After the little bike ride of three months I had only made it through Colombia and Ecuador. There is a two month window to navigate the trails of Patagonia in Southern Chile and Argentina when the paths are clear of snow and warm. Since I am a fair weather traveler and have no desire to freeze my ass off I had to take the marathon bus ride from Ecuador all the way to Buenos Aires. It is half the price and besides, airplanes are cheating since it is like stepping into a carpeted time machine- enter a door, wait a few hours, out a door and you are there. You do not feel as if you traveled. Well, after 113 hours on the bus, wow, did I feel like I had traveled- I had traveled all the way to the very edge of my nerve endings and patience.
Luckily, or so I thought at the time, I met a Scandinavian girl, lets call her Scandi, that was idiotic enough like myself to attempt this trip to see some friends for the holidays. Ok, cool. Companionship on will be nice and we can endure the pain together in graceful sarcastic self'-depreciating conversations the whole way there. Didn´t happen.
We were equally enthralled that the other was going, but there was no fiber of my being that thought there would be anything more happening than being travel companions. She is sweeter than sweet, so much so that she has an overenthusiastic laugh born out of an innate social awkwardness and uncomfotableness with herself that she uses like a period at the end of each sentence...but that includes sentences she says and I say or anyone else says. I hardly noticed at the time since we met over drinks in a loud cafe in Cuzco that she had a slight stutter in English, but being 30 years old it seemed as though she had worked on it to a point where she had it under control. This laugh however was not in control and the more boisterious it became the faker it felt.
Day 1 and 2: 7 hour bus ride from Cuzco, Ecuador to Guayaquil, Ecuador and then a new 26 hour bus to Lima, Peru.
Ok, I am feeling good during the first 34 hours. Scandi has been learning Spanish off and on for the last 10 years and she only wants to speak in Spanish for the entire journey. Ok, fair enough. I am very patient and fill in all the missing vocabulary as she tells these long winded stories, well, not stories since ¨story¨ would imply there would be some sort of a point, but more descriptions of things, anything, that had happened in her life. The added bonus for me is that her stuttering is in full bloom in Spanish because it is her 6th language and it naturally takes more effort for her. That´s a good philosophical question actually- Would you trade the ability to speak 6 languages for a stutter? Hmmm, me either.
Caption, ¨This is the desolate martian landscape somewhere either in Peru or Chile. I could have cared less where I was. If only there was a camera for smells. Scratch and sniff pictures perhaps.¨
Day 3 and 4 and 5: We take a night to sleep in a cheesy Chinese hotel next to the bus station in Lima, Peru. Framed posters line the hallways of groups of girls in bikinis painting a wall sexually intertwined in a ladder with paint smeared bottoms pointing at you called ¨California Girls¨, another one of rock climbers nearly nude but covered in a climbing ropes and harnesses again with butts out calling you named¨Hard Climbing¨. There were more gems too. They made me smile each time I went up and down the stairs though.
We needed to rest before the 60 hour bus to Santiago, Chile.
Caption, ¨One of the two pictures I took in the week of traveling. Lets say I was un-inspired.¨
This bus proved to be the breaking point. Scandi suggested word games, in Spanish of course, to pass the time on the bus. After she took 10 painfully slow Spanish stuttering minutes to explain the rules my brain shut down. She finished the rules, or so I imagine because she stopped talking because I could not follow her train of thought with the 20 second gaps between some of the words. It requires such a huge amount of attention and patience to follow her stories and that reserve was used up on the first 37 hours of the bus ride. Within these 37 hours I honed in on the fact that the trouble words always started with the letter ¨b¨ or ¨d¨ and I knew when one was coming up and would be silently impressed when she found a work around to avoid a stuttering stumbling block word. I simply said, ¨Ok,¨ when she finished the rules and I did not say anything. In fact, I did not say anything for the next 48 hours. If I were to say anything at all it would inspire a heartly laugh that at this point sent electric shocks of wide-eyed exasperation from my tingling ass up my now scoliosis plauged spine. I was spent and needed alone ´me´ time to recharge. She got the hint after 24 hours and even she stopped talking and I could enjoy sweet sweet silence in this bus from fuqing hell. Well, not quite sweet sweet silence. An Ecuadorian Neanderthal with a crooked 5 toothed smile in the front of the bus insisted on putting her favorite music on at all hours of the morning and afternoon and night with no volume control. Volume set to FULL with a speaker, very luckily, positioned right above my head. I think they use this technique to torture POW´s in war camps to get them to snap and tell them military secrets. I was ready to snap. Music of this ear ringing volume seemed important in all of Latin America to preent any thought whatsoever. I continued my frothing silence.
I think all of my 5 senses were abused in some way shape or form on this trip. We were positioned right next to the toilet on this second class bus, and what a treat that was! MMMmmm, how can I describe this ¨flavor¨, this joyful dancing of odors on my palette for 60 hours so you can fully understand? Most scents your body gets accustomed to and they are not as strong after the initial shock, but no, each breath was like being hit right in the facial region with a 2x4 covered in rusty nails. Utterly shocking. Just imagine sitting inside of a shaking Porta-Potty used in those outdoor festivals, sloshingly filled to the brim, for 60 hours and you will start to understand my situation.
The odor/stutter/music combo along with my spine piercing my left kidney from trying to sit and sleep was making me really hate the bus, the Scandi girl, and eventually myself. No one was safe from my bitter wrath of mental insults in my fragile mental state.
I realize that my annoyance with Scandi´s stuttering has nothing to do with her and everything to do with me. My personal theory is anytime someone is getting on your nerves it is because something that is bothering you and not the external stimuli. Most of the time the personality traits you most hate about yourself annoys you when you see them exhibited in other people. So the more annoyed I was at Scandi, the more I knew I was actually annoyed with myself, for whatever reason, and that made me even more annoyed cause it was my fault and I ended up being even more annoyed with Scandi. Another example of this just happened today in Buenos Aires. I met two American Peace Core volunteers just ¨released from service¨ in their early to mid twenties. Their resume building experience rubs me the wrong way along with their need to save the world with an egotistical slant. They are better people than me, this is clear, but for some reason I cannot stand them. My only conclusion is the American attributes I see in them and detest in myself. Well, it turns out I met one of there co-volunteers in the Buenos Aires bus station. He flagged me down because he saw my bike loaded with bags and saw it as a ´sign´ that he had to talk to me because he was leaving on his own biking adventure, of course, to raise 100,000 dollars to save a Paraguayan rain forest (I am not making this shit up). So the natural question he presents me is what am I riding for? ¨Nothing. Just felt like going on a bike ride,¨ I innocently confess.
¨Ya, that´s great.¨ was his disappointed reply. ¨And why are you taking the bus?¨
¨Oh, I am no purist. I took the bus to bike in Patagonia in the summer. I figured sponsorships would hold me back from cheating,¨ was my only half-joking reply.
The American half of him was disappointed from my lack of vision and purity of the mission and my American half was detesting his idealistic eager eyes ready to save the world. ¨Here is my business card (business cards?! for biking) printed on 100% recyclable paper with vegetable based ink. Make sure you tell every one you meet about it,¨ was his over enthusiastic good bye.
Day 6 and 7: Once we got to Santiago, Chile we had to take another night to sleep horizontal. I started to think about experiments on mice. If you took these poor creatures and put them in a cardboard box continuously shaking and blasting loud bad Latin music for 6 days and then took them out of the box and analyzed their behavior I am sure you would find they were an unhappy lot compared to the ´control´ group. They would be frazzled and probably eating their neighbors ears off or something along those lines, but since we are civilized humans we can´t eat off each others ears so we deal with it in our own ways. I shut down into a silent coma with red dry open eyes staring out the window thinking of better days and the stutterer stutters approximately 50x worse than normal.
Only 20 hours on the Santiago to Buenos Aires, Argentina leg. That is nothing. HAha, I can do anything after the Porta-Potty assault on the senses journey. Here is a journal entry so you have an idea of my mental state at that moment on the last 20 hours:
¨Will you allow me the pleasure to cry? To ride my dream in the skies with pterodactyls showing teeth with rabid joy thundering down smoking mountains of Martian sunlight. A bear paw tickles my ribs as I laugh uncontrollably sitting on the handlebars of a blind man´s bike down a spiral staircase of butterfly cocoons. I wish I could transport myself to give everyone I know a hug of blue-eyed fearless happiness. The head tingling of life is all rushing up now, like a shaken bottle of champagne opened at altitude. Bubbles of foamy wide mouth open delight are streaming showers of ice, cocaine and rainbows. Love jumped up from the corner and inflated itself to a big red elephant balloon squeezing me in warm squeaky giggles. Warm squeaky giggles of pissing sprinkles in the air and eyes and silver lined mouths of reborn extinct genius unicorns. Blond bats sing honey harmonies filled with basement thoughts and the scent of dead flowers in already empty holiday room.¨
Who needs acid when you have 113 hour bus rides? It is amazing how environment, comfort really, can affect your mood. The whole range from inspiration or desperation and depression. Ah, travel is my drug of choice at the moment. People often ask, why the bus ride, why not just fly? Experience is my answer, even above being a cheap bastard. Same answer for the bike ride. Experience.
I understand why people work and have nice cozy houses and big safe cars, but for me I want these damn experiences. At the moment, and yes it can change, I do not want that Saran Wrap security to keep safely away from living. I welcome the aging and the wrinkles that come from experience. Shit, I earned them. I question a long life lived with a youthful face on elders. To all the professional non-smokers (as Bill Hicks says, non-smokers die everyday) that slide through life on transparent plastic purchased entertainment and well planned investments, I have decided to invest in myself.
Opportunity cost you say? Yes, I 100% agree. You have lost lots of opportunity. No time to waste. Start wasting on yourself until you have the weight of family and responsibility on your head and the party is over, or turn gay and keep that party going forever. People planning for events of a future that does not exist- of future fathers that have never lived outside a classroom or a cubicle- what sort of parent are you going to be? Train your kid to become one of those that sits collecting interest of the sweat of others compounding quarterly. Can I be a liver? One of those that truly lives. Live like you will die tomorrow and plan like you will live forever...impossible, maybe? We are the people we wanted to know and we are the places we wanted to go.
Enough of this idealistic egoistic American rant from just another angle...
I made it to Bu-bu-bu-buenos Aires.
