Torres Del Paine

They say you can book the bus ahead, but you have to pay at the store, and they don't reserve your space on the bus until you pay...Something about this doesn't add up. But after a few months in South America, we get used to this circular logic. You try to plan ahead, but down here, you have got to let go if it becomes too much. Just run with it. It generally works out. Its good practice actually for life in the USA. So much of it should just be let go. The bus of course was full by the time we got to the store. We rented from Hertz from Victoria a friend of a friend who had migrated to El Calafate because unlike the rest of Argentina this place is booming and jobs are plentiful.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing. No lone telephone pole; no shard from a broken glass bottle reflecting in the distance. To say Patagonia is a vast desolate landscape is accurate, but too lonely. It is so vast and desolate, so immense and clean it conjures up an expanse of emotions. It is total. I remember once when i was a boy, i went camping in a cave. I closed my eyes to go to sleep and they turned the lights off. I opened my eyes. Sure, it was the darkest thing i had ever seen, but it was different than that; it was pure. There was no red spot remnant of the sun moving around, no twitching of eyelids to distract. The absoluteness of that space enveloped me with both fright and excitement. Patagonia feels similar.

We drive from El Calafate to Torres del Paine. We cross 400 kilometers of dirt road into Chile. Miho learns how to drive stick shift on the way. We see an armadillo.

The peaks of Torres Del Paine are some of the most spectacular on the planet and perhaps the most technical climbing mountains in the world. We drink wine under their shadow, looking for the Southern Cross in the night sky. It sits low on the horizon and points to a pole not so far from here. Somehow you can feel this. This connection to a larger order- the stars- makes us even more aware of our location on the globe. Its far, we are remote, like really out there. When i lived in Florida there were all these dudes who had gotten on the road and just headed south, ending up in Miami. That was one thing, but this! This is something else.