Guess where I spent the day today?

Never could I have imagined that I would spend the first of my three short days in the "trekking capital of Argentina," tiny, outdoorsy El Chalten, in the police station. But yes, that's where I was taken the moment I stepped off the bus from El Calafate at 10:30 this morning, groggy and confused and certain that whatever crazy misunderstanding that had occurred would be cleared up within minutes, so I could continue with my plan to take advantage of the sunny day and head up into the insane, jagged mountains bordering the town.

Apparently, someone had reported a theft in El Calafate this morning, the town where I had started my day, and described someone that looks like me as the thief. I have no idea how the Argentine legal system works, but it seems kind of crazy that I can be detained for five hours and have the entire contents of my luggage painstakingly combed over, because I have short blonde hair, or something. As the reality that my day would be sucked up by this surreal situation sunk in, I flipped through a series of possible emotional reactions, and settled, miraculously, on calm acceptance. I could have chosen to be indignant, humiliated, angry, or frustrated, and believe me, I tried on all these emotions briefly during the time I spent sitting in the sterile, flourescent-lit police office, watching two female officers dictate the color and brand of every single item in my backpacks. But I realized that there was little, if anything to gain from these reactions. As I said, I have no idea how the legal system works here, but they weren´t mistreating me; in fact, a couple of the five or so officers who passed their day reviewing my things made smiling small talk with me as I waited. At some point, I accepted the fact that this would be my day today, and waited passively and cooperatively to be released when they (surprise!) failed to find any of the items reported missing among my possessions.

At 2:30pm I walked out the door of the police comisaria to search for a place to stay for the night. I salvaged my sanity and what was left of the afternoon with a short hike to a beautiful waterfall, where I perched myself on a rock and spent a half hour taking deep, yogic breaths, and trying to remind myself of all there is to be grateful for.

The best thing ever.

I am such a procrastinator. I've had posts in my head for weeks, and haven't been able to sit down and write them. And then I go off and do something else, and this really can't wait, so you'll just have to bear with me for some out-of-order postings coming up (hopefully).

So I just got back from Torres del Paine National Park, in southern Chile. I left the farm two and a half weeks ago and took a 26 hour bus to El Calafate, where I am right now. I had planned on spending a few days here and in El Chalten, hiking around Glaciares National Park, where there are some ridiculous glaciers and huge mountains. I knew that it would be amazing, but in the days leading up to my departure, I just couldn't get fired up about it. Twenty-six hours seemed like a really long trip, and I was feeling a bit reluctant to unstick myself from my cozy farm home for the last time to become a tourist again.

As soon as I started my trip, though, I got into it. Travelling in Patagonia is different than travelling up North; down here, everyone is a tourist. Everything exists so that people can enjoy the spectacular natural beauty, so I didn't feel any of the anxiety or discomfort that I had felt last time I travelled. I met some Swiss girls on the trip, and spent my first full day with one of them, Corinne, visiting Perito Moreno glacier near El Calafate.

On the bus to the glacier, Corinne told me that she was planning on going to Puerto Natales, Chile, the following day, and to Torres del Paine National Park, to hike the 8-9 day "full circuit," a popular backpacking trip around the park. I had no definite plans, but had no intention of crossing the border to Chile to visit Torres del Paine. I had been there for a couple of days of hiking in 2002 while studying abroad in Valparaiso, Chile, and felt like I had checked it off my list of places to visit.

Later that day, I spent about an hour sitting on an observation deck watching the glacier. Every once in a while, a thunder-like rumble would announce the breaking off of a chunk of ice and snow into the turquoise lake water below. Mostly, though, I just took in the presence of this mammoth, frozen river of ice and snow.



At some point, a young pair of Americans, a guy and a girl, sat down next to me, and I couldn't help but overhear their conversation. At one point, the girl leaned over to the guy and whispered, "I like the other glacier better." "Me too," her companion agreed. Without thinking, I turned and asked, "Which one?" Surprised and embarrassed at my uninvited participation in their conversation, the girl told me they had just finished hiking the full circuit in Torres del Paine, and that an entire day was spent walking along an impressive river of ice called Glacier Grey. Was I planning on hiking in the park? she wanted to know.

Until that point, as I said, I hadn't been, but I suddenly realized that I had travelled near to the end of the world to be in proximity to some of the most spectacular natural scenery that exists, that it likely won't exist for much longer, and that I had absolutely no reason not to take the next two weeks to see as much of it as possible. How could I come so close to a glacial experience possibly even more magnificent than this one, and pass it up?

That afternoon, when our bus arrived back in El Calafate, I bought a ticket to Puerto Natales, Chile, for the next morning. Two days later, Corinne and I set off hiking. And the next nine days were some of the best days of my life.



We carried our tents and enough food (kind of) for ten days, and took a route recommended to us by an outfitter in town, expecting driving wind, rain, and maybe snow--all the nasty weather this park is known for. Incredibly, however, we were blessed with several days of blue sky and only a couple of brief rain storms. Every day we walked through postcard-like beauty: jagged, granite and magma spires of rock, snow-capped mountains, surreal turquoise rivers and lakes, honey wheat fields of grass and wrinkled rolling hills, scattered brilliant fall-red lenga trees among the green ones tucked into grooves in the sides of mountains, pure blue rivers of glacial ice and snow, breaking off their ancient resting places in thunderous avalanches. It was like being inside an issue of National Geographic, though that never occurred to me at the time. Instead, I found myself stopping, slack-jawed, dozens of times each day, as some new, magnificent vista revealed itself around a bend in the trail.



It's hard to put into words what this experience was like. Corinne commented yesterday that she didn't know how to respond to her mother's excited prodding for stories about the trip. It was amazing, but it's not the kind of thing you can tell in stories. For me, the most powerful experience came on the sixth day, as we walked six hours along hillside paths. The sky was clear, the wind was blowing, and we were accompanied by the oblong, turquoise Lago Paine to our right, with snow-capped peaks beyond. As I took in the landscape, the sensation of being alone in a place of such vast, pure natural beauty (for we were truly alone for much of the time, it being the end of the season), was, more than anything, a consistently spiritual experience. I couldn't help but feel, over and over again, that I was in the presence of god, or rather, that everything around me--each gnarled tree, summer-dried blade of grass, grooved granite mountainside, was filled with the divine. It was strange but also utterly clear to me, that rather than being an outsider, an intruder in this place, I too was part of it, and I understood more completely than I ever had, how every living thing is inextricably connected. It was an overwhelming realization, at once positive and frightening, but definitely unforgettable.



I brought my camera with me, of course, but didn't bring a charger, assuming, falsely, that there'd be no opportunity to recharge the battery while on the trail (a few nights were spent camping outside of refugios/hostels where this would have been possible). On the morning of Day 5, the low battery light began blinking. I spent the rest of the trip carefully preserving the remaining battery life, taking only a few photos each day. At times, it was frustrating not to be able to capture some of those incredible scenes, but it forced me to take in each view in the moment, and I tried hard to imprint in my memory those things I couldn't photograph, and choose carefully the images worthy of a bit of my camera's remaining battery life. Each night I listed in my journal, "Images to hold on to," calling forth the single fire-red lenga tree amidst a forest of green, or the small clump of yellow, slipper-like flowers by the side of the trail.

Corinne and I returned to town on Tuesday tired and sore, having walked eleven and a half hours the previous day in order to not have to get up early and hike on the final morning. We were ready to be done, splurged on a private room with a king-sized bed in the hostel, and took ourselves out to a gringo-style dinner (veggie curry and a bean burrito w/ cilantro, yoghurt, and avocado!). I think they were luxuries well-deserved, though I was lucky enough not to have suffered much more than sore hips from sleeping on the ground each night. I'd say we made out pretty well :).