When in doubt, go to Argentina

There's a strange suspension of reason that starts to take over when you're traveling. Passing fancies that you would ordinarily dismiss as impulsive and borderline delusional - say, for instance, "we've got a few days with nothing to do...why not go to Argentina?" - start to sound like good, carpe-diem common sense. Brianne and I have apparently reached that level of vagabond whimsy, because after our WWOOFing experience in Metri fell through, we decided that what our hearts most desired were the mountains and lakes of Bariloche, the chocolate capital of Argentina.

We took another spectacular bus ride across the Andes and arrived in the windy, ashy ski town of Bariloche. Our hostel left some character to be desired, and their promise of a free "vegetarian-friendly" dinner yielded a questionable plate of white rice in cream sauce (i.e. cream) with vegetables (i.e. three sliced chives). But the workers at the front desk were very helpful, and ended up giving us the use of their partner hostel, now closed for the low season, to work on our neverending graduate school applications. So we spent a day plowing through internet forms here:

With the occasional chocolate break at Rapa Nui, which is pretty much the Argentinian answer to Willy Wonka.

Having satisfied ourselves that Bariloche's cacoa reputation was well-deserved, we decided to follow another travel hunch and explore the mountain town of El Bolson, known as Argentina's hippie mecca. Since our aborted WWOOFing stay had tightened the belts on our budgets, we had written ahead to the owners of the family-run hostel Hospedaje Peheunia to see if they had any work we could do in exchange for a room discount. They had responded enthusiastically but vaguely, and so it came as something of a surprise when we showed up and they asked us in rapid-fire Spanish if we would run the hostel for them for four days while they went out of town. Que? We ended up politely declining, but did agree to man the helm for a day while they did some shopping in town. And we fared pretty well, all things considered, with only the small adventure of giving an Argentinian travel agent a tour of the property in toddler-level Spanish. The rest of the time in El Bolson was spent walking the hills with Canadians, wandering the artesan market, and making foolish purchases of pack-heavy, slow-dry knit panchos.

While we were there we also heard back from a WWOOF farm in Chiloe, Chile. This was actually the first farm that caught our eye, with an emphasis on communal living and vegetarian/vegan cooking. When we first wrote them they were full up for the fall, but thanks to some cancellations they had space for us, and we were very excited to have another chance at the South American farming experience. We boarded a bus back to Bariloche, where we not only spent a night in a much better hostel with a much better view (see photos below), but also accidentally took out too many Argentinian pesos and were "forced" to spend the excess on more chocolate and wine.

Now we're back in Puerto Montt for the night, and headed to Chiloe tomorrow for WWOOF Chile take two. We're not sure what the internet situation is going to be on the island, and so blog posts may take a brief hiatus as we (hopefully) dive into vegetables and meditation. If our trip so far is any indication, there will be plenty of surprises in store.

(Mis)adventures in Metri

The day ended with us making soup in the rustic kitchen of a family home. Just not the home we expected.

The story of how we didn't end up WWOOFing in the Bay of Metri shares many themes with the whole of our trip so far. Don't plan on things working out neatly. Be courageous and flexible in the face of difficulties. And be prepared to stick out even more than you think you will.

After a thirteen-hour night bus from Santiago, we arrived in Puerto Montt on Friday morning. "Chiloe?" a security guard asked us as we left the bus, concluding that Chiloe, the nearby tourist-friendly, hostel-rich island, was obviously the only logical destination for two American backpackers. Interestingly, no. We were headed for the fishing village (and village here is used generously) of Metri. The guard directed us to the rural terminal, where we boarded a mini-bus packed with locals come into town to get groceries and pick up packages. Stops were unmarked, but after repeating "treinta" to the bus driver several times, I eventually communicated that we wanted to be let off at the bridge at kilometer thirty of the highway. He dropped us there, looking more than a little bemused, and we alighted in the Bay of Metri.

Now confident in our ability to navigate rural Chilean highways, we started trying to follow Matthias Doggenweiler's remarkably vague directions to his farm. "Cross the bridge to a hill with some houses," he had said, "and keep going 200 meters until a black inner gate with WWOOF on it." We crossed and recrossed the bridge in both directions. We went up and down several hills. We tried calling Matthias, but couldn't get the call through on our cell phone. We finally asked directions from a kind man across the across the street and were directed back up the steep hill we'd already climbed twice: arriba arriba, he said, just keep climbing until the end.

Finally we found the black gate with the WWOOFing sign and thought we were home free. Oh no, my friend. We walked for some time along a dirt path through the woods, which eventually diverged into several unpromising-looking nooks and crannies, but wherever we searched, we could find neither people nor inhabitable buildings. We did turn up several shabby huts, a small herd of cats and dogs, and some rather run-down fields. We were starting to get a strange vibe. Even if we came across the owners at this point, we were not sure this was the kind of place we wanted to stay.

After searching for a while, we decided to bag it. The property didn't look cared for and our patience had been worn thin by Matthias' laissez-faire directions. We hiked a kilometer up the road, sweat some more, and finally found a little "store" (a room in someone's house) to buy a coke and some potato chips and recover our spirits.

Next we boarded an even more crowded mini-bus back into town, took a taxi to a "guesthouse" (another room in someone's house), where we spent the night, as we had hoped, in all the comfort of a rustic grandmother's cottage. Except with Perla and her half-Swiss grandchildren instead of with our farm hosts. Here we also found out that WWOOFers at Matthias' farm actually stay in one of the shabby huts we saw. There's no heat in the building, possibly no electricity, and no food except what's in the greenhouse (which right now is nothing). So all things considered, we're glad we walked away.

We are now, yet again, in a position to regroup and redeploy. Lessons in flexibility have not been in short supply on this trip, but luckily we are feeling limber. Although, as the photos demonstrate, our appearance became increasingly haggard in the course of the day, our spirits stayed surprisingly high. As we plot our next steps we are thankful to be warm, dry, and happy in the luxury of a free night at the Holiday Inn Express (thank you to my incredible father for letting us use his travel points!). And we are hopeful that in a couple of weeks we will look back and think, "Thank goodness that farm turned out to be a sketchy abandoned field. Now we had the chance to ______." Just follow the clues, as a terrific fellow traveler Ross Ballinger would say. And embrace the unwritten conclusions of your fragile plans.

Of Malbecs and Mendoza

It's a fairly obvious truism in travel to say that every experience ends up being more mixed than you anticipate. Our time in Mendoza has been no exception. While most of the week brought the sunny-and-75 weather we hoped for, we also experienced several days of the "zondas": a strong wind off the mountains that once or twice a year blows cold air and a cloud of unbelievable dust into the city. Schools were closed for the day, and spirits at the Chilean independence festival next door were considerably dampened by the 50% of your lungs that filled with particles the moment you walked outside. (Although that didn't stop them from dyeing a fountain Koolaid-red and singing songs of freedom all night long.) And while our hostel has brought all the relaxation, comfort, and privacy that we desired for application productivity, a highly unfortunate accident involving a patio chair, a snagged charge cord, and Brianne's computer making abrupt contact with a slate floor left us in this situation:

Bottom: Brianne's netbook, completely dismantled. Not pictured: Us, completely freaking out. Top: Max, our friendly hostel worker, who also happens to come from a family of computer technicians. After the dismantle didn't solve the problem, Max eventually called his uncle, who gave me the opportunity to use the word "tio," took away Brianne's netbook, replaced the hard drive, and - because our situation wasn't pathetically comical enough - installed a Spanish-language version of Windows XP. The whole ordeal felt a little like this:

We decided to console ourselves for the lost productivity by compounding it with a six-hour-long wine tasting, followed by a two-hour-long siesta. And I have to say that where wine and olives are concerned, Mendoza has entirely lived up to our expectations. We sampled wines at three very different wineries, ranging from fabulously wealthy to family-run organic. We tried two completely new varieties of wine (Bonarda and Moscatel de Alejandria), learned that your first sip of wine should be to adjust the acidity in your mouth and not to taste, and took far too many pictures of wine bottles. I've included just a few (relatively speaking), as well as a final photo of our lunch spread at the end of the day.

It was a gorgeous end to our time in Mendoza, and though we're not as far along with our graduate applications as we hoped, we're making peace with taking them along for the next step of the trip. Tomorrow we board a bus back to Chile, the beginning of a long adventure down south to an organic farm on the Bay of Metri, where we'll be WWOOFing for the next couple of weeks. In light of our week in Argentina, I'm trying not to draw too many advance conclusions from the local weather report of month-long rain and highs in the mid-50s. Mary Oliver says you should always leave room for the unimaginable, and from smashed laptops to spectacular vistas, this trip has already had a fair amount of the surprising about it. I'll leave you with a couple of photos from the bus ride to Mendoza, which will hopefully be repeated on our ride tomorrow. Wish us luck.

First taste of Colombia, seasoned by application anxiety

I've often studied while abroad. If you count bottling organic beer, running sheep dogs, or teaching English twelve hours a week, I've even worked while abroad. But I can say now that nothing in my past experience has prepared me for the disorientation of trying to apply to graduate school while abroad. Here we are: in a hostel full of Danish, Irish, Polish travelers bound for the Amazon, a salsa festival, or the Galapagos Islands, Brianne and I are snuggling ourselves under wool blankets to type out personal statements from the surprisingly chilly capital of Colombia. The part of my brain that's trying desperately to persuade an admissions committee of my intellectual vigor, as it turns out, does not harmonize very willingly with the part of my brain that's trying to embrace perpetual disorientation (does our bus leave on Argentinian or Chilean time?), infantile Spanish (does "nuestro compromiso es su seguridad" mean they've decided to compromise our safety?), and earthy body odors (when's the last time I showered again?). The two investments I'm making this year - in graduate applications and in months of purposeful vagabonding - may not be as easy to reconcile as I had hoped.

The difficulty of that project in some ways touches my memories of Bogota, where the cold climate, temperamental internet, and somewhat sketchy vibe made settling down to reserach gender performativity a little bit challenging.  From what we heard from other travelers, there's much to see in Colombia, and if we had had more time and money we would have loved to take one of South America's many 8-13 hour bus rides to trek the Lost City trail or curl up in a Carribbean hammock. But constrained as we were by the graduate school albatross we've foolishly strapped to our necks, we had to make the best of what we had.

We treated ourselves to Colombian coffee while writing from our charming hostel

We took advantage of one sunny morning to get a view of the city from the nearby mountains.

We ate regularly at a fabulous vegetarian restaurant run by possibly the five most adorable women in the world. Pictured: the best guacamole I've ever had.

And we sampled some of Bogota's eclectic street scene, which for your information includes miming and betting on trained guinea pigs.

After a couple of days, we also decided that the time had come to move on, and - since we didn't have the luxury of really exploring Colombia - to find somewhere a little warmer and more relaxed where we could knock out our graduate preparations without feeling like we were missing out on our own trip. Luckily, at this point in our vagabonding, we're both pretty comfortable treating our travel plans as possibilities and our airline tickets as flexible suggestions. And so, hours later by plane and by bus, I'm now writing to you from a wisteria-scented patio in Mendoza, Argentina, the Malbec capital of the world. But more on that, and on the gorgeous bus ride from Santiago to Mendoza, to come later. For now it's time to get back to my wine and my writing sample. Welcome to South America.

Last Day in the Known World

Weighing in at 31.5 pounds, veteran of three continents and several mountains, my backpack is feeling much better prepared for the seven months on the road than I am. I've been asked numerous times in the past few weeks whether I'm excited to be leaving. I know I've talked a big game about my around-the-world trip, and that my transient lifestyle should probably have made departures like this one seem old hat by now. But this past year in Chicago has been the most stable of my post-college life, complete with a twelve-month lease, a full set of dishes, and a long-term boyfriend. In comparison, the months to come - during which I will experience nine new countries, be accepted or denied admission to grad school, thrive or flounder at maintaining a long-distance relationship, and quite possibly experience a cosmic shift in my world view - feel like the stuff of fairy tales: beautiful, hazy, and terrifying. Visualizing tomorrow's plane flight from New York to Bogota is like looking at the sharp cliffs at the edges of old maps. Beyond this point, there be dragons.

So as I set my sights on Bogota, Colombia, where I will be landing in the wee hours of Thursday morning, I am telling myself that it's good to be a little (a lot) afraid. This next year may very well be the last time that I can honestly say I have no idea where, how, or what I'm going to be from day to day. It's overwhelming, but yes...on some deep level...exciting.

I'm going to do my best to keep this blog updated with stories, photos, and musings as my wonderful travel companion Brianne and I trek through Colombia, Chile, Peru, Hong Kong, Thailand, Cambodia, India, Nepal, and the UAE. For further reading, you can also follow Brianne's blog, or look back on my travels through Europe and New Zealand at my other blog. Thanks for coming along.