Post Andean Turbulence

Scary smooth departure from the "Paris" of South America - aka Buenos Aires. Smoothest, cleanest bus and ride yet despite it feeling somehow clandestinely surreal. This locals bus is half the cost of the regular bus station buses and it is running long distance when all other long distance buses in the country have slammed on the brakes and ground to a halt until the drivers demands for a 23% salary increase are met.

Maureen and I confess to each other that we kind of felt like we won the lottery. I cannot help but be reminded of a James Bond movie (Octopussy?) where an East German is successfully smuggled over the border while the Wall was still up. We were experiencing a similar feeling of elation I am sure.

Maureen stopped payment on her credit card, our only recourse- after three bus stations trips on friday to the Vasa office and having them give us the runaround an finally flatly refusing any kind of refund on our 680 peso per person overnight bus to BA. The Salta Por Siempre Hostel was amazing in their patience with my "espanol creativo" (stealing a term from Helga) to call the bus company, airlines, ministry of tourism - and speak in Spanish on our behalf. With helpful ideas from Helga and the support o Salta Por Siempre we ultimately forged our escape us on the locals from Salta bus with Cache Turismo...

Finally fell asleep on the bus at two AM after witnessing at minimum 3000 brutal killings: Expendables with facelifted mercenaries Sly Stallone and Dolph  Lundgren snuffing out everything that moved. Then an American werewolf in Paris, Resident Evil, a zombie movie, and 44 Minutes in North Hollywood - a documentary about a bank robbery w sub machine guns... The bus had become a Strange kind of rolling desensitization tank.

Somehow these movies make the Argentine world of huelga and the present near total absence of the ubiquitous bus, the intense poverty creating the possibility of road blockades, the sketchy traffic potentials evidenced by struck dead and bloated slow pigs and horses and the non stop double yellow passing game immediately beyond the drifting pane - seem a bit less threatening.

The present reality is inescapable- deafening non stop gunfire, seat rattling fireball explosions, spurting blood from jugular knife thrusts, the undead feasting on helpless humans- for a nerve jangling 14 non-stop hours.

We put on our headphones and plug into music lists on our iPhones but we too are among the helpless. The auditory and visual armageddon leaks in at the periphery... But- We are moving! We have snacks for the ride. The driving has been non-erratically smooth so far. We will make our flight. We saved money. All of this seemed nearly impossible the last 36 hours when we were fairly convinced we would be spending hundreds in US$ more for a domestic flight with extra baggage charges.

We arrived  at 5:30 in pre-dawn darkness to a sedate Buenos Aires where cabs were already waiting to meet the bus. The transition took just minutes and we made it 14 hours early to Ezeiza for our flight. They put us one at 8AM, so instead of 12 hours in the BA airport it would be 13 hours in Lima international.

Mid-flight with nearly one travel leg down I have a chance to reflect on the fascinating and inspiring people and lessons learned while traveling... It comes whilst being bumped around, trading blows with an invisible pugilist-A bit of Post Andean turbulence - felt physically as the plane takes hits - and internally as my mind sifts through a barrage of synaptic jabs- memories of individuals I hope will not evaporate like the clouds we are pushing through. I will attempt to write some of them into permanence before the challenged batteries of phone and memory fade.

I think I am most impressed with all the solo women travelers: Christine the architect from Hong Kong living in London. She admitted that the longer she is away the more she is estranged from her old life back home. Her memories are still fresh of mainland China and what a different world it was in the early 90s when visiting her grandmother there. For her traveling bursts the bubble of comfortable isolation; Kathy the 20 year old veterinarian from a tiny town in Australia- Argentina and Brazil were her first steps outside the country. Helga the chain smoking 70ish Austrian that drove by car in 1973 to India from Germany passing through Afghanistan; Maria, the 23 year old Brazilian working at a Bariloche hostel to earn enough to continue hitch hiking alone to meet a friend in Cuzco. "How brave they must be..." Maureen had said. I think as a man I would have a much easier time traveling alone and I would still be quite intimidated...

How does travel forge and reforge ones veltaunshauen (worldview)? At times I think you have to let your guard down and just trust - locals and fellow travelers - and rely on a universal sense of humanity trusting it is still accessible in others. In sedentary life you can go a long time without doing this. But in travel, following the often turbulent paths of the nomad, you have to know how to listen and trust your instincts, to sometimes give in, but not give up. To stay positive when facing not the best of outcomes, through sickness and last second roadblocks- to be able to divine the best solutions and not be crippled with doubt or fear, or too closed off to other options well outside the comfort zone. The crux as always is balance- Being too open and too trusting and fall off the cliff obliviousness at the other end. Constantly (and this soon becomes a job for the subconscious to free you up so you can move with some fluidity) as travelers we calculate risks over reward while forgiving yourself for less than perfect choices -because through mistakes we can often learn the most about life and ourselves...

Travel could be the condensed crash course for living a more passionate and compassionate life. It has the potential to effect healthy change of perspective at a more expedited and fundamental level. It is difficult to remain stagnant/stoic when borders and time zones are broken through, rivers and ranges crossed and recrossed - especially when outside of a plane. Traversing through micro climates of geography with jackets shifting to tshirt and sandals as we get more comfortable and adjusted- and if we are lucky- finally being reclothed in a sleek pair of empathetic perspective dungarees and a classy leather Indiana Jones hat of wonder and wanderlust.

There is magic in the translations found going from fingers crossing a contour line or eyes across a printed photo or a typed description... to mobilized feet and engaged eyes into the winded blue sky,  feeling the bite of altitude on heart and lungs and creating your own multi dimensioned map of experience in a new location.

I remember a casual sharing of chords from a guitar at a mountain refugio on a stormy night in the Nahuel Huapi... What commenced was a smashing through of multiple borders and a resonant shattering of our near silent lives pre travel. A shared Yerba mate soon becomes a shared laugh... The whisper of a line on the flat map, a postcard photo, a story from a fellow traveler, delivered the itch and soon the scratch becomes the tonic of momentum on an ancient Incan highway pulling you forward in the present, and a rushing torrent down a dry riverbed from a fall storm, impossible to shut out. A nexus of living history, communion and potential -far exceeding what is normally accessible in our prosaic backyards and neighborhoods.

Travel is a re-awakening... A figurative placing of our stones for luck on the apacheta of life. Again, soon, we will switchback in the dusty tracks close behind a 10 year old minding his family's goats as he and his family has done for centuries. We will walk Salta's cobbled colonial city blocks with the locals and hear and see the same revving of a moped straining beneath the weight of a family of four. The miles will again counted through the vast sea faces, our lives reflected in the eyes of a 1000 strangers finally met. Ancient desert dust will again swirl in our lungs by the force of fierce Patagonia winds and Andean Pumas. We will hear subtle slips in speech- the softening of a consonant inspired by the insolation and isolation of a political border or a mountain range... Taste tiny green Andean potatoes from the local soil and 1000 year old terraced fields of the Quebrada Humahuaca at 10,000 feet. In Palpala smell the burning of garbage detritus of a harvested tobacco field. In Cafayate inhale the decaying of Visaja Secreto wine in 147 year old hardwood casks. Chew numbing coca leaves and blacken our teeth with Rosario Canchi who's whole world is his tiny pueblo and the nearby towns in the distant mountains of northern Argentina. Again we will be sniffed and followed by several hundred homeless dogs of every size and description. We will watch the splintering of sunlight through iron crucifixes while wandering a cementario in Humahuaca at sunset as a family adds plastic flowers to a recently filled grave...

Next trip we will experience home stays with local families that have opened up rooms for travelers keen to escape the roads and walk. We will connect networks of ancient villages whose streets have never seen a car, 8 hours from the nearest dirt road with only ancient foot trails for access hidden beyond over 5000 meter passes as we travel from Argentina into Bolivia...

I realize once here at the Lima airport the maps and descriptions have now all been read, the blisters popped and healed, the words have been spoken or forever left unspoken- but the nagging silence of an unknown region is gone. The memories, the several thousand images are no longer blurry and static and they are now our own. The mental reflections have sprouted roots, as do the epiphanies yet to burst above the surface to be exposed like quinoa sprouting in cool sunlight, and the leaps of comprehension will soon be assimilated into my everyday speech, like vocabulary to a newly discovered language. The key to Patagonia and to Argentina has been turned, the door has swung wide, we are inside, at the end of the trip but not through... I am grateful to have shared this journey with someone as amazing as Maureen.

So many words yet to be written, images to be processed, emails and photos to send across time zones to people who will have likely long forgotten me but will be reconnected.

The exciting part of finishing a good book is that you get to start a new one... And with travel it is an exponential planting of words, seeds, images, connections, contacts - in this case pulled from our past two months in South America and far beyond into our collective pasts. In travel wisely executed comes a gentle and welcome tugging... Illuminations for the journeys yet to come, volumes and libraries filling with worthwhile datum. A constant welcome return.

I have come to believe that travel can be a feast for all the senses and for the spirit if we are open to it- It is up to us when we choose to take the leap of faith to speak in a foreign tongue, to talk to a stranger, to find the courage to walk the same streets and trails for a while... A massive collective borrowing and a temporary sharing of perspectives and space. Often not easy but always illuminating.

Travel. In its essence- To go and embrace the turbulence...

Epilogue:
We are thanking the travel gods... All told we traveled 135 hours on long distance bus routes with just one four hour mechanical issue and a 3 hour tire repair. on our last week 25 of those hours were during the strike and with asking the right questions, staying focused and an amazing amount of luck we found a locals bus from Humahuaca to Juy Juy and a remise from their to salta for only 10 pesos more than the bus (5 hours total). I still don't understand why we were lucky enough to find our 20 bus all the way to BA. Strange that no on else seems to know about it as evidenced by blogs and web posts from stranded travelers. when we bought the ticket i first thought it would be a 16 passenger van or a series of short and medium distance buses. Cachi has pictures on the bus and in the office of their coaches parked next to colonial churches but seems to function as a locals bus for business people to ferry goods to and from BA... still unsure if it is really operating above board... We truly had the best possible outcome...

Sitting in Miami Int with our bags checked to St Louis we have the luxury of time to read headlines about the continuing huelga in Argentina. Officially called a A lockout whereby 22000 drivers refuse to budge. The government has ordered bus companies to pay the increase of 23% from April to the end if the year. The bus companies want none of it, nor do the unions because they want the increase to be retroactive since January. And the government has no teeth to enforce the demands. People are sleeping in bus stations for multiple days, many wondering if they will get reimbursed for tickets still not knowing if/when they might travel, and protests have turned violent in some major cities like Cordoba. Many tourists are stranded and blogs talk abut many resorting to hitch hiking. There appears to be no end in sight for the short term.

To further add to the insanity the truckers union has now begun their strike and is snarling traffic in the Congresso district of Buenos Aires where we arrived yesterday for our taxi to the airport. The traffic in the city is now likely to be nightmarish...

I think of the the stressed zippers and stitching blowing out on our packs that had been our personal mobile homes for two months - never entirely sure how secure they were and how quickly they would deteriorate and just give way. Soon the decklid zipper was blown on my pack and rendered 10 percent of the pack capacity useless. Maureen's decklid three weeks in was held together with a safety pin. A buckle broke and left my pack with one crucial tie down point unusable... Maureen soon blew another side zipper and we began carrying reusable shopping bags with are compromised behemoth packs...

I tried to learn from and adopt the enviable relaxed approach the Argentines have toward this unavoidable fraying, this continual breakdown. I have some work yet to do....