Refugiomania VI...

Our first real hike was a three-day tour around a couple of very pointy mountains south of a place called Colonia Suiza, which is about 25km west of Bariloche along the lakeside. We packed our bags and set off down the hill from our house to catch the colectivo (public bus) to the trailhead. About halfway down the hill we had both had enough, but we refused to admit defeat and continued heroically to the bus stop.

The first day was a nice 30-degree amble up the side of a mountain to an alpine cabin (refugio) perched on a promontory at about 1500 meters. Refugios are a new concept to us. In Canada you don't generally find places that serve cold beer, wine, and deliciously rugged meals on high mountainsides. We quickly realized that about 80% of the gear we had lugged up the hill wouldn't be necessary after setting foot in Refugio López, but that was okay, because they had cold beer. So I resolved to drink the weight of our unnecessary gear in Heineken before leaving the refugio.

Refugios are not super-deluxe. They are generally very rustic, woody places, but they have everything you could possibly need to restore your strength, warmth, and sleep during walks in the mountains. So if you were to forget to pack something important while preparing for your trip, like food and sleeping bags (don't laugh, that has almost happened to us), refugios would allow you to continue hiking without dying.

We met a couple of nice people that night at Refugio López, most of whom had crossed over from Refugio Italia that day. This was the route that we were going to do in the opposite direction the following day. They all warned us about the loose rock on the other side of the first high pass the next day's hike. It was very windy and rainy all night, so we were prepared to turn around and head back out the way we came if the weather looked nasty, but the next morning white puffy clouds were drifting over the peak, so we decided to go for it.

It was a beautiful day of alpine hiking. The loose rock descent was no problem at all, though we could see why the people who had ascended it would expect it to be difficult. We got that section out of the way first, and the rest was mostly smooth sailing, sort of.

The last stretch to Refugio Italia skirts an alpine lake called Laguna Negra. It is possible to see the refugio from about 6km away, and looking at it from that distance, one thinks that the last little walk should be easy. What you can't see from 6km is the sheer rock face that you have to traverse before enjoying the wood stove and cold beer.

At one point during the traverse of the rock face, Jen's water bottle slipped out of its holster, and she had to get rid of it before continuing, so, cleverly, I suggested that she throw it to me. The wind was picking up, so her 20mph changeup quickly became a 103mph fastball which sailed high, tipped off my outstretched hand, and landed in the laguna.

I removed my backpack and, creeping like a skilled crab to the water's edge, dipped a toe under the water bottle and tried to flip it to myself. This didn't really work, so I needed to scoop and flip, and lunge and grab. Something happened between the lunge and the grab, so what should have been a scoop-flip-lunge-grab was a scoop-slip-splash-yell-scramble-laugh-undress-posedown-dress.

Like a newborn hippo, I had fallen into the Laguna, and it wasn't just a little soaker. I had been completely submerged. But somehow I knew that the stakes weren't that high, since the refugio was in sight, so I was very proud to have been part of something so incredibly stupid. More on that later.

So I slipped into Jen's underwear, and we continued the walk around the Laguna. The wind was really howling at this point, so the footing and our general mood was getting worse and worse. The last five minutes of that day's walk was the least pleasing, but in a way it made sitting down in the refugio all the more satisfying... and I need not mention the cold beer again, although at this point some nice mulled beer might have suited us better.

We met a very well-travelled and sweet English couple in the refugio, and we hit it off with them. There names were Allan and Jessica, and they have abandoned their management-consulting jobs for another travelling stint. They've already seen about 75% of the world, so at this point they're just filling in the gaps, as far as I can tell. The story of falling into the laguna was a very effective ice-breaker, and we shared many laughs and beers with them that evening.

After a couple of beers with the refugiero (dude who runs the refugio, a nice young guy named Nahuel), I told him the story of falling into the laguna in horrible broken Spanish, thinking that maybe he hadn't caught the entire story in English. He gave me a wry look and said "I know... I watched the whole thing through the window", as if to say: "I watch silly gringos do that kind of thing all the time. You are silly gringo number 873."

I put my wet clothes out to dry on the rocks outside, and had to weigh them down with 100 kilos of rock to prevent them from blowing away. A street dog who had followed Allan and Jessica coming up the other way from Colonia Suiza promptly fell asleep on my pants. So my pants ended up being wet and smelling like wet street dog, but that did not prevent me from wearing them the following day.

The wind howled all night, and for some reason Jen and I picked the bunk directly below the flapping aluminum portion of the broken roof. So it wasn't a great sleep, but by morning the wind had subsided and more puffy white clouds were ready to shepherd us back to Colonia Suiza. It was a beautiful walk with Allan and Jessica, and on the way we proposed to them that instead of staying in a hostel, they stay with us in our spacious apartment.

So we had house-guests for a couple of days which gave us an opportunity to test the parrilla. That was a barrel of monkeys, of course. There's nothing like building a fire indoors. We were very hungry, so we were a bit hasty with the embers and our first attempt at cooking the chicken wasn't very successful. I found in testing the embers that I was able to hold my hand directly over them for about 4 minutes without feeling pain. We concluded that more power was needed... MAS FUEGO. So we made a bigger fire, and about 4 hours after realizing the first desperate pangs of post-hiking hunger, we sat down to eat beautiful barbecued chicken! We are now total parrilla experts and can barbecue human hands whenever we want.

After another week of work and Spanish school, we hit the slopes again and hiked to a beautiful alpine lake next to Refugio San Martin. This took us along a river through beautiful lush forest full of lizards and bamboo-like greenery. It was another very cool walk, much less challenging technically than the last one, but longer, so our feet hurt afterwards. We tented next to the refugio, and enjoyed their beer during dinner on rocks next to the lake. The stars were as bright and numerous as we had ever seen them, and we were both moved by the strangeness of the unfamiliar constellations. There's some kind of famous nebula or cluster in the southern hemisphere that we should be looking out for; we need an astronomer to tell us what it is.

During the walk back Jen came up with this gem: "I would rather lay an egg than give live birth to a child. So I could lay the egg, sit on it and read and knit for nine months, then... poof. Baby."

Allan and Jess have left us and moved on to Chile, and Jen has started 4 hours a day of Spanish at a new school with comatose instructors, so hopefully she can awaken them and get some quality lessons out of the deal. I'm hoping that she brings home friends from school, and we can barbecue them!

"Sumptuously Appointed Andean Thoroughbred"...

We got on another double-decker bus at 9:30PM out of Puerto Madryn bound for Bariloche, a city in the province of Rio Negro surrounded by beautiful lakes and mountains. It is on the eastern border of the Andes, close to the Chilean border at about S41 degrees latitude. The overnight trip took us 3/4 of the way across the continent, and as we pulled into Esquel, a mountain town a few hundred kilometers south of Bariloche, the sun began to rise. While that was happening on the east side of the bus, there was a full moon peeking out from behind the mountains on west side of the bus. Holy crap... beauty overload. So we were trying to control ourselves. I wish I had a better camera, like one of the new "smell-capture" models, but I can't complain too much about my prehistoric battle-tested Kodak DC4800, which soldiers on as the cracks in its casing deepen and lengthen.

The rest of the morning was an incredible drive through a narrow valley all the way up to Bariloche. It really reminded me of the trans-Canada from Canmore to Field. Things seem to get a little bit more open and drier close to Bariloche, but there are still plenty of mountains.

We got a cab from the bus terminal to a hostel called "41 Below", which is a really interesting building perched on a hillside (as all buildings in the area are) with many huge north-facing windows. The hostel is nominally run by a Kiwi guy and his girlfriend, but, as inveterate travellers, they are about to abandon the place for two years. They worked out an agreement with a Belgian couple who want to learn how to run a hostel, so currently 41 Below is a kind of four-headed monster. All four heads are really nice, and there were a lot of really interesting people from all over the world hanging around the place, so it was a great place to spend the night.

The next morning we set out in search of an apartment. Our only lead was a rental agency whose number came up about 25 times in the apartment rental listings. 432-000, in case you're interested. Anyway, similar to the Peyrow rental property monopoly in Montreal, the only apartments on offer were overpriced depressing crap-heaps (with beautiful lake views), so we decided to keep on looking. By this time siesta had started, and typically lasts from 1pm to about 4pm, so we were losing hope, but we decided to drift by a real estate office that we had seen earlier in the day just in case they had a furnished place available.

We met a nice agent who said that although the agency didn't have anything suitable, his basement was for rent! So we trundled up the hill in his little Peugeot and had a look at the place. It was beautiful! High ceilings, north-facing windows overlooking the lake, an indoor barbecue, high-speed internet... pale-yellow leather couches, brand new high-intensity mattress, taste-control refrigerator, auto-paste dispensers, fragrance-controlled hosiery... the list goes on and on. The panoramic picture is taken standing in the back yard.

So we decided to take it. The price was very negotiable, so we pretty much named our price, went to the bank machine, got our bags from the hostel, and took a cab to our new home! Either one of us has two horseshoes lodged somewhere, or we both have one... Anyway, every day we talk about how lucky we were to get this place, and about how lucky we are in general to be doing all of this stuff.

The only drawback to the apartment is the lack of a land telephone connection. In order to address the problem, I have begun experimentation with voice-over-IP using a service called Skype. Some of you have been lucky enough to get Skype calls already. For those of you that haven't, they go something like this:

Person in Canada: "Hello?.......HELLO???"
Neil over IP: "H--."
PiC: "HELLO???"
NoIP: "H--o, c-- -ou he-r --?"
PiC: "Neil?"
NoIP: "Y--. Is it --sy to h-ar m-?"
PiC: "What the hell is going on? Are you in a helicopter?"
NoIP: "No. Okay, now is that better? I just moved my left arm two inches to the left and closed my calculator window. Sorry about the line quality, I'm using Skype..."
PiC: "Yeah, that's better. Hmmm, Skype eh? Woooo."
NoIP: "Y--h, it's p--tty sh--ty. -y pants --e on f---."
PiC: "Your pants are on fire???"
NoIP: "Yes."

So you get the idea. The other common test of Skype quality has been rounds of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" to determine the time delay on the line. At one point I had three-quarters of CoroNéo Incorporated singing the round. The delay was about 4 minutes 34 seconds as we measured it. But now I think I have figured out how to optimize the Skype experience, so if you get a phonecall and nothing happens for about 5 seconds, it's me or Jen calling. Don't hang up. Turn off all the lights, and make sure you're facing south.

We have now fully settled in, and are planning our first multi-day trek, so the next post should be interesting. We are in training mode now, drinking wine and eating fine cheeses.

Adios Buenos Aires, Hola Woolly Paradise...

We left Buenos Aires on an overnight bus to a place called Puerto Madryn, a seaside town known for sea elephants and parasailing. The long-haul busses in Argentina are something to behold; they are double-deckers, and yet they only hold about 40 passengers owing to the extreme luxury each is afforded. They have great names like "Benevolent Luxury-Lord of Patagonia", and "Bronzed and Muscular Captain of the Andes". On the websites they list the maximum angle to which each seat opens. We got the 150 degree seats. Wow. It actually made sleeping on the bus possible! We fell asleep with visions of protractors dancing in our heads.

Not only that, we were lucky enough to get the front row of the second deck, giving us an incredible panoramic view of the highway and scenery, although the scenery was pretty boring for the most part (especially overnight). During the ride, the entire Shakira video library was played for us twice, including remixes and rare early dance routine footage. She is such a ridiculous person. Watching her dance makes me laugh out loud.

Just north of Puerto Madyrn lies the Valdes Peninsula which is all part of a wildlife sanctuary, although the land is privately owned and used as pasture for Merino sheep. Only one sheep per 4 hectares can be supported by the land, so there are not many sheep, and a lot of very dry, sparsely covered land. We took a tour around the peninsula, and saw a bunch of really great stuff, including armadillos, sea lions, sea elephants, Magellanic penguins, and very distant Orca fins. Orcas were feeding off of a point fairly close to the sea lion colony. I secretly wanted to witness a whale tearing a sea lion limb from limb. Don't tell anybody.

We spent the following day on the beach at the foot of town. It was very hot and windy (!!?!), and we got some reading and beer-drinking done under a parasol while our delicate northern skins were sand-blasted and baked by the southern elements. I think that some men shave their legs here for non-athletic reasons, but I'm not sure. More evidence needs to be gathered. Women definitely shave their legs here for non-athletic reasons. Okay, okay... I'll keep gathering evidence.

Jen's highlight of Puerto Madryn (if not the entire trip thus far) was finding really cheap wool! She's starting a sweater made from a nice turquoise Merino/silk blended wool; stay tuned for regular sweater updates. She bought $200 worth of wool (by Canadian standards) for about $20. Our already ridiculous amount of luggage was not made any less voluminous by the huge wool purchase, but it has made Jen so happy... and it's not very heavy wool, but the bonus gift of two Merino sheep has really complicated things.

Joni Boon

Our very dear friend Joni Boon died on Friday February 16 in Toronto. We both loved Joni very much, and we miss her. The photo was taken at the Toronto airport right before we got on the plane to Buenos Aires. We had dinner there during a stop-over with my parents, Joni and Erich.

Joni was a wonderfully creative, interesting, and brilliant person, and a caring and warm friend. She loved to see people happy, and when we hadn't seen her for a while, Joni would ask us about our favourite projects, our latest visits with our families, our future plans; all of the things that we loved to think and talk about. I can't express in words how sad and empty it makes us feel that she is gone. The world is a poorer place without her beautiful soul alive in it.

It has been very difficult being so far away from her husband Erich and both of their families since receiving the news, but we felt as close as we could have talking on the phone and emailing. We want to thank all of the people who made sure we were in touch during that first week.

We spent some time during that week in the botanical gardens remembering Joni. Erich sent me a copy of his speech and I read it aloud to Jen. We sat in the shade. It was a beautiful sunny day.

Birthday with The Puma...

For my 31st birthday, we went out for a lovely dinner with a Spanish school colleague named Allan. He's an English guy who has lived in Germany for the last 20 years or so. He has recently switched to a career that allows him to travel while working, so he's experimenting by spending a couple of months in Buenos Aires.

We went back to Jangada, a restaurant we'd been to with Kia and Gen. It's a Brazilian place specializing in aquatic pigs... well, a type of fish that is purportedly as fatty as pork.

We had a great time with Allan, but unfortunately we forgot the camera, so the true image of Allan will not appear here! Thank heavens he looks exactly like the famous Argentine film star Gabriel Goity. He's stopped on the street and asked for autographs and stuff, so the likeness is striking. So I think it is appropriate to include a picture of Goity instead. Goity's nickname is "El Puma", and that nickname is so fitted to Allan's personality that I now refer to him by that name only.

You'll know Uruguay when...

Kia and Geneviève left today... sniff. We hugged them and put them in a taxi to the airport, where they will fly to Brazil to enjoy a week of Carnaval in Rio.

Before getting into the show-and-tell portion of the post, I'd like to let everyone know that my health is now perfect. After eleven emails asking about my bum state, I thought I'd better just make an announcement. My standardized bum aptitude quotient (SBAQ) is now a robust 87. Please refer to your international bum cross-reference table for North American equivalency.

We've had a great week. There is too much to mention in detail, so I'll include few words and lots of pictures. We made it to our first live soccer match last week, joining a tour with a bunch of English people. We piled into a tiny van, and were unceremoniously booted out by the driver about 7 blocks from the stadium, which is called "El Monumental", or, as I have seen it translated, "The Huge". Security was high. There have been some nasty incidents here over the last couple of months, so all of the men underwent a thorough frisking.

The home team was "River Plate", who are in a pitched two-way battle with "Boca Juniors" for football supremacy in Argentina. There are other teams too, but they don't have the same overwhelming support as these two. Have a look at the fascinating comment from an earlier post (tattoo/phallus) to get a feel for the rivalry between these two teams.

On this day River was playing one of those other teams: Lanús. The Lanús fans could be seen trapped on the second deck behind two layers of barbed wire and riot police. Lanús' team colours are exactly the same as River's, so it looked more like the particularly poorly behaved River fans had been put in this detention area.

The stadium was electric. The 50,000 River fans all knew the same songs and dance moves, so for pretty much the entire game there was an incredible wave of sound echoing in the stadium. Some of the songs were originals, but for the most part they would take classics and change the lyrics to "Vamos River Plate". Like Frankie Valli's "I love you baby, and if it's quite alright..." etc. And even weirder (although I think the melody is more ancient than this), Men Without Hats' "Pop Goes the World". You get the idea.

The game itself was a bit of a flop. It was the first game of the regular season, so the players may just be rounding in to shape, although their off-season only lasts about two weeks so I don't know if I should be giving them that excuse. There were a lot of long lead passes up the wing and failed individual efforts. I'm watching a lot of English Premier soccer right now, and there is absolutely no comparison. For real soccer fans this might have been obvious, but I sort of assumed that because people take the soccer so seriously here, it would be extremely high-quality. The English guys agreed; they said that it was a bunch of bollocks.

It was a scoreless tie until the 90th minute, and River scored a nice goal off a corner. The ball skidded off of someone's head to a wide-open man on the far side of the box. He volleyed a ball off of his chest into the near side of the net. So in the end, all of the River fans were very happy, and we felt as though the game had been saved by the late goal.

The funny thing was, in spite of the fairly boring game, replays were on every television for the next two days, along with in-depth white-board analyses and heated discussion groups. It is amazing how expansive the cultural machinery built up around the sport has become considering the low quality of the product... Anyway, to avoid bricks being thrown through my window by dudes with phallus tattoos, I'll stop writing about the poor quality of the soccer now.

The other excitement was a trip to Uruguay early this week. We started by taking a 3-hour boat ride to Montevideo. It was a very interesting city. Poorer than BsAs, and much quieter and slower. We had Chivitos for lunch, which is the South American equivalent of poutine. Check out the picture... I do not need to explain the concept... but I will say this: To Canadians who believe that poutine has achieved any kind of gold-standard peak of excess for foods having a french-fry substrate, you are sorely mistaken. I tried to explain poutine to our Uruguayan cab driver, and after explaining the gravy component to him, he asked "But what about the slab of meat?".

The next morning we travelled by bus to a place called Colonia del Sacramento, which is an old colonial city once used by the Portuguese as a smuggling port to avoid Spanish trade barriers at the port of Buenos Aires. The old city is a very cute network of rough cobblestone streets and nice foliage. We had read about a nice beach a couple of kilometers out of town so we took a walk in search of it. Next stop: Playa Ferrando. After a couple of wrong turns and near-military-base experiences, we found it. It was on the other side of a really beautiful rural strip of land between the edge of town and the water.

The beach was about 1 km long, and not very busy owing to the Tuesday factor, so we found a nice spot in the shade and swam. The water, because it's actually the wide mouth of the Rio de la Plata and not quite the ocean, is a nice brown colour.

After way too much sun we retreated to the Cabaña and pounded Heineken for a while. They played great music, and the entire staff would dance while working. The peak, I thought, was James Brown's "Dynamite". The kids at nearby tables started dancing, then we started talking about how bad our dancing abilities were as North Americans, then we walked home.

The next day Jen and I rented scooters! So we can now check that off of our list of things to do in this lifetime. There were many hilarious moments, mainly connected with Jen learning to use a motorized two-wheeled vehicle. At one point she managed to jam the entire horn/signal switch assembly under the housing while trying to turn off the signal, which was making a horrible squawking sound, and in so doing she managed to get the horn stuck in the "on" position. So we were sitting at the side of the road with the scooter honking and squawking, and us laughing (me laughing), before I finally decided that enough was enough, and I turned the key to the "off" position.

Now, shifting into full diplomat mode:

Jen decided that it would be best to learn the basics of scooter-driving at conservative speeds. We made sure progress along the coast north of Colonia, and we appreciated the fact that elderly cyclists took great care to use hand signals while overtaking us during that leg of the trip. Afterwards we headed back to Playa Ferrando and had barbecued meats fresh off of the parrilla before heading back into town to drop off our powerful machines. By the end of the trip, Jen was much more comfortable on her scooter, but I don't think that scooter-renting is going to become a weekly activity.

I managed to hit a top speed of about 195 km/h on my scooter... but the speedometer wasn't working, so I had to calculate my top speed using an estimate of the frequency of the tail-end of my helmet strap slapping me in the face... but I think it's a pretty good guess.

Kia and Gen arrive...

Kia and Gen have arrived, and are in fine form. We've had fun showing them what we have seen of the city, and we've broken new ground together as well.

Some recent highlights have been a restaurant called Olsen, but with a line through the O, like.... c'mon HTML...... Ø. Ølsen. Yessssss..... It is a Swedish restaurant, but not in the log cabin bearded arctic explorer way. More in the streamlined teak cabinetry minimalist techno way. I had smoked pork neck and mashed potatoes. Kia had smoked trout. Gen had... salmon ravioli and Jen had seared red tuna. They specialize in vodka as well, adverstised as being served at -30C. So I had to have one, which was really more like two, served in a very tall and slim glass.

We also went to check out a musical called "Dracula: El Musical", by the music/libretto/stage direction team of Pepe Cibrián and Angel Mahler, no relation to Gustav, unfortunately. This truly was the "Cats" of Angentina; I don't know where the cats were hiding. The music could best be described as "sweeping". Constant sweeping... and when it wasn't sweeping, it was "driving", like A-Team building-a-homemade-tank music. It was clear that the drummer was reading music during these periods. The audience was very moved at all the right times. Gasps of emotion were everywhere. It was really fun to join in the gasping. Beer was on sale at the concession, and drinking while watching was totally okay, so the second half was better than the first. On the whole, it was an incredibly entertaining evening.

We also had a nice walk through Puerto Madero. In behind a fairly well-developed alley of converted warehouse buildings along the old port system is an incredible amount of construction and growth. Then behind that is an ecological reserve, which is actually a pile of rubble and infill from city construction which has been slowly reclaimed by grass and trees. It is a very strange place; we only hung out on its edge, where a dried-up human-made lake provides a foreground to a mysterious line of trees and open space behind. There seemed to be a lot of fishy people hanging around a stone plaza on the edge of all of this, and from what we could tell, this is where the middle-aged go to get drunk. Weird.

I have also been practising playing NHL hockey simulators with women perched on my lap. It makes it harder...

Stay tuned for live soccer game stories, as well as Uruguayan adventures...