It’s over. There is no way I am going to be able to sum up what this whole trip meant to me while I’m sitting here on the plane from Buenos Aires to Miami, especially after going to bed at 6:30 this morning and checking out of my hostel at 10:00 a.m. (what’s a last night in Buenos Aires without a discoteca, right?). I’m afraid there is also no way that my laptop battery is going to last long enough for me to write the usual running narrative of the last six weeks, so I’m going to go quick and dirty with a (gasp) bullet-pointed list of the best stuff. Here are the highlights:
- Mendoza: I wound up liking the city of Mendoza itself more than the wine tour that everyone seems to go there to do. The small, wine-drenched valley that Hope and I toured in Hungary was much more accessible than the eleven kilometer stretch of highway that one has to ride down (while huge trucks go careening by you) on the famous wine tasting tours at the vineyards around Maipú (just outside Mendoza). The wine was good and the drunk cycling was an adventure, but the day I spent strolling through Mendoza’s massive public park was decidedly more enjoyable.
- Rappelling: I took a day tour from Mendoza that involved a two hour hike, followed by three separate rappels (the first was around twenty feet, the second around thirty, and the third was over one hundred and fifty vertical feet), followed by a two hour soak in the local hot springs. The whole day was X-tremely awesome. Check out the pictures!
- Buenos Aires 2.0: It turns out that when it’s not cold and rainy, a city can get a lot more charming. My second pass through BA was brief but the sun was out, the flowers were blooming and…well I’ll just say it: the women were wearing a lot less, and smiling a lot more. That is one attractive city. I only stayed for twenty-four hours the second time around, and still didn’t have time to really fall for her, but she definitely started to grow on me.
- Cusco, Peru: The jumping-off point for treks to Machu Picchu was way cooler than I expected it to be. As it was formerly the capital of the Inca empire, the Spaniards felt a particular need to fill Cusco, which sits at around 10,000 feet above sea level and is surrounded by mountains that reach even higher, with more than it’s fair share of gorgeous, colonial-era churches. It was a colorful, energetic and beautiful place to explore; despite the constant harassment I got from anybody selling anything from horse treks to back massages. The food was good and spicy as well, something that I had really missed since Southeast Asia.
- “Salkantay” Trek to Machu Picchu with Val: Val Khislavsky, a good friend from my semester abroad in Italy, made a last-minute decision to take a break from her new job and hike to Machu Picchu with me. I’m so glad she came. The five-day trek (which is the cheaper and slightly more intense version of the “official” Inca trail) was definitely the hardest I have ever done (our top elevation was over 15,000 feet), and the weather wasn’t exactly copasetic (cold rain was virtually constant) but Val’s company took the edge off of the hard parts; and sharing the absolutely gorgeous views along the trail as well as the experience of actually seeing the Inca city that the conquistadors never found with a good friend made the trip seem that much more special.
- Valparaíso, Chile: My decision to go to Chile was based entirely on the fact that Mike Oxton, a friend of mine from Bowdoin, had just finished his six month English teaching program there, and was planning on traveling for two weeks that happened to start just as my time in Peru ended. Although we met up in Santiago, Valparaíso was our first real destination. Aside from visiting one of Pablo Neruda’s old houses (which is now a museum), Ox, Rachel (one of his friends from the program) and I did little more than wander around the colorful coastal city, spend some time at a nearby beach, and eat lots of delicious seafood…and that was all we needed to do. Valparaíso just gives off a great vibe, what can I say? Maybe my pictures explain it better than I can, but it definitely makes the highlight list.
- Bundor Brewery in Valdivia, Chile: Valdivia, which lies around twelve hours to the south of Santiago, sits on a spit of land right where two rivers empty into a series of coastal inlets. It’s a small town, but the seafood is excellent, it has a lively university crowd and also has something that has been very hard to come by on my trip: good beer. Spearheaded by the mass-marketed products of the long-established Kuntsmann brewery, Valdivia has a rich brewing tradition that stretches back to the early 19th century. Although the fat cats at Kuntsmann wouldn’t let Ox and I see their factory, we did manage to talk our way into the bowels (or liver?) of another operation. You see, Ox is actually a casual home-brewer himself, and I just so happen do enjoy drinking good beer as well as learning about how it’s made, so when we realized that the address on the back of one of the beers we sampled was walking distance from our hostel, we hatched a plan. We headed to the “brewery” (basically a big shack behind a local brew-pub), knocked on the door and introduced ourselves to the owner (in the style of George Costanza and Kramer playing Art Vandelay and H.E. Pennypacker) as “two young entrepreneurs from Boston who were interested in starting our own brewery, and could we please take a look at your operation?” We wound up with an appointment the next day for a personal tour of the entire factory (which consisted of two store-rooms and a third room with three large tanks that had formerly been used in cheese-making), conducted by one of the founders of the company himself. He turned out to be a great guy who was very eager to share his micro-brewing experience with us, and give us advice for our future (and completely fictional) enterprise. Although we felt a little bad about stretching the truth, it really was awesome to see a small, artesian company that (in my humble opinion) is poised to blossom into a legitimately successful enterprise; and the two free beers weren’t half-bad either.
- Perito Moreno Glacier near El Calafate, Argentina: Bariloche was absolutely beautiful, and seeing the Southern Wright Whales in Puerto Madryn was pretty sweet as well, but the true highlight of my second run through Argentina (this time the Southern half), was the thirty kilometer by five kilometer, hundred foot-tall, two hundred foot-deep, constantly moving (at up to two meters a day) chunk of ice that is the Perito Moreno glacier. The thing was just stunning to look at.. You can actually see enormous blocks of ice falling into the lake as the glacier slowly creeps forward into the water, and I took a tour that involved actually strapping on crampons and walking around on it for an hour or so, followed by a glass of whiskey served over freshly hacked-out glacial ice. Although I rushed through Bariloche and Puerto Madryn, putting in about 32 bus hours inside of four days in order to see Perito Moreno, I have no regrets. It was awesome.
- My Last Night in BA: After spending four days wandering around the city on my third and final visit, I finally had my truly fantastic night out in Buenos Aires. On Saturday night, determined to celebrate the end of my trip, I convinced a group of Chileans, three Brits and a Danish guy that I had met at my hostel to go out in Palermo, a neighborhood of BA that I had only wandered in the early evening but seemed like a fun place to “hit the town.” We started with a midnight dinner at what turned out to be a pretty crappy and overpriced restaurant right on the Plaza Palermo Viejo, but soon found our way to an absolutely packed discoteca, where we literally danced for four straight hours. The music ranged from House of Pain to Rick Astley, the group I was with was a ton of fun, and the sun was coming up when we finally left the place to find the streets still chalk-full of Argentinean party machines. My stroll through San Telmo’s colorful Sunday market later that day finished the job: I now really do think that Buenos Aires would be a sweet city to live in (for a short time anyway, don’t get too nervous, Mom).
So there it is. A lot happened that’s not on that list, but I think I’ll be seeing most of the people that have been following this blog inside the next week, so I’ll be able to fill in the rest face-to-face. Right now I feel pretty much how I expected to feel: I’m sad to see such an amazing trip end, but incredibly grateful that I had the opportunity to take it, as well as the support I’ve gotten from my friends and family, from the first time I brought up the idea to my last Skype conversation with Mom. I’m really anxious about what my next step is going to be, but wicked excited to see everyone back in Boston. Like I said, I’ll need some time to get a good perspective on the trip as a whole, but when I do I’ll try to put it into words here. Until then, I think I’ll end the post with some facts about this crazy trip that I put together when I was really bored in some airport somewhere. Enjoy.
Sam’s Trip: Fun Facts
Total time away from Boston: 9 months, 1 day
Total countries visited: 21
Number of flights: 31
Total hours flying: 105 (4 days, 9 hours)
Total hours in buses, dolmuses, louages etc.: 290 (12 days, 2 hours)
Farthest North: Helsinki, Finland (~lat 60º 11’)
Farthest South: Río Gallegos, Argentina (~lat 51º 30’)
Total distance traveled (roughly measured w/ Google Earth): 52,500 miles
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