Patagonia

I don´t need to tell you how gorgeous Patagonia was, because I´m sending pictures. I really, really had a blast. Patagonia is about 20 hours south driving of where I am in Mendoza. Another 5 or 10 hours and we would have been at the glaciers at the tip of South America. I REALLY wanted to go see the glaciers, but those are for another trip, I think. We went hiking almost every day, and everybody stayed in the same building with 2 or 3 people per room. We all shared walls and the walls were REALLY thin, so there was a lot of ... bonding going on. You could hear toilets flushing two rooms down, not to mention everybody´s alarm clock and conversation.

The view from my bedroom window was spectacular-- I could see the lake and the snow-capped Andes. A few of the nights, the ground frosted over and in the morning everything was white and still. I was doing classwork too, because my professor came with us, but it was only for an hour or two a day, and the rest of the time I was hiking or horseback riding, or in town ... or at a club dancing. My whole body aches from hiking mountains, playing volleyball and dancing until 4:30 am in smoke-filled clubs. I slept the whole drive back and barely made it two hours awake at home in Mendoza before I fell into another 3 hour siesta. All of my clothes are wet and smell like me, mountain, and cigarette.

On one hike, we went to (basically) the border of Chile to the "Selva Fría" or "Cold Rainforest". There were lories (like those colorful birds they have at the San Diego Zoo with the exibit where you can go in with cup of nectar), and bright red and yellow mushrooms in between the ferns. Not to mention funky red waxy fungi growing from the trees, bright purple hanging flowers, and cows. There are cows everywhere here. Between the constant sprinkle of rain, hiking into the hollows behind waterfalls, and the waist-deep rivers I crossed clinging to a rope, I got completely drenched.

Well, we were so close to Chile on that hike that we had to go through customs. On the way there, nobody had to get out of the bus, but on the way back, everybody had to get off and present their faces with their passports. Well, I had been so drenched getting back on the bus, I had decided that I wasn´t going to sit for two hours in soaked jeans ... so I took them off and covered my legs (and crotch) with my ski jacket ... so you can imagine my face when they stopped the bus 20 minutes later and told us all that we had to get off and go into the customs building. My jeans were in a muddy dripping pile at my feet. And I was naked except for underwear from the waist down. Imagine me, with two tiny rag-towels (borrowed from friends) clutched together around my bum and front, standing in the Argentina customs line soaked and barefoot with my passport between my teeth (because I needed two hands to hold the little towels up). You should have seen their faces. They´ll think twice before they kick me off the bus again.

Love,
Me

PS: The upside is that I got my passport stamped again, so my tourist visa has been re-extended and I have another whole 90 days in Argentina. Yes!