What I’ve Learned: One Month In
Writing from the bus to El Calafate in Argentina. I am a complete idiot (we’ll get there) and left Puerto Natales a few days later than I’d planned, but my mistakes meant that I ended up leaving Chile exactly one month after I arrived, giving me a perfectly-timeboxed life experience to reflect on.
Already Argentina looks different, even though we’re just on the other side of the mountains and still in Patagonia. The land is dry, dotted with scrubs and sallow grasses instead of squat green trees whipped sideways by the wind. It’s flatter, less obviously diverse, beautiful in its own way, a master thesis on how many different colors exist between the boundaries of yellow and brown.
My first month of long-term travel wasn’t exactly what I thought it’d be, which is good, because if I knew everything before I did this, what would the point of my trip be? I spent more money, made more friends, and got in more fights outside of shitty bars in tiny towns that I thought I would; I did more hiking than I thought I was capable of and less Spanish practice than I needed.
I started off January as an extroverted, creative, passionate, practical, (sometimes over)confident fast-talking seizer of opportunities. I think I’m still all of those things, but with a looser grip on the conditions of my existence. I’ve felt so viscerally, up and down the length of this fingernail of a country, how little I can control what someone thinks of my Spanish or when the buses run or whether the weather will be good enough to attempt a volcano summit, and that’s turned me into someone who’s more comfortable living in the now. Dare I say I have more chill? Because I think I do.
Some other lessons and revelations:
- It is so, so easy to make friends here. Particularly in hostels or on walking tours or on hikes (it was a little harder when I was staying with local Chileno/as). People who self-select into those places, and to long-term travel far from home in general, tend to share a huge chunk of core values with me—curious exploration of the world, for one—and it’s so easy to strike up a connection based on them. It’s an offer to cook dinner together, a question about what museums are worth visiting, a walk-through of an itinerary—and voila.
- I don’t have to be friends with everyone. I think, especially in the beginning, I wanted to seize onto every new person I came across, whether I actually thought we’d enrich each other’s lives / make each other better (my top condition for friendship) or not. I was alone, thousands of miles from home and from the majority of my friends, and I thought I needed to set a bunch of sparks of friendship, in every direction, to replace the blaze of human connection I’d left in New York. That was a stupid way to go about it. A thousand fleeting acquaintanceships, doomed to fade as soon as the next bus rolls out, are energy-draining without being life-affirming. I stopped giving my WhatsApp number to everyone I made eye contact with at the breakfast table. Instead, I got really comfortable with spending time by myself and learned to be patient for the people who were actually wonderful. That’s not to say I didn’t keep meeting new people and stay open-minded—I did, I am!—but I don’t expect every other person to become a bosom buddy. Now, when they do—when I find a Payal or an Anne or a Karin—I’m genuinely and throughly appreciative of my time with them, and very much looking forward to checking in on their lives down the road, even beyond their travel plans.
- No plans are the best plans. So far, my lack of a planned itinerary has only inconvenienced me one time—when I realized I couldn’t do the whole W in Torres del Paine since I didn’t book reservations months in advance—and even then, only for about 10 minutes, until I found a way to do the trek that was actually much better and more up my alley then the traditional trek would’ve been. Not knowing exactly where I’m going to be in three days or three weeks has given my life this wonderful focus on living in the moment I’m in, something that doesn’t come naturally to me. It makes it easy to be flexible, and makes me so appreciative of the resources I have around me to learn more about the world. I’ve passed dozens of hours so far sitting with other travelers over beer, hearing about their recommendations for Peru treks or Argentina transportation, or connecting with a local in an Uber or over tea about their favorite things to do in their town. The person-to-person connection is so much more fun to mine from than the Internet is (though I’ve spent lots of hours searching for hostel reviews or trek recommendations there, too).
- Money is just money, and I don’t need that much of it to meet my goals. Almost losing my purse yesterday really hit this lesson home for me. I was contemplating what I’d do if I lost the $400 cash and $1000 phone and $100 Kindle that were in there—would I replace the electronics? What would throwing away $1500 do to my travel plans? What would I have to cut out?—and I realized: it doesn’t matter. I am really, truly not here to vacation for 6 months. If the rest of my travel plans were like my two weeks at Tomás’s hostel, I would still meet all my goals—I’d still be meeting new people, learning new things, understanding more about the world, and writing about it all. It might be less comfortable, and with less mind-blowing vistas or with less nights on the town, but it would be totally, completely fine. I’m glad I have the money I have, and I’m happy to spend it on experiences and to have some really wonderful vacation days (and will have more in the next few days as I zoom through the Argentinian side of Patagonia and the Lake District!), but I really don’t need that much to feel fulfilled. That being said: I’m going to be way more careful with my purse going forward.
- Romance on the road is an extra-intense version of traveling—right into someone else’s life. Despite the early warning flags I got, I ended up spending a lot of time with Jorge2 for the two weeks I was in Puerto Natales, and I’m very glad I did. He’s wonderful and different and taught me a lot. (I’m also glad to have not blown up my travel plans to stay there with him longer, which is how some of my travel friends’ romances have ended, usually to eventual regret.) I loved having a person in that town—I can’t tell you how happy I was when he came to pick me up at 2:30 a.m. on the night I had to flee Tomás’s—and to get to see myself through his eyes. I loved learning about him and his life—his family, his business, his community. I’ve never dated a Latino before, and lots of things about him surprised me—how quickly he showed possessiveness, how expressive he was about what he thought of me. He and I parted on neutral note—we fought on what was to be my last night in town (about whether I was drunk, which, to be clear, I was), then he sent very sweet messages the next day, then he didn’t respond to my requests to see him once my departure got pushed back a day. I’m headed to Argentina not heartbroken, but appreciative of our time together, which I think is exactly perfect.
Okay, so I won’t go much more into navel-gazing here—I’ll save that for our first quarterly goals check-in at the end of March!—but I wanted to give you the highlights of what I’m learning.
As promised, the story of these last few nights (sung to the tune of Lin Manuel-Miranda’s “Story of Tonight” from the incomparable Hamilton) is below. Please feel free to make fun of me in the comments or on your social media of choice. I am an idiot, I am grateful my story ends as it does, and I’ll be better next time.
After I fled Tomás’s and left Jorge’s and had a restorative night sleeping in a big, clean bed, in a room without other people, for the first time a month, I ambled down to my hotel’s reception to inquire about bus times to El Calafate. A nice Chilean man who looked, actually, a lot like Lin—Lin of In the Heights, with a groomed goatee and a smooth chignon—informed me that there weren’t any buses that went to Calafate on Wednesdays. (This was not true, I later learned, but I was stupid and didn’t investigate his claim myself.) “Damn. Can I extend my stay another night, then?”
He told me they were all booked that night, which was actually good, because I did not need to spend another $95 on a queen bed. I booked myself into the top-rated hostel in town—after scanning reviews to ensure no one in the last 3 years had seen even so much as the shadow of a bedbug—and packed my backpack and walked over.
Right after I arrived at my new hostel, I met Anne. The man at reception had paused the map he was drawing me for the Bus Sur offices in order to check her in, and I glanced over at her while he gave her the guestbook to sign. Pack festooned with fraying patches from India, Costa Rica, Australia; wildly stylish travel outfit of plaid shirt and ripped black jeans and pale yellow fleece beanie that I couldn’t pull off in this life or the next; blondish-brown hair that looked like a picture of what Jessica Biel probably brings her stylist for inspiration. I looked down at my black harem pants (ridiculous, I know, but they’re so comfortable, I don’t care) and then asked her if she’d like to walk to the bus station with me.
She did, so long as we could stop at her old hostel, where she’d stayed before she did her Torres del Paine trek, to see if she’d left her bag o’ electronics—chargers, adapters, and the like—at the bar there.
Anne is in her early 30s and lives in London, where she works in financial software sales and covers Scandinavia and the UK as the second-youngest member of her team; she’s a badass with a beautiful accent and she had me laughing not even two blocks into our walk.
Our first stop was successful, and we hugged after the barmaid passed over her black bag. The pursuit of lost things would bookend our time together; St. Anthony is officially the guardian angel of our friendship.
After buying bus tickets for the next day at 7 a.m., we walked along the water and talked more about our travel plans and lives. I filled her in on Jorge and my dilemma: should I try to see him on my last night or let it fade away? She said some very wise things about communication and figuring out what I wanted, and I sent a text to him as she and I settled back in to the lobby of our hostel to an afternoon of trip planning (for her) and writing (for me).
That evening, right as Anne was heading to grab her wallet so we could go grocery shop for some veggies to make dinner, she was stopped by a stunning Dutch woman who asked if Anne wanted her extra salad. It looked beautiful—peppers, tomatoes, cucumber, avocado, tuna—and Anne and I sat down with Karin, the generous Dutch woman, to share it. We added Anne’s dark chocolate and my bottle of champagne (left over from my Torres trip; I was going to share it with Greta on our last night but by then the vibes were definitely not let’s-pop-champagne vibes) and had a decadent little picnic.
Rather too decadent, in fact…Karin added a bottle of red, and Rodrigo, a Chileno from San Pedro who was sitting next to us at the table, shared some beer. An hour later, we were all unexpectedly drunk and recruiting other people in the hostel for an impromptu night out. Jorge texted me back and we made plans to meet at a bar near my hostel.
I changed into real pants, put on some mascara, and gathered my little parade of internationals—a French couple, an Indian dude, an Argentinean woman, Rodrigo, Karin, and Anne—and headed out to Slowly, one of the two bars in town, and also a victim of absolutely terrible marketing.
I, having been in Natales for almost two weeks and having already gone out on a W nocturna (aka a bar crawl through the town that hikers will do after they’ve finished the real W), was the de facto town expert, which was a title that most definitely went to my head. Aside from my night out with my coworkers, I hadn’t had more than a glass of wine or a pisco sour all month, and I forgot what responsibility was. I forgot about counting drinks, about drinking water, about eating enough first—I had fully regressed into sophomore year of college. When we got to the bar, I bounded up to Jorge and his friends with a little too much enthusiasm, and he pulled me outside quickly.
I don’t remember all of our fight, but it was something along the lines of: “Don’t be embarrassing, this is a tiny town and I know everyone, you’re drunk.” “What are you talking about? I’m not even drunk, I could drive a car right now.” (Ugh. I am the actual worst.) “Get it together.” “You’re making me sad, I’m going inside with my friendsssss.”
The night devolved from there. We went to the club, and I danced for a bit, but then asked Anne and Karin to take me home; in the rush of grabbing jackets and saying goodbye to our other friends, no one (including and especially me) noticed I didn’t have my purse.
Anne and I woke up the next day an hour after our bus to El Calafate had already left. She had it rough: she needed to rebook the dizzyingly complicated set of buses that would get her to Bariloche. I had it rougher: I didn’t have my phone, wallet, or Kindle (why I packed a Kindle for a bar crawl the world will truly never know—I’m just glad I didn’t bring my passport).
I spent a few stressful minutes pacing and searching around the hostel. Karin, all calm positivity and shiny blonde hair (how someone can wake up so well-coiffed after a night of heavy drinking?), told me she’d accompany me to comb the town and that of course we’d find my stuff.
We made a circuit of the town—bar, club, local police station, Chilean border control (just in case!)—and nothing. I was depressed. I left the number of my hostel with about every single human being I came across, begging them to call if they saw a small cloth bag with flowers on it.
We slunk back to the hostel, where I messaged Jorge from my computer and asked him to be the Hardy boy to my Nancy Drew in the puzzling shitshow that was my life. He gave me some helpful clues—he was at the club later and didn’t see my bag at the coat check—but couldn’t solve the mystery.
Karin, Anne, and I went back out to run errands: we needed food and I needed cash. Anne took out money for me, and then we walked to the grocery store. Across the street from the Unimarc was the club, of course, because this town is 5 blocks long, and I figured I’d check one more time to see if they’d found anything, since when I swung by early that morning, the cleaning crew hadn’t been through yet.
A lovely young man with jagged incisors who worked at the shipping store above the club beckoned me forward and pointed to the counter. There, slumped over like a dead rabbit, was my stupid, wonderful bag, and inside of it—I ran to it in three single bounds—were all of my belongings, untouched.
WHAT LUCK, AM I RIGHT?
I didn’t deserve it, but god, did I appreciate it.
The girls and I celebrated with extraordinarily shitty pizza (Karin noted that the cheese looked like dead skin; Anne inquired as to whether someone had thrown up on it or if it was actually supposed to look like that) and surprisingly good ice cream.
I booked myself another bus ticket for the next day (today) and laid in bed all afternoon, petting my wallet and vowing to be more careful.
So there you are. A bit of a wild last few days in Chile on all accounts. I’m excited to start fresh in Argentina, compounding on what I’ve learned so far. A few days of hiking and exploring await me here, and then I’ll head up north to Bariloche and then Mendoza, then over to Buenos Aires. Stay tuned.