What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (14 page)

They were all a little younger than I was, and in different places in their lives, but together this crowd saved my trip. The Israeli pilots took me flying, in a tiny little plane over Cape Horn, and our heads smashed into the roof of the plane as the winds tossed it about like a toy. I was still determined to see the penguin colonies, and so the next day I corralled some of the troops to go on a boat trip out to visit them.

It was the year of
March of the Penguins
, and there was no one from anywhere in the world who had not seen the movie and become enthralled with the funny little creatures. We piled onto the boat, which pulled out into the freezing, windy harbor as the fog came in and the rain began to fall horizontally. It was too miserable to stand outside, and the fog made it impossible to see land anyway, so we all found ourselves inside the boat, drinking
cafés cortados
and watching, yes,
March of the Penguins
on the boat’s TV system. Dubbed in Spanish.

Just when we had resigned ourselves to the fact that we had flown to the bottom of the world to sail around in the rain rewatching a penguin documentary, the clouds lifted enough that three small islands came into view. And they were covered in thousands of penguins. The thing in the place, at last.

We spent some time watching the hilarious little guys waddle and roll like thousands of tiny Charlie Chaplins,
which delighted us all exactly as much as we had hoped it would, then sailed back past seal colonies through a frigid and glorious Antarctic sunset, cool silvers and golds and blues replacing the tropical oranges and reds that seemed to have no place down there.

After the boat ride, we bustled back to our cozy little hostel shivering and windblown, a couple of new Kiwis in tow, to find the lobby filled with music and the smells of food cooking.

“
Shabbat shalom!
” the Israelis called out.

It was Friday, and the Israeli boys had skipped the penguins and cooked us all a proper Shabbat dinner. We sat down to eat, and they said a quick prayer that was the first Jewish prayer many of the crowd had ever heard, and we ate Argentine steak and grilled veggies and hummus.

Nick the cute American teacher blew in through the door, smelling like rain. He had made a run for beer and ice cream, and pulled up a chair next to me. We talked about his week alone hiking through the rain and wind and tundra. He said he wasn’t sure where he was going next.

“Well, I’m heading up to El Calafate and Fitz Roy, if you want to come with,” I said, casually. “I could use a hiking buddy who actually knows how to not get lost in the Andes.”

“Hm,” he said, buttering his bread. “Maybe I’ll check into flights.”

It was also St. Patrick’s Day, which some of the crowd had never celebrated. As an almost 25 percent Irish-American mutt who used to live in Chicago, I took it upon myself to lead a St. Patrick’s expedition, and found Dublin’s
Irish Pub in Ushuaia, purportedly the world’s second-most-southern Irish pub. (The winner is the Galway, also in Ushuaia but half a block south.) I introduced many of my new buddies to their first green beers. We jigged in the pub with some French guys wearing elephant trunks, then moved on and merengued to the Manu Chao album that was constantly on that month in a tiny, ancient fishing-shack-turned-bar until the wee hours of the morning.

Years later, I’d have dinner with Elizabeth the Australian when I visited her hometown of Sydney, and she would come stay with me in Los Angeles, and Avi the sexy Israeli would deliver me from an Israeli beach to the Jordanian border on my trip to Israel. The people I met during those three days in Ushuaia all exchanged love notes for years—
“That St. Patrick’s Day was the best day of my yearlong trip … You guys were my favorite people I met in South America …”

It was the kind of travel chemistry that doesn’t happen all the time, and it all happened because I lost my passport and my plan. If I had gone on the trip I originally booked, I would have been with older, rich, married couples. It was a reminder for me that reinforced my travel rules—don’t overplan, and don’t book expensive trips if you want to meet fun, single people. The experience also illuminated another fact: regardless of how you travel, as you get deeper into your thirties you might be the only person your age out on the road at all, whether it’s in the hostels with the twentysomethings, or on the fancy cruises with the sixtysomethings. In your fourth decade, your compatriots are mostly at home, working, raising humans,
getting husbands through rehab,
living for someone besides themselves.

Suckers. That’s what I told myself.

Nick decided to come north with me to El Calafate. We said good-bye to our new hungover friends the next day, leaving them to their collective discovery of what comes out of one’s body the day after drinking a dozen green beers, and traveled north to the portal town of the famous Perito Moreno Glacier, star of the Glacier Cam. We were a week late for the big movie moment seen by no one, but just missing The Thing You Were Supposed to Do seemed perfect to me on this trip of misses.

Nick and I were a little shy about deciding to travel together, our relationship as yet unclear. When we were confronted with the question of how many rooms we wanted at the hostel in El Calafate, there was a lot of mutual bluster:

“Well, I mean, we can get a double, I guess. Cheaper than two singles,” I said “casually,” not at all worried about cost.

“Yeah, and it’d be nice to not be in a big dorm room of snoring people,” Nick agreed, “not caring either way.” “A double, yeah. And … I guess … two beds?”

“Yes, please, two beds,” I agreed, like a “lady.”

Of course the only room available had one queen bed.

“Well, if that’s the only thing available,” I said, happily.

“Yeah, if that’s all there is, sure, we can get by with one,” Nick agreed, quickly.

We went to our room to change clothes, I noticed that Nick had a smooth, muscled back and flat belly, and then we took ourselves quickly out of the room for yet another steak in town. As we sat in the
parrilla
in front of the room-size fire, where goats were sizzling, each splayed on its own crucifix, we got to know each other better. Nick didn’t love being a high school science teacher, yet didn’t know what else to do with himself. He knew a lot about mountaineering, but oddly very little about a lot of other topics, topics one would hope the teachers of our children would be knowledgeable about. But he was handsome and sweet, and, it turned out, my knight in shining armor in several ways.

I managed to leave my cash card in an ATM that night, meaning I was now at the bottom of the world with both no passport
and
no way to access cash. It was just one of those trips. Nick said he would take care of me, though, and we agreed that I would cover anything that could be covered with my one remaining credit card, and he would take care of cash needs. I couldn’t help but think about my prior magical year in Argentina, which had been absolutely hitch-free. It seemed like God was trying to tell me something, not just about overplanning, but maybe about money, too. I had tried to make this a much more opulent vacation than I ever had before, straying from my history as the girl who “didn’t need fancy hotels to have a good time.” But all of those opulent plans had blown up, and I
had ended up a girl in a hostel who had to borrow money from a near stranger.

Who, granted, was about to sleep in her bed.

Now, was there electric chemistry between me and Nick? Not especially. But, much like with my Patagonian Spanish-teacher boyfriend the year before, there was enough. And in the same way I’d needed Diego to turn a flawed travel situation into a great (unlonely) story, Nick was now on deck.

Nick and I went back to our big bed in our little room, and lay down awkwardly on top of the covers in our clothes. We chatted some more, about how he had been a little disappointed by his experience of trekking around alone—he hoped he wouldn’t get as lonely as he had. I told him about the dramatic difference between my two trips to Argentina, and about how I was feeling a little lost and banged up by this one. But I was also kind of peaceful—the message of all of the events, from Father Juan to the less-than-stellar experience with my two best friends to the lost passport and cash card, seemed to be the same one Hope was trying to send me.
You can’t control everything. Just enjoy what the world is giving you.
And that message was actually pretty relaxing.

Eventually it got quiet, and Nick and I just lay next to each other, on our backs, staring at the ceiling, waiting to see what was going to happen next. Would we roll over and go to sleep, or do something else? Slowly, strangely, Nick raised the hand closest to me into the air, his elbow still on the bed … and just left it up there, his arm at an odd right angle. I looked at his very weird first move, an
open palm, a quiet question floating above us, and then reached up and took his hand in mine.

Deal.

We did not just go to sleep.

T
he next day, holding hands easily now, Nick and I went to Perito Moreno. The sky was blue, the sun was warm, and the air was cold, blowing off the ninety-five-square-mile glacier that could hold the entire city of Buenos Aires. We took a boat along the turquoise lake, and snapped pictures of ourselves kissing in front of the two-hundred-foot-tall wall of ice that, somehow, was advancing forward six feet a day. This three-mile-wide ice mountain was moving a little bit faster than a tree sloth.

Inexplicably, there were flocks of tropically colored parrots in the trees across from the ice, and the green, red, and blue birds against the miles of glacier made us feel like we were in some kind of J. J. Abrams
Lost
universe—polar bears on tropical islands being the clue that you were in another world, or a rule-free TV show. It turns out that if you plan on seeing the glacier fall, it will happen in the middle of the night and you will miss it. But an unexpected trip to that same glacier, days after you theoretically missed the big moment, might lead to a sunny, spectacular day with a new friend, who might kiss you in front of glacial parrots while the ice falls.

After a night in our big, warm bed, Nick and I snuggled through a bus ride to El Chalten, a little mountaineering town at the end of a long, dusty road. El Chalten exists
exclusively to service the people who come to climb Mount Fitz Roy, on the border between Chile and Argentina. It’s one of the most technically challenging mountains on earth, but Nick and I just took a day hike from town up to the lake at its base, on a rare sunny day, the last day of Patagonian summer. We stood on floating pieces of ice in the lake under the Fitz Roy Glacier, and ate sandwiches in the sun. That night we found a little apartment over a tapas restaurant for about thirty dollars. The smell of baking bread wafted up from the restaurant, and we rattled the one twin bed while the ever-present Patagonian wind rattled the windows.

The next day, we rode the bus back to town, Nick kissed me good-bye, said it had been the best trip of his life, and went back to teaching teenagers in Baltimore.

Back in Buenos Aires, I retrieved my passport from the friend who had rescued it from the Internet café, and had a few last days with my Argentine posse and my bartender, Oscar. I had heard about
telos
, “love hotels” all over Buenos Aires, ranging from the very cheap to the very high end, that could be rented by the hour. It’s big business in a country where many people either live with their parents or cheat on their spouses (or both).
Telo
is a
lunfardo
word—the language of the streets of Buenos Aires.
Lunfardo
flips the syllables of normal Spanish words, and was originally a sort of pig latin for criminals, to keep the cops
from following their conversations. So an upstanding
hotel
(silent
h
in Spanish) becomes a seedier
telo
in
lunfardo.

I asked Oscar to take me to one, and he promptly pulled out what was basically a
telo
frequent flyer card attached to a wallet-size list of all of the
telos
broken down by neighborhood. It turned out they were everywhere, on every block. I just had never noticed them because they look like parking garages, for reasons that will become clear.

We drove to one, pulled up to a gate, and stopped the car at what looked like the order window at a McDonald’s. But the items on the menu all had to do with types of rooms and hours required—
3 hours of love, only 60 pesos!!!
You could also add on extras like sex toys, video cameras, and drink and food packages. We selected a simple three-hour food-and-vibratorless package, then drove in and up a level, and parked directly in front of the door to our room, which is how
telos
always work. There are never any lobbies, in order to eliminate the possibility of an awkward run-in. Oscar and I walked into our blackwalled, mirrored-ceilinged room, and thoroughly enjoyed our bed with a radio built into the headboard. “Your Body Is a Wonderland” was playing, unfortunately, but other than that, it was all I hoped it would be, complete with free toothbrushes and condoms, and a polite phone call five minutes before our time was up.

O
n my last night in the city, I went out dancing with my friends, and Father Juan came by to say good-bye. I had sent him an update or two over the course of my trip,
trying to be “friends,” and he had been cordial in return. He came to the party alone, and it was awkward, Juan standing nearby quietly, neither engaging with anyone nor leaving, until I finally just thanked him for coming, hoping he would just go. He got it and left, again apologetically. I kicked myself for sullying our experience together the year before by coming back again. I had replaced the endless ellipses in our relationship with a period. No more possibility, just a final chapter. I thought I’d never see him again.