The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (24 page)

That night I make friends with two German girls who are in Buenos Aires to learn Spanish. After a cheese-and-crackers dinner, we sit at the kitchen table, notebooks, textbooks, and in my case, heavily illustrated children's books in Spanish spread out like it is the night before finals. We practice our new language—they have a dialogue in which one girl pretends she is the waiter and the other is a customer while I helpfully interject Rain Man non sequiturs such as “I like brown cats!” or “I don't like brown cats!” Like all beginning language students, I am reduced to simplistic
phrases. I like. I dislike. I want. I don't want. Nuance is elusive. Eventually, I leave the faux meal, announcing my departure with “I want no more food. It is the night.” They smile encouragingly while I walk the mere two steps into my dorm room. Inside, the walls are so thin I can still hear their every word.

It would be nice to take a shower, although I don't have any fresh clothes or a towel. By now I have heard about my rejected backpack, so I'm stuck in sticky jeans and a black tank top for another twelve hours, at least. But I did splurge on a toothbrush and toothpaste with my airline inheritance, so at least I can remove the day's grime from my teeth.

A tall, broad-shouldered girl unpacking on the bed across from mine turns around to face me. “Hey, I'm Samantha,” she says. “Do you have any books you want to trade?”

She's got something waterlogged and true-crime-looking and a copy of
The House of the Spirits.
I pass on the former but trade her my copy of Nick Hornby's
How to Be Good
for the Allende. I don't yet know Allende is an epidemic among female backpackers in South America—every third girl is carrying
The House of the Spirits,
and it takes me four days of peddling to get something new from a Canadian girl who just arrived in Argentina and doesn't know any better. Since backpacking requires carrying all your possessions, there is not enough room for more than one or two books. Extra cash is lacking for luxuries like new novels, so trading is a vital means of reading survival. And because transportation in South America is often a days-long affair, you learn to take into account not only content but how long a given text can last you. I write my name and location in each book before I trade it away, hoping these pieces of myself will be carried to the remotest corners of the earth.

Samantha is a little older, in her late twenties. She's recently had what I've begun to think of as a “this can't really be my life” epiphany—a variation of a common enough travel storyline. Samantha lives in Seattle. Up until a few months ago, she worked
for Amazon.com. One morning, for no apparent reason, she awoke feeling bored and useless. The state persisted for several days until she recognized it was not a mere phase but, quite possibly, a permanent condition, so she sold her comfortable condo, put her possessions in storage, packed her blue backpack, and flew to Sucre, Bolivia. She planned to immerse herself in intensive Spanish classes for one week before beginning five months of travel in South America. On her first day of class, she strolled down the tree-lined lane where she was staying with a Bolivian family to the small school in town and sat down in front of another student, Jap—pronounced “yap,” like a dog's bark. At this point, Samantha takes out her digital camera and shows me his photo. Jap is several giant leaps above attractive. He is the Dutch version of Jude Law, with those same chiseled cheekbones and wavy dirty-blond hair. I try not to exhibit surprise, which is difficult to hide post–jaw drop, because Samantha is rather plain, though lovely and smart and funny. One week with Jap turns into five, and Samantha sees more of Sucre, Bolivia, than any person should be subjected to in a lifetime. They finally part ways to continue their own travels, Samantha through Ecuador and Peru and now to Buenos Aires, while he heads off to other parts of Bolivia. She is in Argentina until next month, when she and Jude Law plan to reunite in Chile. “This is the real thing,” she says.

“That's wonderful,” I coo.

Normally, I would be skeptical of this type of definitive pronouncement, having seen many relationships fail with far less to overcome than being from different countries, but everything seems so possible and optimistic when you're traveling that I believe in them immediately. I form a neat mental picture of their future, rocking on a porch swing in the Netherlands, where they occupy a tidy two-bedroom house surrounded by yellow tulips.

The next morning Samantha and I meet two other girls staying in the room. Ivana is also in Buenos Aires by herself. She is an adorable, small blond Slovakian girl with a husky accent who
attends Boston University. She says “fuck” every third word and is traveling with a suitcase that nearly rivals Big Red. It is secured with a heavy silver padlock. “My fucking camera got fucking stolen in Chile,” she explains. “All my pictures—fucking gone.”

Ivana recently quit her job and decided to take a break from school to travel, spurred on by her own traveler epiphany, the one I call a “relationship” epiphany. She recently found out her Brazilian boyfriend of three years was cheating on her for, oh, around the past three years.

Jenny, a Czech girl, rounds out our group of temporary best friends. She's here because of an “epiphany of purpose.” She has decided that what she desires more than anything is to own a vineyard in Argentina. She can't do it yet. You need money first and foremost. But this trip gets her one step closer. Her feet are on Argentine soil. In a week she will walk into a vineyard in Mendoza, take off her sandals, and squish grapes beneath her toes.

We have all left something behind—Samantha her cubicle, Jenny her go-nowhere bartending job, Ivana her adulterous boyfriend, and me, the expected version of my future, the future I do not want but do not know how to dismiss, like a dinner guest who won't get the hint that the wine has run out and it's really time to go. And the accompanying mystery: What is it that I
do
want for myself?

Friendships in hostels are instantaneous and intense, jumping over several intermediary steps straight to comfortable intimacy, as happens when you live with someone—when you sleep close enough to hear him or her breathing. The four of us form a happy clique and roam Buenos Aires as if we've known one another forever. We take long meals together in cheap restaurants or join the makeshift
asados
the hostel hosts on the rooftop—barbecues where row after row of supple grilled meats are slid onto our plates.

It is on the roof that I learn the ritual of
maté,
a national drink
that tastes similar to green tea. One gourdful passes around a circle of friends, and if you accept the
maté,
you must drink the entire cup yourself. Then you pass it back to the host, who refills the gourd and passes it to the next person. If you say
“Nada más”
when the gourd reaches you again, you are saying you are entirely finished with the
maté,
and you'll be passed over the next time around.

Late at night on that roof, we reveal intimate details of our current lives. Samantha talks about the guy she was afraid to leave behind because he might meet someone else, and now she is afraid to return because she has. Jenny fears she'll never quit her job. Ivana worries she'll be alone forever. I say that I am scared to go home and face my life. Our confessions wind up toward the night sky like cigarette smoke, a cloud of revelations mixing together above our heads. We are all far from home and think (know?) we will never see one another again after we leave Buenos Aires. Our secrets have never been so safe.

My romanticized image of Buenos Aires as a place where residents tango in the streets, red roses between their teeth, is not terribly off base due to the lucky timing of my arrival with the annual tango festival. Locals and professionals dance for audiences in the plaza during the day and for themselves in the parks at night, cloaked in darkness and so close it's difficult to distinguish which arms and legs belong to which body.

One night we attend a performance at the famous Teatro Colón, the city's magnificent opera house. As with so many of the buildings in Buenos Aires, certain sections are in desperate need of repair, but inside, the main theater is magnificent. It holds some three thousand people in swirling layers delineated by tiny chandeliers every few seats. The king chandelier dangles like icicles from the domed, frescoed ceiling.

Buenos Aires is a city of protests; each day seems to bring another
rally of bodies, many focused on the high unemployment and the financial crises. People here harbor a great deal of anger toward the banks that closed after the crash, leaving many without access to their life savings. They were given tickets and told they could cash them in eventually, with no word on exactly when that would be. Meanwhile, the wealthier customers were alerted of impending trouble and retrieved their funds before the meltdown. The Argentineans' fury is illustrated by the graffiti scrawled all over the boarded-up financial institutions and when they take to the streets.

My first encounter with a protest occurs on my second night in the city, when I wander into what I naïvely assume is some sort of parade or festival. People drum pots and pans while sidewalk vendors sell cheap diced meat. It is only when I am spat out on the other side of the masses that a police officer informs me what I have just skipped blithely through. If I saw these rallies on the news back home, they would make me fear Buenos Aires. Yet here, in its midst, I don't feel scared. Mainly, I want to understand what it all means.

On Sunday the girls and I drift through the outdoor artisans' markets that snake around a park in a fashionable neighborhood called Recoleta. They're filled with handmade jewelry and clothing. I buy a pair of impractical white linen pants that tie like an apron behind my waist and then again at my belly button. Every time a breeze blows, I have to untangle them from around my ankles. We visit the adjacent cemetery filled with massive marble mausoleums, where Evita's grave is stuffed with notes and flowers and where stray skinny cats dart around the cavernous corners. I spend one whole day alternating solely between book- and shoe stores, both of which are plentiful in Argentina. I scrutinize the simplest texts with my handy dictionary, then reward myself by trying on cheap, beautiful high heels. Another day I wander from one tango demonstration to another, stopping in all the parks and plazas in between. I visit La Casa Rosada, the striking pink
structure where Evita famously addressed the Argentines and where, much to the dismay of many residents, Madonna embodied her in the 1990s film version. La Casa Rosada sits on the eastern edge of the Plaza de Mayo, where a women's group called the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo gather every week to acknowledge their missing sons and daughters abducted during the Dirty War of the late 1970s and 1980s and to pressure the government for answers. Many of the missing were tortured and killed; many are still unaccounted for. The women march counterclockwise in a symbolic gesture of turning back time.

Since Carly and I parted before my three-week trip up Australia's east coast, she has been off having her own adventures. She bought an around-the-world ticket for $2,500 Australian because it was cheaper than going straight to South America and because, really, why not? The tickets stipulate you move in one direction—no backtracking—so she has gone from Sydney to Bangkok to London to Stockholm to Copenhagen then to Rio, where we were supposed to meet.

She immediately regretted her decision to spend a few weeks in Scandinavia. It was the middle of February and blistering cold, and her backpack was full of light South America summer gear. In Copenhagen, she stayed in a massive hostel—a converted factory—with beds for two hundred, though only around ten people were there at the time, all of them seasonal workers. Carly was the sole tourist. On the third day, a film crew came looking for backpackers for a documentary, and they filmed Carly walking around the deserted, frozen city. She was convinced the name of the program translated to something like “People Who Are Stupid Enough to Visit Copenhagen in February, and What the Fuck Do They Do All Day?”

Rio is the first place Carly ever backpacked, half a year before we met in Galway. When she arrived at her hostel back then, the
other guests were understandably on edge because the previous afternoon four armed men charged in and robbed everyone. Though it's hard for me to imagine, Carly was nervous those first few days in Rio. She was nineteen, and it was her first trip alone. The hostel was in a bad area (obviously), and the local men aggressively leered at her on the streets. After a day she departed for the countryside to stay with Brazilian friends she had met in Australia. And that was where, outside congested, frenetic Rio, she fell in love with Brazil.

When I don't show up, Carly is stuck in Rio alone again, in another shady hostel. Like the last time, she quickly shoves off to find her old mates. She also meets up with an acquaintance from an earlier trip who makes the mistake of declaring his undying love for her, prompting her to drop him immediately. “He was one of those guys who gets all scared to go off on his own. I swear, guys are the worst for that,” she tells me later.

Carly is a magnet for clingy men. Every few months she acquires a story about some dude she had to ditch like a bandit in the middle of the night. Once an American guy she thought she'd successfully unloaded glimpsed her smoking on her hostel balcony in a city she claimed she'd departed several days earlier. “I'll be right down!” she shouted, feigning excitement at their unexpected reunion. “Wait there.”

Then she hastily stuffed all her gear in her backpack, paid her hostel bill, and sneaked out a back door and down an alley while he waited for who knows how long below her empty room.

While we're apart, Carly spends some time in the Pantanal—the Brazilian wetlands—piranha fishing and horseback riding. She meets two German guys around our age and takes a train with them to Santa Cruz. There she develops a bronchial infection that lasts several days, forcing her to bed rest. The concerned Germans deliver food and medicine and diligently look after her. The one tourist sight she manages in Santa Cruz is a glimpse of
the renowned sloth family that lives in the main plaza, and there is very little Carly hates more than being out of commission in a brand-new city.