June 10, 2008
Mount Shasta
Dear Friends, Family and Supporters,
Our goal for 'The Climb' was to make it up and down Shasta under our own power and raise at least $1 for every foot that Shasta is high. We're pleased to report success on all fronts. Every good team has clear roles and responsibilities; The Bruces had the job of fundraising, and Brent's was to reach the summit. Brent did in fact reach the summit after a 10-hour climb, and Bruce made it to 10,400 feet. One of our supporters asked for notarized proof of the ascent, but the attached pictures will hopefully suffice.
Most importantly and thanks to your support, we raised nearly $20,000 for the American Liver Foundation - money that will go to liver research and education.
Thanks to all of you from the 'WeB3 Team'
Bruce Hansen
Brent Scharschmidt
Bruce Scharschmidt
http://www.active.com/donate/climb08
This is me and my dad at base camp with Shasta in the background. The summit is actually not visible from here; the long, diagonal row of rocks just below and to the left of the cloud (the "Red Banks") is at around 13,000 feet, 1,000 short of the summit.
This is me at the summit. I'm squinting mostly because of the sun - I didn't want to look like an alien in my glacier glasses for this all-important photo. But I am as relieved as I look. At this point the altitude sickness had finally set in, mostly as a bad headache. The hike down was much harder than the hike up, even given that we were able to glissade most of the way down. But the headache, windburn, and sore butt from sliding down thousands of feet of ice were well worth it.
Posted by brents at 2:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 20, 2006
Vientiane Road Trip
It's been a long while since I last wrote, and a ton has happened since then. My parents came to visit, then Tim, the spring semester ended... lots of stuff. Now it's summertime in Chiang Mai, which means the weather is bipolar, switching between 95-degree sun and drenching rain, usually in a matter of hours. With the real rainy season looming just a month or two from now, I decided to take advantage of some free time and visit Laos.
I'd been meaning to go to Vientiane ever since Elona came in December and raved about it, but a busy class schedule had prevented me from traveling much since then. But we recently found out that the Payap intensive English summer courses (which I was scheduled to teach) were cancelled due to a lack of students. Though not good news for the International School, the slow summer has meant more time to study Thai, more time to spend with my visitors (Kyle next week, then Tif in July), and enough free time to do another road trip.
The Honda Wave has been doing well since the road trip up through Pai and Mae Hong Son, though a recent propensity for flat tires had me a little worried about driving all the way to Laos. Luckily, there is a major industrial route from Chiang Mai to Vientiane which, though slightly boring, has enough gas stations and mechanic shops to keep the journey pretty low-risk. So once again I had the brakes tightened and oil changed, and last Friday afternoon I set off.
My goal was to get to Vientiane by Saturday night, though I would have settled for Sunday morning if I had problems on the road. The first leg of the trip took me to Pitsanulok, a major industrial hub in central Thailand, about 350 km south of Chiang Mai. The riding that first day was not at all what I expected. Just an hour outside Chiang Mai were serious mountains that continued for almost 100 km. The roads were great, but maneuvering between the 18-wheelers kept me on my toes (literally: you brake with your right foot). The sun set before I arrived in Pitsanulok, and I had a clear view to the west at twilight.
Here's a picture of the sunset, and another with my bike in the foreground:
Friday had been declared a national holiday to honor King Adulyadej's 60 years on the throne, so I encountered various small celebrations along the trip. Everywhere people were wearing yellow shirts (since yellow is the color associated with Monday, and the King was born on a Monday), and an hour or so outside of Pitsanulok I drove past a big stage with Thai girls lip-synching and dancing to traditional Thai music. But the coolest celebration was in Pitsanulok itself, where I arrived just as they were setting off fireworks. The first day of the trip had been great, with beautiful views and no bike trouble, and I stopped on an overpass to watch the fireworks in celebration. Traffic laws are loosely enforced in Thailand, if at all, and so one lane of the two-lane overpass was filled with parked cars and idling motorbikes, as everyone watched the display to the north.
I found a hotel in the city, ate chicken kebabs at the local market for dinner, and fell asleep. Here's a picture of downtown Pitsanulok (taken the following morning). It was cool being somewhere with practically no signs in English. Luckily my hotel had a sign in Roman characters, though I had been keenly on the lookout for a "rong raam" ("hotel" in thai, or literally, "stay building").
Saturday morning I set off to the east, planning to follow a road that looked big, flat, and straight on the map. Like the road the day before though, this route also wound its way through mountains for nearly 100 km between Pitsanulok and Khon Kaen, and this time I stopped to take some pictures:
The rest of the day was uneventful, except for lunch in Khon Kaen. I stopped at a roadside restaurant (the kind that have about three menu items, two of which are always noodles and fried rice), and talked with the Thai owners for an hour. Not many foreigners make it to Khon Kaen, which is another industrial, homogenous town that exists more as a rest stop than a destination. So being white and able to speak Thai made me a minor celebrity with the family, who approached me one at a time to ask where I was from, what I was doing in Thailand, and - of course - what I thought of their country. I told them that I was American, that I was teaching in Chiang Mai, and that I loved Thailand. This made them beam, especially when I cited their own hospitality as an example of why I liked Thai culture so much. It was one of the best hours I've had since getting here, entirely because of the kindness of the family and satisfaction of being able to understand and answer everything they asked. I headed north toward Vientiane full and happy.
I reached Laos at about 6pm, called Dorian from the border, and after a short bus ride and hour-long tuk-tuk trip, arrived at their house. Here's a picture of the tuk-tuk I took from the border:
The three PiA-ers in Vientiane are Amy (working for The World Conservation Union), Dorian (Vientiane College), and Elona (Population Services Int'l). I could write a separate entry about all three, but take my raving for granted during the rest of this one. For more info, you can check out their PiA profiles here: http://weblamp.princeton.edu/~pia/main/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=66&Itemid=56.
Amy served me a big bowl of Lao "khaw soi" (a soup made with rice noodles) which is different from Thai khaw soi in that it uses no coconut milk, and so many vegetables that you can't see the broth. (Two days later, I would witness Dorian put a small vegetable plantation into his soup and eat it all - very impressive.) Since Amy was sick with a cold and I was pooped, we spent the rest of the night watching a James Bond movie, marveling at Timothy Dalton's awful sexual puns, and talking about our jobs, countries, and everything else. It was a good night.
The next day after breakfast, Dorian, Amy and I went on a 2 hour motorbike trip along a dirt road that borders the Mekong north-west of Vientiane. I was kicking myself for not bringing my camera, because the river was beautiful and we stopped at a temple at the halfway point where the most rickety wooden view point you can imagine looked across the Mekong to Thailand. The real highlight though, was watching Amy (riding on the back of Dorian's bike) hang on for dear life over the thousands of potholes, more than once nearly bouncing off the seat. Dorian drove faster than I would have dared, which made the trip all the more entertaining thanks to the constant fear of wiping out. My tolerance for potholes went way up, and my sensitivity to speed way down. Needless to say, my eventual drive back to Chiang Mai the next week was way faster than it had been just three days earlier.
We drove to a bar on the Mekong where we met Elona (who had been helping open a drop-in clinic in southern Laos), then picked up some Chinese dumplings and Vietnamese-style spring rolls, and headed home to feast. Here are some pictures from dinner:
Monday morning everyone went to work and I did some sightseeing. I checked out the National Museum (which makes it clear that every bad decision ever made by a Lao communist leader was the result of American and/or French treachery) and did an unsuccessful trip motorbike trip south of the city in search of a park full of concrete Buddhist statues. Here are some photos:
I also visited the Vientiane Victory Gate (modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris), and especially liked the sign on the Gate which commemorates its construction and condemns its hideousness. Dorian explained the situation well, saying that the current Lao government (communist) couldn't figure out whether the Gate should be considered a symbol of the communist victory or an ugly relic from the French imperial period.
Monday night we went out to a French restaurant for dinner (where between the three of them, Amy, Dorian and Elona knew about 70% of the people there). Amy headed home after dinner, and Dorian, Elona and I went to an Australian-owned riverside bar open late to show the World Cup games. The Australia - Japan game had just finished when we arrived (Australia scored 3 goals in the final 10 minutes to win 3-1), and the bar was pretty rowdy. We drank beer Lao until the U.S. - Czech Republic game started at 11, drank more when the U.S. went down a goal, and hung our heads the rest of the night as the U.S. got blown out. Actually I'm speaking just for myself and the other Americans at the bar; Dorian is Canadian and Elona's Albanian, but at least they didn't cheer like everyone else at the bar every time the U.S. misplayed a ball or got scored on. It was another lesson in how much we Americans are disliked around the world. Ex-pat solidarity in Laos? Far from it.
Tuesday I met Elona for lunch and finally got to see her office, one building of which was recently turned into a drop-in center for gay men and gateoy (ladyboys). Population Services Int'l (in Laos since 1998) is the only legal distributor of condoms in the country, and they combine peer education programs about condom use with distribution of their own brand, called "Number One" condoms. PSI also bought television time during the World Cup television broadcasts in Laos, meaning that halftime of every game featured a commercial where various Lao people (smartly, from the various ethnic groups in the country) reach through the half-open window of a parked car and try to grab a packet of Number One condoms. Keely and I are now also proud owners of Number One condom polo shirts, thanks to Elona. They're classy, royal blue, and pretty hot. We just have to remember not to wear them on any Monday for the rest of the year, when only the king's yellow is supposed to be worn. Swapping the king for condoms? It might singlehandedly ruin foreigners' reputation forever.
Seeing the PSI Lao headquarters was a cool way to end the trip, especially since the atmosphere of service and dedication there helped renew my own motivation, which had recently been somewhat low. Elona helped me bargain with a tuk tuk driver for a rate to the border, and within an hour I was back on the Thai - Lao Friendship Bridge heading to Nong Khai. But first, a couple last pictures from Laos: Elona with her bike on a tuk tuk, after her 2nd flat tire in two days, then one of lunch.
The time in Laos had been perfect - just what I needed to recharge my batteries and get energized for the second half of the year in Chiang Mai. Dorian, Amy and Elona have a good situation there - cool jobs, a tight group of fellows, and close friends, both ex-pat and non-. Dorian leaves in just over a week to start law school in Canada, and Amy takes off in five weeks to start a new job with The Cottonwood Gulch Foundation, which runs expeditions for kids, teenagers and families in the hills of New Mexico. Elona will stay for another year though, so I'll almost certainly be back, hopefully soon.
The rest of Tuesday was uneventful. My bike was still at the border where I left it (I had been renting in Vientiane), and I drove for a few hours to Udon Thani, the unofficial capital of northeastern Thailand. I found a hotel, had dinner at a local market, and crashed.
The next day was a long one, with about 700 km of driving between me and home. This time I decided to cut through the mountains, which turned out to be a great choice. Within a half-hour of leaving Udon Thani I was on a desolate country road that wove through the hills for 150 km. This time I didn't forget to take pictures:
I bypassed Khon Kaen, reached Pitsanulok around 4pm, then turned north toward Chiang Mai. The views along the way were again spectacular, especially when dark clouds could be seen dumping rain on the distant mountains.
The highlight of the drive back was a massive Buddha statue at a seemingly random point along the road between Pitsanulok and Chiang Mai, which had no fanfare of any sort surrounding it except for an empty gravel parking lot. It was also here that I took my only successful timer photo. Mine is not a typical Buddha pose.
I got back to Chiang Mai around 10pm, later than I'd planned, but thankful after one of the best weeks I've had since coming to Asia. Laos was everything I'd hoped for and more. Also, the motorbike gods had once again smiled down on me: 1,650 km, no accidents, and no flat tires. What's more, the bike had become my ultimate conversation piece - when driving a 100cc motorbike through rural Thailand, with bags strapped to the back and some road grime on your otherwise white face, people want to ask you questions. I was just glad that this time around, I could finally understand most of them.
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February 13, 2006
Pai - Mae Hong Son Road Trip
Hi Everyone,
It's been a while since I last wrote, mostly because school started mid-January and things have been pretty hectic. But this weekend we had Monday off, and all the PiA-ers took advantage of the long weekend to flee the city. I've been wanting to go to Mae Hong Son for a long time, mostly because in CM they sell postcards of the small northern town, with pictures of lush green rice fields freckled with teak huts. Mae Hong Son is the capital of the northern province of the same name, which lies 150 km west of Chiang Mai along the Burmese border. I figured Mae Hong Son would look nothing like the postcards, especially now during the dry season, but I had three free days, an itch do something adventurous, and a motorbike pining to get out of cramped Chiang Mai and onto the open road.
There is a popular loop connecting Mae Hong Son and Chiang Mai, which heads north and then west over the mountains surrounding Chiang Mai city, then runs through the small city of Pai (a popular place to stop for a night or two), continues west over more mountains to Mae Hong Son, then finishes with a circuit around the major mountain range south-west of Chiang Mai. The whole loop is 638km through mostly mountainous terrain - it intersects three National Parks, and comes within a few kilometers of three others. One look at the map and I was sold. I had the brakes tightened on my 100cc Honda Wave, packed an overnight bag, and bright and early Saturday morning I headed out.
The trip to Pai was nice - about an hour of urban driving, followed by three more up through the mountains. The scenery was awesome - at most of the vistas you could see only more mountains, all green with no signs of civilization. The road was good in parts and not so good in others - there were a lot of tight turns on shoddy pavement, which made for very slow going, but other sections were freshly paved and fantastic. First gear was necessary quite a few times, usually when I misgauged how steep the hills were and how much momentum I had. There's something frightening about having your bike in fourth gear one moment, and then slowing down so quickly up a steep hill that you have to downshift three times in a matter of seconds. First gear is the devil - the bike bucks and lurches, and screams in this angry high pitch that makes you feel like you're administering some kind of torture device. But eventually the incline gets less severe, or you get up enough momentum in first gear to change to second... and then third, and forth, and then you're coasting along a ridge or - even more fun - racing around curves down a long descent.
Enough bologna: to the pictures. Pai is a small town, and really touristy. Initially seeing all the white guys racing around on loud motorbikes and sitting at bars with their shirts off kind of depressed me. But eventually I got over it, mostly because I talked with some friendly locals, and also because I found a great guesthouse with private teak huts separated by the Pai River from the rest of town. Here's where I stayed:
And here's the bridge you crossed to get there. It was even more rickety than it looks.
The next day I headed for Mae Hong Son, another 140km up through some major mountain passes. The road was being repaved for the first 40km, which meant some really slippery turns and lots of "Oh, god, did I just get a flat tire?" moments of panic. But once the construction ended, the road was awesome. It's strange to be talking about the road so much, but when you're riding on just two tires in the open air, these are the things you notice.
More importantly, the scenery was awesome. Up and down through the passes the view was mostly of jungle, but in the valleys the road wound through rice fields with those exact teak huts I had seen in the postcard. It was amazing. Small villages also appeared every few kilometers - there were huts with smoke coming out of their chimneys (giving off that rich, wooden smell of a subsistence lifestyle), and women selling fruit and vegetables on the side of the road.
Halfway to Mae Hong Son there was a vista looking down into the valley, with a glimpse of the road ahead:
And a picture I took with a random Thai woman, who wanted to pose with the farong:
This was some of the more spectacular scenery along the way:
I got to Mae Hong Son - a small town with only two traffic lights, surrounded by mountains on all sides - and took a tour around town on my bike. I biked around the airport, which occupies about 15 percent of the land in the main city, and hung out at one end of the runway for a while, hoping to see a plane land. None came - apparently there are only three a day from Chiang Mai. But it was a cool place to relax a little - from the end of the airport you could see the town's major attraction, Wat Phra That, located on Doi Kong Mu, the 1500m-high mountain that overlooks town. You can see the Wat in this picture of the runway:
A close-up of the Wat:
I checked into a guesthouse and spent the rest of the day wandering around town. I visited the Wat (which had a great view of town), watched part of a high school soccer game, visited the local market, and then watched part of a parade that seemed to appear and disappear with no warning or fanfare, except for a few onlookers and loud traditional music. I didn't even manage to take a picture of it.
The view of Mae Hong Son from Wat Phra That:
Young monks inside the Wat's main temple, cleaning up for the day:
The next morning I woke up early, wondering whether I was crazy to try to do the 370km back home in one day. It was cold as I strapped my gear to the Honda, and the seat was covered with dew. And as soon as I got on the road I was too - the first hour or so was wet and cold, but beautiful. Mist hung in the valley so thick that you couldn't see for more than a few blocks - let alone any of the mountains surrounding the city. Pretty soon I was out of the valley and up over the first pass, which is when the scenery really turned amazing. The flat sections of road were surrounded by rice fields, and the high passes had views of mountains as far as you could see.
The sign I encountered at 7:30:
A village 75km outside Mae Hong Son. You can see the smoke coming from the houses, and could smell the smoke from the road:
A view of the rice fields that bordered the road through valleys. Just like in the postcards:
The road eventually came out of the mountain range and headed north toward Chiang Mai, but not before cutting right through Ob Luang National Park (where I took my only successful timer shot - booya!).
And even the supposedly "boring" part of the road ran parallel to Doi Inthanon National Park, home of Thailand's highest peak (Doi Inthanon, 2595m).
I made it back safe, in time to tutor the little girls at my favorite restaurant, having swallowed only one bug along the way. I washed my bike and gave it a good pampering, which it deserved after more than 650km on the odometer in less than three days. The last picture in this entry is devoted to the true star of the weekend, my Honda Wave. It didn't get any flat tires, got terrific gas mileage (4 fill-ups, a total of $8), and kept me alive against all odds. The love affair continues. If they made Honda Wave body pillows, I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
Pop gan may,
Brent
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November 19, 2005
Loy Kratong
My first week in Chiang Mai coincided with the Loy Kratong festival, a three-night extravaganza of lights and noise during which Thais make kratongs, small crafts made from palm trunk and leaves, to float down the river as a way of sending off the bad spirits. At least that's the traditional purpose of the festival. It seemed that the modern festival was largely an excuse for Thais to set off as many firecrackers as possible, some mercifully aimed upward, others left on the ground to explode on their own accord, and to launch flaming lanterns by the hundreds into the night sky.
Each night began with a parade through Chiang Mai's most famous gate, Pratu Tha Phae, with floats carrying girls wearing traditional garb, Thais playing music on traditional instruments, and groups of students and local cultural organizations representing their schools and causes.
Just next to the parade path a huge, temporary stage had been put up. Over the three nights it hosted a beauty pageant, one ceremony during which humongous lanterns were lit and let go into the night, and cultural shows with displays of traditional dances.
The stage and parade path were 100 feet away, making it almost impossible to move, or to stay with your group, or to hear anything when talking on your cellphone in the process of locating the friends you had lost in the crowd.
After the parade the crowds followed the floats to the Nawarat Bridge, which turned into a kind of living light and noise show once the parade had passed. The bridge hadn't been closed off to traffic, so cars and motorbikes mingled with thousands of people in a sort of large-scale Brownian motion.
An area had been set up for tourists to make kratongs, and we made our own with the help of local Thai volunteers. A typical kratong consists of a slice of palm branch, onto which you attach folded palm leaves, orchids, three sticks of incense, a candle, and sometimes some coins. Ours was painfully ugly in comparison to the ones being sold by women along the street, but we went down to the riverbank to launch it all the same, hoping that whatever god was responsible for relieving us of our bad spirits wouldn't be insulted by our hideous creation.
A Thai boy was in the water just off the dock, taking the kratongs and swimming them out into the current in exchange for coins. Ours almost capsized, it was so gaudy and over-decorated, and in lighting the candle and incense we had set some of the palm leaves on fire. It is a sign of good luck if your candle remains lit until the kratong is out of sight. We knew there was no chance of that, since it had been floating precariously on one edge since entering the water, and so we took fate into our own hands and stopped looking as soon as our smoking contraption had joined the parade of other kratongs down the river.
It's hard to describe the atmosphere of the Loy Kratong festival at its height; the best I can do is to say that it sounded like warfare, or what I imagine warfare to sound like. Fireworks were being set off everywhere, by kids and teens and adults alike, and rarely did a second pass without being punctuated by an explosion of some sort -- often close enough to make us jump. Several times in the course of each night we felt we had lost our hearing for good after a particularly loud firework would boom under the bridge, or explode over our heads or at our feet.
The other major activities of Loy Kratong surrounded the lanterns -- thin paper formed into a cylinder, with a wad of oil-soaked cloth attached by wire to the open end on the bottom. If you weren't launching a kratong on the river, you were selling lanterns, or buying a lantern, or lighting your lantern, or watching lanterns float up into the sky, or slowly entangle themselves in highwires, or trees, or drop chunks of flaming cloth into the river or among the crowd. At any given time there were a dozen being lit on the road leading to the bridge, and the night sky contained hundreds of them, some still visible in detail, others just specks of light.
It was my first week here, and the questions that interested me most were ones that seemed not to matter to the Thais. Wasn't it a little dangerous to send flaming wads of cloth up into the sky? What happened when the lanterns lost their heat? Where did they land? What happened if they hit someone? How were planes landing at CM International Airport, just 3 miles west of the bridge?? It was a dramatic introduction to the Thai attitude of "may pen ray", a phrase that covers everything from "you're welcome" to "don't worry about it", "nevermind", "whatever", and "it's no big deal". "May pen ray" is closely tied to the idea of saving face, which like in so many Asian cultures means you keep a calm demeanor no matter what happens. When stuff doesn't go your way, you laugh and move on. Things out of your control aren't worth your anxiety. In short, the best way to deal with the potential hazards of sending off lanterns was simply not to think about it. There were flaws to this perspective: wasn't it your choice to light the lantern in the first place? But the Thai attitude was, why make a fuss over safety when it's a lot of fun, and everyone is doing it? And after having been in the US for so long, where lighting a single lantern within a few miles of an airport would probably bring FAA goons to your door, the Thai attitude was as refreshing and liberating as it was strange and unsettling.
That pretty much covers Loy Kratong. Despite three nights of firecrackers and lanterns, we escaped burn-free and with our hearing mostly intact. That first week I had started language classes in the mornings, was apartment hunting in the afternoon, and generally just getting used to life in CM. Even after a month here it will still sometimes hit me that I'm living in Thailand, but that first week was something of a shock. Lo Kratong was the most dramatic introduction to Thailand I can imagine, and one that only added to my excitement about what the next year would bring.
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November 5, 2005
Patagonia
Hi all - here are some pics from the trip to Patagonia. Three days until Thailand - so psyched. Enjoy,
-Brent
Nick and I landed in Punta Arenas, on the Strait of Magellan, and eventually found a hostel called "Los Tres Hermanos" - which our dictionary told us meant "Three Brothers". Our Spanish was improving already. Improving MUCHO! We wandered down to the Strait and took this picture. We would eventually get much better at taking pictures with timers, learning how to elimate things like big blurry rocks in the foreground.
One of the most interesting places in Punta Arenas was the town cemetary, with graves stacked in rows that made the place feel like a very large bookstore, complete with sliding ladders allowing visitors to see the ones higher up. Each grave had a small display, typically with a picture of the deceased and momentos of their life. One child's grave had a soccer jersey hanging on display, along with pictures of him playing soccer.
From Punta Arenas we traveled to Puerto Natalas, a 4-hr ride by bus. Puerto Natales, just East of the Southern Chilean Andes, is the jumping-off point for Torres del Paine, one of Chile's most famous National Parks. In town we picked up provisions, including 5kg of cheese (see picture). As it turned out, that was 4kg too much, and we ended up giving the rest away to thankful hikers as we finished our trek.
At the grocery store we also met a young Israeli couple, and the guy asked us if we had seen double-stuffed, chocolate-covered Oreo's anywhere. His girlfriend was clearly not too thrilled to have been dragged all over town in search of Oreo's, but he was on a mission. We met them again in Torres del Paine, and he was still talking about how Chilean chocolate cookies didn't compare to the real thing. In Argentina we eventually found Oreo's, but by that time we had lost touch with the Israelis.
We spent 5 nights in Torres del Paine, which ended up being our favorite camping of the whole month. We had great weather for the park's picturesque towers (aka "Torres" - our Spanish was still getting better), spent a day walking next to a lake that looked like it belonged in the Caribbean, slept just a stone's throw from the park's main glacier, and hiked one afternoon through 100km winds (so windy we couldn't hear each other from 10ft away). Yeah, it was ok.
After our 5 nights in Torres del Paine, we returned to Puerto Natales on my birthday, and spent the night wandering from empty bar to empty bar in the empty town, buzzed and freshly showered and happy. For dinner we ate at a small restaurant, where the waiter kept shaking our hand and giving us promotional flyers about his place. Nick had a rare steak with a sunny-side egg on top, which would have violated numerous health codes anywhere in the US, but was a staple in Patagonia. Nick survived - the meal that would knock us out didn't come until Bariloche.
From Puerto Natales we took another bus up the Andes, into Argentina, and spent a day at the Perito Morino Glacier. Then we traveled to El Chalten, a town of pop. 300 that exists for the sole purpose of providing a hub for hikers of Mount Fitz Roy, a 3,400m mountain that defines the Chile/Argentina border in the central Patagonian Andes. We hiked for 3 nights there with a Canadian named Declan, whom we first met in Torres del Paine. Fitz Roy was almost as impressive as Los Torres, except that the weather turned bad on our second day, and we spent more time huddled in our tents, sleeping and reading and drinking whisky, than we did hiking. But that was pretty fun too.
From Fitz Roy we headed east, and took an 18hr bus up the Atlantic coast to Puerto Madryn, one of the best places in the world for whale watching. The Argentinian buses were something else - about as nice as business class on a plane, with movies, meals, fully reclining seats - the works. And the whales in Puerto Madryn were as promised - big, bold, and everywhere. After reading Moby Dick so many times and spending a whole semester studying the symbolism of the whale, it was cool to see these guys up close.
From Puerto Madryn it was westward back toward the Andes, for a week of trekking and hostel-ing in Bariloche - a little resort town known for its chocolate, lakes, and its tacit rule that no one is allowed to start partying before 3am. Nick and I, not deterred by the National Park warning that most of the trails in the area were treacherous and snow-covered, set off on a three-day circuit around the mountains just southwest of town. We found the trails treacherous and snow-covered, but with the help of a local brand of frozen burgers, managed to stay warm enough and eat well enough to survive. The crowd from the hostel helped us improve our now near-flawless Spanish. Mucho bien, nostro espagnol.
From Bariloche we crossed the Andes into Chile, on a bus ride so nauseating that they passed out barf-bags (not made by the same company that makes Barfy Burgers) as everyone got on. We spent one night in Puerto Monte, which observed the same clubbing rule as Bariloche, walking around the fish market (where Brent violated his vegetarianism, and not for the first time this trip) and then another night in Osorno - where the woman who owned our hostel was nice enough to let us, even after checkout, use her bathroom to clean off the leeches we'd picked up during our day-hike (but not before one ate through my sock).
From Osorno we took our last overnight bus to Santiago and spent the day walking around the city - where big yellow buses seem to occupy as many square feet as the buildings themselves - visiting churches, a museum (our first of the trip), eating ice cream and generally just being taller and whiter than everyone else. Heading to the airport that night was really depressing - Nick was heading north to visit the Bolivian salt flats, and I was going home for five days of hectic packing and a long drive down to LA to get my visa for Thailand. But it was hard to be too upset with Asia just a week away, and the trip had been awesome - we couldn't have had a better trip if we had planned it day-by-day, hour-by-hour. And Nick and I both agreed that we would return if we could, hopefully soon.
"Red sky at morning, sailor take warning." Flying into Dallas Int'l Airport the next morning, a red sunrise heralded my return to the States - the hectic days ahead, and what is sure to be a serious culture shock when I arrive in Chiang Mai next Friday. But if it was easy, it wouldn't be worth doing, and I'm psyched to be heading into a new place with unknown challenges. If we can survive Patagonia with a stove and tent, I can hopefully survive the Land of Smiles.
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