeks. I covered 3,000 miles.