i saw a dead guanaco

turns out that one of the intrepid argentine travellers i met, a girl named Sol, knows Aprille and la Mario and friends of theirs who i´ve heard about but don´t know.. crazy how the world is so small...

after 2 nights and 1 day in las grutas (beautiful beach with crazy tide changes!) where i saw MY FIRST PENGUIN ZOMGWTFBBQ adrian and i said goodbye to fédé and sol who were going onto bariloche and walked the 5 km separating us from la ruta 3. after about an hour holding up my fancy RIO GALLEGOS carton, 3 guys in a white ford pickup told us we could jump in the back, and we rode for 300 km under a beautiful blue sky until here, here being puerto madryn. i thought it was funny that they had a saint christopher sticker on their window.. a good omen, me thinks.

i miscalculated my kilometres... i´m, right now, at approximately 1400km from BsAs and at about 1797km from Ushuaia.. kinda the half way mark, so i´m not looking at 3400km ida y vuelta, but 6200 ida y vuelta..!!! craziness. at least i have a friend for the next 1000km, who i´ve affectionately surnamed ché boludo (literal translation: friend, ballsack) because

1. he looks like ché guevara. and is how i imagine el ché was when he was the same age travelling through patagonia.
2. he starts all of his sentences with ché and finishes them with boludo.

i love how everyone here calls eachother boludo or boluda which in french would translate into couillon and couillonne but i don´t think i know any english words that would translate into a nickname for ballsack.


when people ask why we´re travelling together he says ¨she has a tent and i don´t, but i have a fork, and she doesn´t.¨
what a sweetie. he´s been teaching me about the history of patagonia, the tehuelche tribe that was killed off, the mapuche.. he´s been hitchhiking around patagonia and tierra del fuego for a while, and has beautiful photographs to prove it. it´s nice having someone who knows the best ways to get where i´m going, and i´m sooo thankful right now that i took the train, cause the past 2 days have been a blast.

i sprained my ankle on the beach yesterday while walking out during low tide, i was stupidly walking and playing the accordeon at the same time and CRUNCH, i slipped on a tidepool.
well, my excuse is that i, all by myself, have managed to learn by ear LA WALTZ D´AMELIE with my MIDGET. i think that´s worth the sprained ankle. however, poor ché has to listen to it non stop for the next 1000km. and i have to walk on it with my 20 kg pack. ah well.

you know how in canada you see dead groundhogs on the side of the road? well here, it´s dead guanacos. i counted 3 dead guanacos in 40km. so sad, cause they´re so cute when they´re actually alive and staring at you in that "what the hell are you?" sort of way.

i´ve been kind of perplexed by the eerie similarities between my trip right now and the lyrics to a song by la rue ketanou, sur les chemins de la boheme, especially

avant de partir le pouce en l´air.. a l´autre bout, du bout du monde...

yeah. that´s what i´m doing.

oh and my mornings aren´t filled with café creme, instead, i drink maté.