I Survived: 24-Hour Bus Edition
After four days and 100km of hiking in El Chaltén, I put my body through a different type of endurance quest: a 24-hour-bus ride to Bariloche, Argentina.
My ride followed the same pattern of most hero’s journeys: call to adventure (to swim in the beautiful seven lakes of Bariloche, to hike its hills, to eat its world-famous chocolate), crossing a threshold (finally leaving El Chaltén after an unexplained 45-minute delay), a path through challenges and temptations (vomit and broken air conditioning / eating cookies for 3 meals straight), an abyss (when the 24 hours had passed and we were still 3 hours from our final destination), and atonement (begging my hostel to let me in even though I arrived an hour after closing).
Before resigning myself to a full cycle of the sun bumping along Argentina’s Ruta 40, I spend a day doing all my favorite things, as to store up joy and fulfillment to deploy against claustrophobia and motion sickness. I went for a solo hike, I reread Tamora Pierce’s Immortals series (a childhood favorite) from the top of a mountain, I called out someone for being racist (an Englishwoman I met who asked a man of mixed descent if we could play “guess what race you are” — “no, but where are you really from, where are your parents from?”). I ate vegetables (admittedly, the Patagonian version, which was semi-wilted lettuce with a sweet honey dressing; it tasted more like you’d let Easter candy melt all over the fake grass than it did a salad), I took a long shower, I started a list of everything I hate about Americans (I’ll share later).
Then, at 9 p.m., 50 minutes before my bus’s scheduled departure, I strapped on my backpacks—grimacing as the weight dig into the sunburn gracing my shoulders, uneven sunscreen application being one of the few negative consequences of hiking alone—and walked to the bus station in the fading sunset.
This being Argentina, my bus didn’t even arrive at the station til 10:05; we finally pulled out of the station around 10:30 p.m.
Maybe there’s some poetry in the fact that I spent Valentine’s Day evening on a bus with three dozen strangers, ensconced in the massive blue-and-gold armchair (which wouldn’t be out of place on Miss Frizzle’s Magic School Bus) of my cama ejecutivo status. The whole experience was a little comical and oversized, not unlike the Hallmark holiday itself. But I almost forgot that it was even a holiday at all—I certainly forgot yesterday was Fat Tuesday (possibly a huge mishap, not making the most of being in South America for Carnival by whipping beads through the streets of Rio, but I picked uninterrupted time in Patagonia instead and I’m happy with that decision). The days kind of blend together here, unmarked by work or even pedestrian thoughts of museum opening hours or which nights are best for clubbing—all we have to worry about are the hills and lakes and the mountains and whether the weather will allow us to enjoy them.
It’s one of the proximate diagnoses of why I haven’t been doing my daily hour of writing here, I think. Contrary to my original assumption that it’d be super easy to carve out time to write or check in with friends or practice Spanish when I’m in small towns with nothing on my agenda but gawking at landscapes, the lack of structure here has made it so easy to focus on nothing at all aside from which hike I’ll do that day, then subsequently, how to assuage my resulting sore feet and strong hunger. It’s a simple life—I get up at 8 a.m., pack a lunch, hike all day, and then make dinner, maybe adding a shared beer with new hostel friends before crawling into bed by 11 p.m.—but an unproductive one; I did so much more towards my personal goals when I was at Tomás’s and had to create some structure if I was to get anything done.
I’m excited for another few days of Patagonian wonder, and then a few days of getting up close and personal with Argentinian wine, but I’ll look forward to getting back into cities, and hopefully doing another (better!) Workaway-type experience somewhere near Buenos Aires. I feel like I haven’t even learned anything about Argentina or its people, aside from how beautiful its southern tip is—a very different experience from Chile, where I started in Santiago and jumped into its history, politics, religious currents, gender dynamics, et cetera. I’ve been way more of a tourist in Argentinian Patagonia than a journalist or even a traveler, and my connection to the place is suffering as a result (as is my writing—I don’t have much stimuli to process when my days are just 8-hour hikes up mind-numblingly-beautiful mountain terrain. My legs, however, have never been stronger, and my appreciation for the earth has never been higher).
So! That’s partially why, when planning how to get from El Chaltén to Bariloche, I bit the bullet and bought a ticket on the 24-hour bus: I knew it’d be an experience, and I’m here courting those.
Elif Batuman said it best in The Idiot, which I’ve talked about on here before and was going to write about but now it’s too late (I’m 6 books past it by now—whoops) so instead I’ll just share with you this quote that 1) sums up my worldview so perfectly it feels like Batuman must have taken up residence inside my brain and 2) I hope inspires you to buy and read the rest of the book:
Moreover, my policy at the time was that, when confronted by two courses of action, one should always choose the less conservative and more generous. I thought this was tantamount to a moral obligation for anyone who had any advantages at all, and especially for anyone who wanted to be a writer.1
So here I am. I scribbled in my journal for all of my (possibly actually interminable?) bus ride, and now I’ll transcribe for you some of the highlights.
First: Argentinian Spanish. I got a good dose of it from the conductor, steward (do buses have stewards? let’s go with yes), and other passengers on this bus, much more than I got from the series of transplants I encountered at hostel desks and trailheads in El Calafate and El Chaltén. I knew it was going to be different than Chilean Spanish, but I didn’t expect it to be so different. My strongest learned example of a language shifting across geography, I think, is the English of the northern U.S. states (with Boston/New York speech as extremes) versus the English of the south, and I guess I’ve constructed a heuristic that assumes dialects are mapped along a north-to-south divide, with slower vowels and drawling speech corresponding with longitude. But Chile and Argentina are like two legs of the same girl, mirroring each other, each with a counterpoint along every conceivable point of longitude, yet Argentinian Spanish is noticeable different: slower, more drawled. They even have a “y’all!”
Argentinians don’t often use the tú (you, informal; we talked about this with Tomás) form that most of Spanish speakers do; they use the vosotros form (you all, informal), even when they’re speaking to one person. At first, it gave me a negative impression—it felt like I wasn’t worthy enough of a personal nod, but instead was being thrown a term that would blanket anyone else who happened to be around—but then I realized it was literally the exact same as the southern English y’all, which, even when applied to singular subjects, I’ve always found cute.
Two case studies that cemented this vosotros thing for me: the first involves my very favorite way of learning and the second, my least.
I’ve written before about how much I love learning languages from children. I still do, even when it comes with disgusting bodily expulsions. Trigger warning: vomit ahead!!
The seats over my left shoulder were occupied by a mother and her two children, a boy and girl. I think their father was somewhere on the bus—when we got off for our periodic stumbles through brightly-lit gas stations to buy snacks or visit the servicios, there was a man who carried the boy, who had his exact same haircut, right down to the sharply shorn sides that reveal a strong cowlick in the back—but he didn’t sit with them, nor share in any of the childcare duties that the mother was burdened with. And they were plentiful: she had a four-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl to keep entertained, fed, watered, and quiet for an entire 24 hours.
She did really well for the first 14 hours or so. Her kids slept through the night, they ate the cookies that were passed out for breakfast at 9 a.m., they sat and read books quietly. She whispered the little girl’s stories to her, which I didn’t mind, since the simple sentences were good practice, and she used vosotros commands throughout: “veni” (come); “sentaos” (sit down); “dadle en paz” (leave her be—the “her” being me, said after the third time the little girl had toddled over to inquire, through spit bubbles and a smile, as to whether I wanted to hold her bottle).
Then, somewhere around 11 a.m., her cute little toddler—I think her name is Giana?—threw up all over the back of my seat.
It was the first, and only, really disgusting thing to happen on my bus ride—sure, the on-board bathroom stank to high hell and the lunchmeat in the prepackaged dinner trays was slimy and hockey-puck-hard, but those were run-of-the-mill gross; the sound of the vomit sloshing down the low-grade slant of the bus floor, and the smell—tangy, sharp, like compost only halfway through its virtuous cycle from glorified rot to organic fuel—had me gagging. The steward smelled it after a few minutes and had the bus pull over, and all of us remove our carry-ons from the ground, so he could mop.
The mom checked in on me, in vosotros form again: “Estais bien?” I muttered “no pass nada” and waved her off.
My second exposure, the one that confirmed the rule, was from my least favorite way of language learning: men yelling at women. It happened at one of our half-dozen stops along Ruta 40. I was stretching against a bench outside the bus station when I saw a corpulent grey-haired man in a sweat suit and flip flops walking a tiny dog. When the dog pooped on the sidewalk, he yelled “Denise, veni! Veni, Denise!!!!” (Denise, come!, made more emphatic by pointing aggressively at the coiled lump of shit and miming that she was to pick it up) at a middle-aged woman with coppery highlights who I could only guess had the great misfortune of being his wife. If they were Chilean, or if we were in Spain, he would’ve said “Denise, ven!!”—he would’ve used the tú command, not the vosotros command. In no such hypothetical, based on my experience, would he have said “Denise, would you mind passing me a plastic bag so that I can clean up after our pet?”
Okay, y’all, that took longer than I thought—we’ll move now into list form, both as tribute to my erstwhile German traveling companion and to force myself into a bit more brevity:
- Vosotros is a thing—covered above
- How is it possible that the reconstituted piece of cardboard that I think was supposed to pass as pizza is still better-tasting that the pizza that Karin, Anne, and I had in Natales to celebrate the reunion of me and my wallet?
- This bus in another of those things where thinking obsessively about what I got for what I paid is a painful process. My ticket was $150, which ostensibly included an entire day’s worth of meals and entertainment. I was warned ahead of time how shitty the meals would be, so I dropped another $15 on provisions for the long ride, mostly in the form of fresh fruit and non-greasy cheese.
The entertainment took the form of Fast and Furious 6, dubbed poorly in Spanish, played on a loop. My bed, supposed to be full cama so I could recline fully to sleep, only extends to about a 110 degree angle. No blankets were provided and I stupidly didn’t pack any extra clothes in the backpack I brought to my seat with me, so I was shivering for the first two hours of last night until I had the bright (possibly deeply unhygienic, but I still stand by bright) idea to strip the empty seats around me of their lycra head coverings and ball them together as a pillow, so I could repurpose my down jacket as leg coverage. Flying wasn’t really an option—the nearest airport from El Chaltén is in Calafate, where I’d come from; even if I could stomach having to travel three hours south just to fly north, there weren’t any budget flights from there anyways. The cheapest flight up would’ve set me back at least $200 (not including airport transfers and baggage fees and all the fun accoutrements of flying).
- I wouldn’t have called my New York existence high maintenance, but whatever it was—medium maintenance?–I’ve nearly completely abandoned it, with the singular exception of my sleep habits. I don’t miss biweekly mani-pedis, I haven’t worn contacts for over a week since I lost my expensive contact solution and haven’t been able to replace it, and I went several days without conditioning or brushing my hair while I was hiking, but I still can’t sleep well without a trifecta of silk eye mask + white noise + completely horizontal sprawling. I think it’s the thing keeping me from being a true traveler—it deeply hurts my credibility that I can’t do more than doze fitfully on planes or trains or buses.
- The air conditioning broke around hour 15, right as we were driving through the dry Patagonian steppe at midday. The bus turned into a sauna and everyone began to strip; soon we were all blushing with the forced intimacy. (Okay, let’s be real, only me, the buttoned-up American, was blushing; the two brothers next to me were happily sitting in just their jean culottes, the aforementioned toddler was running around in just a diaper, the abeulo in front of me had no qualms about hanging his Spanglish t-shirt from the back of his seat and letting his little round belly rub against his armrest). An innovative Chilean couple found a way to wedge a window open, and we enjoyed the breeze for about four minutes until the steward came bounding up the stairs—wearing only his dress pants and a black tank—and insisted that they close it because “it will let the cool air out.” The couple, taking on our collective mantle as if it they’d just been elected our members of Parliament, pushed back: “the air conditioning’s not working at all!” The steward insisted that it was, and even if it wasn’t, it would be soon; it sounded like pure propaganda and the couple called him out for it. He didn’t budge, and we were stuck there, pants rolled up as high as they’d go and tongues panting. (Somewhere around hour 21, the air conditioning came back on, and now I shivered as I watched the sun set behind the power lines and the hills).
- Many of the Chilean and Argentinian people on the bus have brought with them their cups and straws for mate, a herbal drink (not unlike green tea) sipped out of immovable metal straws with specially-fitted flattened mouthpieces stuck into small gourd-like bowls. The setup almost looks likes something to smoke out of, but they pack the bowls with the herb and pour hot water from their omnipresent thermoses on top, swishing the straw around the bottom a bit to make sure the water’s reached it, but not so much as to disturb the close packing. I drank mate with Jorge and his friend once, and got a lesson in the careful preparation and enjoyment of the tea; last night, watching everyone on the bus complete the ritual as we bumped over potholes, I found their coordination impressive and their enjoyment authentic and beautiful.
- Hozier’s 2014 self-titled album got me through this trip. “Jackie & Wilson” is my current favorite song. Savor this: “‘Cause with my mid-youth crisis all said and done/I need to be youthfully felt, ’cause God I never felt young.”
- The bus ride was advertised as taking 20 hours; I, aware of South American standards of timeliness, added an extra 4 hours as buffer. It wasn’t enough. Somewhere around hour 26, the bus stalled and limped to the shoulder of a road surrounded only by forest—no light, no civilization visible in any direction. The driver turned the engine over one, twice, thrice, at which point the lights finally flickered on and we continued a halting progression down the shoulder and eventually back onto the main road. The bus groaned as we picked up speed again and I started praying that we’d make it to Bariloche. We did, finally, at hour 27. My backpack was, of course, the last to be unloaded from the bus, which meant that all the cabs were gone by the time I got in line for one; I sat on the ground and cradled my head in my hand while I waited. Eventually, one came, and drove me to my hostel, where I banged (as gently as possible) on the door until someone came to let me in. I apologized for arriving an hour after their reception desk closed, checked in, and then crawled into a sweltering but comfortable (and horizontal!) bed.
So there you have it: a few of the fun and less-fun anecdotes and thoughts that kept me entertained over the course of a literal entire day+ inside a bus. I made it: I survived.
But when I go to Mendoza next week, I’m flying.