It´s 3:15A.M., and I´m waiting for my taxi to the airport. Due to a major cluster$%&# of airplane reservations and general bad planning, I´ll be changing planes no less than 6 times over the next 36 hours. Oh well, it will be good to get home.
I just finished a Tango lesson and the opportunity to dance at a Milonga in Argentina. Talk about sink or swim, after a one hour lesson we were thrown in with a group of top notch dancers. Only 2 of us ended up dancing - if I remember it took me 4 months of salsa dancing before I would go out to show off my moves.
Anyway, now might be a good time to outline our second hike.
My dad and I bussed down to Osorno, Chile, where we started to see some plant life and the typical Patagonia topography. The next day we cruised over the Andes to Bariloche, meeting Andris and Jamie for standard Argentinian fair.
From Bariloche we hiked to a refugio on Mt. Tronador - a massively glaciated peak reminiscent of Mt. Hood. With no technical equipment, the summit was off limits, but we managed to see the most epic sunset I´ve ever seen, and spent another 4 days hiking.
My dad and I just about ran up another peak to see the view: mountains as far as the eye could see. Definately worth further exploration.
The end of almost three weeks of hiking came too quickly, and 5 days in Buenos Aires was enough to erase it all. But this is a fun city. Come here if you want to learn Spanish and have a good time. Definately the best Latin American city I´ve been to.
27 February 2008
24 February 2008
Buenos Aires: The City That Never Sleeps
These people are insane, and I mean that in the most bittersweet kind of way.
Last night we had dinner at 12:45 A.M. (yep, that´s technically breakfast), and the restaurant was packed. At 4 A.M. there were still lines out the door to get in to clubs. Long lines; the kind where you get that sinking feeling that this isn´t going to be your night. But nobody seemed to mind. I asked a cabbie when the people of Buenos Aires sleep, and he lauged:
Last night we had dinner at 12:45 A.M. (yep, that´s technically breakfast), and the restaurant was packed. At 4 A.M. there were still lines out the door to get in to clubs. Long lines; the kind where you get that sinking feeling that this isn´t going to be your night. But nobody seemed to mind. I asked a cabbie when the people of Buenos Aires sleep, and he lauged:
Nunca.
Fair enough, but how do people function on this kind of schedule? Here´s the deal (and this took a while to figure out): grab your watch and set it backward by 3 hours. That´s the only way to make sense of it.
8 A.M. is really 5 A.M., as the hue of the morning sun makes apparent. 11 P.M. (when most people have dinner here) is really 8 P.M. And 6 A.M. (when most people go home from the clubs) is really 3 A.M. (a more sensible).
But you have to hand it to the porteños: they know how to party. I took our small group to a local salsa hotspot which happened to have the best salsa dancing I´ve seen outside my home´s local salsa group.
And I´ve got 3 more days to burn here before flying home. God help me.
23 February 2008
On the Way to Buenos Aires; Part I of the Hike
Today I´m on my way from Bariloche, Argentina, to Buenos Aires. It´s been hard to keep up with anything here, since 17 of the last 24 days were spent backpacking in the Andes and Patagonia.
In short, this trip has consisted of two big hiking trips: one in the Northern Chilean Andes (11 days), and one in Southern Argentina (6 days). Both trips had major highlights and included a lot of walking (over 100 miles on the first hike), but beyond that the similarities stop.
The first hike took us to Copiapo, Chile, which is roughly the same latitude as the middle of Baja. As it turns out, everything north of Santiago is basically desert - miles and miles of it - and bus rides are long. The ride from Santiago to the beach town of La Serana took us 5 or 6 hours, and the next day was another 5-6 hours to Copiapo.
From Copiapo we took a bus up a long winding road checkered with raisin plantations. Imagine the mountains of the basin and ranges of Nevada but add one important factor: the mountains are well above 15,000 feet - enough to capture significant amounts of precipitation in the form of snow. As a result, there´s enough water in the valleys to encourage a great deal of life in an otherwise barren desert.
Anyway, this was a trek in the truest sense. After begging for some gasolina for our stove, we walked for 5 days, for an elevation gain of 10,000 feet, all the while hiking through the same canyon. Desert, rocks, canyon, and water. That was it.
But things started to get interesting at 15,000 feet. Most importantly, because of our slow, five-day approach, the usual signs of acute mountain sickness were held at bay. No headaches or sickness, but all three of us suffered from some very unpleasant Cheyne-Stokes breathing (this occurs when the lack of CO2 being exhaled prevents the normal breathing response - basically you stop breathing). There were more than a few nights that I woke up gasping for breath so many times that I just gave up trying to sleep.
However, having broken all previous altitude records for myself (I took pictures where the tops of Mt. Hood, Adams, Shasta, and Ranier would be), I was still enthusiastic about the hike. After five days we reached the crest of the Andes - big mountains that don´t even get started until 15,000 feet.
We managed to top a 16,800 foot cindercone before descending out of the hellish winds of that kind of altitude. Another 3 days in the wind had us all but insane, but we dropped several thousand feet and got back into summer pretty quickly.
Although the hike was mostly a desert slog, it had the particular highlight of allowing us to get to nearly 17,000 feet with no technical equipment. We were also able to follow one drainage from the crest of the Andes, all the way out to the Ocean (on the bus of course).
That´s part one...
In short, this trip has consisted of two big hiking trips: one in the Northern Chilean Andes (11 days), and one in Southern Argentina (6 days). Both trips had major highlights and included a lot of walking (over 100 miles on the first hike), but beyond that the similarities stop.
The first hike took us to Copiapo, Chile, which is roughly the same latitude as the middle of Baja. As it turns out, everything north of Santiago is basically desert - miles and miles of it - and bus rides are long. The ride from Santiago to the beach town of La Serana took us 5 or 6 hours, and the next day was another 5-6 hours to Copiapo.
From Copiapo we took a bus up a long winding road checkered with raisin plantations. Imagine the mountains of the basin and ranges of Nevada but add one important factor: the mountains are well above 15,000 feet - enough to capture significant amounts of precipitation in the form of snow. As a result, there´s enough water in the valleys to encourage a great deal of life in an otherwise barren desert.
Anyway, this was a trek in the truest sense. After begging for some gasolina for our stove, we walked for 5 days, for an elevation gain of 10,000 feet, all the while hiking through the same canyon. Desert, rocks, canyon, and water. That was it.
But things started to get interesting at 15,000 feet. Most importantly, because of our slow, five-day approach, the usual signs of acute mountain sickness were held at bay. No headaches or sickness, but all three of us suffered from some very unpleasant Cheyne-Stokes breathing (this occurs when the lack of CO2 being exhaled prevents the normal breathing response - basically you stop breathing). There were more than a few nights that I woke up gasping for breath so many times that I just gave up trying to sleep.
However, having broken all previous altitude records for myself (I took pictures where the tops of Mt. Hood, Adams, Shasta, and Ranier would be), I was still enthusiastic about the hike. After five days we reached the crest of the Andes - big mountains that don´t even get started until 15,000 feet.
We managed to top a 16,800 foot cindercone before descending out of the hellish winds of that kind of altitude. Another 3 days in the wind had us all but insane, but we dropped several thousand feet and got back into summer pretty quickly.
Although the hike was mostly a desert slog, it had the particular highlight of allowing us to get to nearly 17,000 feet with no technical equipment. We were also able to follow one drainage from the crest of the Andes, all the way out to the Ocean (on the bus of course).
That´s part one...
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