je ne veux plus me battre avec toi..

i don´t want to leave this place i don´t want to go back to the infernal spiral of the same hollowed faces the same darkened places the same people the same things the same speakers the same streets and names...

i want to stay on this road i want to discover the world meet people share their experiences and live with them learn from them love them.

i see life in my eyes and it had been years since i had recognized myself in a mirror.


it had been years since i remembered what it felt like to just be instead of escaping. i thought coming here was an escape but i realize now, i truly see it, that coming here was a way to find myself and remember what is truly important.

living.

et j´ai erré...

la plaine est morne sous la pluie
les nuages bas et gris...



je suis parti de ma famille
il ne faut jamais revenir
quand le soleil jamais ne brille
quand le meilleur devient le pire...



et j’ai erré et voyagé
et même si je pense à toi
à toutes les heures de la journée
et même si je pense à toi
jamais je ne reviendrai...



i can´t leave this place. it has a magic over me that i can´t describe.

i´m sorry.

comme les journées sont longues...

awake at 9:30, a rare occurancy for someone such as myself, but i ended up crashiong at one am, and it was the first time in a very long time that i slept eight consecutive hours without interruption since i´ve been in south america, or at least for as long as i can remember.

i was actually woken up by the sounds of people saying "wow it´s so nice out! it´s a good day for trekking!", and i was on time for breakfast for once.. i prepared myself a few matés as usual and saw that the dreadlocked street dog who keeps following me around was waiting for me in the garden, awww, he´s a cutie. cariñoso, a glutton for affection he is.

as the sun was (finally) out and the sky was blue, 15 degrees, we decided to hit up some nature today. accompanied by a paraguayo slash monkey man, a half american half paraguayo and a mexican (who won the BME scolarship! fancy that!) we tried to hitchhike the 20km separating ushuaia from the trekking site, but 4 people hitching is kind of ridiculous so the only person who picked us up was a local bus taking other trekkers to the site.. well 25p for 4 people isn´t so bad i guess, it´s better than 25p per person!

because of the heavy rain over the past few days it was incredibly muddy, and the "moss pit" as we called it was full of water.. needless to say, with my skate shoes i looked pretty pitiful. and my sprained growth plate didn´t make hiking up very easy, but i had a big stick to help me and although i got my foot stuck in the mud a couple times (BIGFOOT!) i managed to get up to the laguna esmeralda and back down without too much difficulty.

it was a 5 hour hike going to and from, generally it takes 3 hours but we were jumping over trees and trying to find dry land so we strayed from the path a bit and it took us a bit longer... when we finally saw the green lake and the albino glacier it was like a smack in the face, waterfalls around us and the surrounding glaciers peeking out shyly from behind neighbouring mountains. superb.

my feet were sopping wet by the time i got back to the hostel (which is great, really, a very family atmosphere and many different nationalities, nothing to do with THE POINT ARGH ARGH) and right now my shoes are plopped up on a tree stump next to the radiator, here´s hoping by tomorrow i can wear them again!


a couple pictures to tease you, more tomorrow.
blogger templates suck because they cut my pictures off, boo.







look! i´m an elf!

donde aprendiste a tomar maté? - que dices, no es una scienca, es maté, boludo!

on my third maté of the day, stuck inside because of the rain and cold and greyness that settles onto ushuaia in the autumn, chatting away with the staff and the paraguyayos who are here on vacation. (one of them is dancing michael jackson styleez as thriller plays in tyhe background, quite well might i add, what a sight!)

last night i walked around with a newly found friend and we sat and split a bife four ways: for ourselves and for the two dogs who had decided to sit with us and beg for affection. then one of them followed us back to the hostel, where we were for about two hours, and when we left to go out he was sitting in front of the gate waiting for us. awwww.
then i went to this place named kuar for a drink, the music wasn´t my favourite but the barman with his dreads coiffed pineapple style was kind enough to give us some free drinks.
there was a circus type show, with firebreathing, sword swallowing clowns who then proceeded to throw shaving cream pies on everyone present in the club. myself included. with music by emir kusturica and goran bregovic! sweet.
anyway i went to talk to them after and they told me to come round later tonight for a show, one of them is from buenos aires and is going back up this week through esquel, bariloche and el bolson, which is my route.
this is me trying to get a free (or at least cheaper) lift back up.

i decided to bail on the norweigians, well firstly it´s raining so i´m not going to adventure out the 3km walk separating me from the port, and secondly... it just seemed too farfetched, even for me, and that´s saying something.
there is, however, a french family docked on the bay, and i´m going to try and see with them, it seems safer to be with a family then with two scandahouvians.
and even at that.. ok, so what if i didn´t make it to the REAL end of the world.. i still made it to tierra del fuego and ushuaia and that is what matters in the end right?

the clouds are thick and milky and the mountains are barely visible, it´s about 5 degrees outside and very wet, so no glaciers today, unfortunately.
boo.

i´m fairly upset right now as my darling kerido kenhitomio (aka ze pequenho) has a tumor on his eye, and the cheque i left for my roommates seems to have disappeared, so i have to figure out a way to fax a copy of my visa to the vets, and the operation is going to cost about 300$, 300$ which i can´t afford to pay but i´m willing to give my last penny to save my sexy boy, just as i spent more than half of my south amerika fund on vet fees for him before i left. arrrrrg. poor bebe.

and my poor roommates who have to take care of him instead... i´m a bad rat mom.

eres una duendita!

ushuaia.

my god.

i woke up this morning and stepped outside and my jaw dropped when i saw that i was surrounded by snow capped mountains and the water, and the port and the wildlife and ...


*ORGASM*


words really can t express how i feel. i have dreamed of this place for so long, and it really is beautiful, the town itself is a tourist trap but i walked around the mountain a bit, and i bought a few calabasas for mate, and tried to find a way to cape horn....

well, i found a way. i met two young scandahuvians from norway who kindly offered to take me there.

for free.

now. i know it s really really really risky to get on a boat headed for the end of the world with two complete strangers. especially when they re having a leaky motor problem.
sooooo tomorrow morning i am supposed to meet up with them for lunch and see what s going on.. if my instinct says backoff, i will forget about this whole sleeping in the lighthouse at the end of the world idea and frolicking with penguins, if my instinct says cool beans i follow.
i am constantly trying to push my limits further.. but at what point is it just pushing it? when i told marcin he did that big brotherly "CAAAAAAAAT" thing he does like when i said something about a russian cargo to antartica...

anyway. i am still thinking about it.

one of the french guys i met on the bus told me he met an artisan the other day in puerto madryn who said "hey, i met this crazy french chick who was hitching to ushuaia!".
a + b = yeah, that was probably me.

hee.

i prance around town with a sparkle in my eyes and a smile with my bloo elf hat and my polar blanket wrapped around me poncho style, my accordeon hooked up to my belt, and everyone stares at me funny, and the artisans call me over and ask me if i really am an elf - when i told the story of my adventure down from carmen del patagones and the norwegians he said to me:

eres una duenda.. una duendita azul, porque tienes magica chica...

maybe. just maybe.

my face looks different. my eyes have changed colour. i am metamorphosed by this adventure through argentina and patagonia is my mistress, tierra del fuego my dream, the way the landscape went from the patagonian steppe to wild crazy forests and streams in 5 seconds is amazing, winding roads around the andes...

words. can t. speak. just. awe. love. love. LOVE!


could someone throw on some slayer cause i think i ve gone hippie on myself. jeebus.

speechless.

i made it.


i´m here.


3200km in one week.

i´m in ushuaia.


i dipped my feet in the icy turquoise waters of the magellan strait and watched the smallest dolphins on earth swim next to th boat.
i cried when the boat docked on tierra del fuego.
i cried when my feet finally touched its soil.

right now i am so happy, i have no words to describe it.

you have to see it to understand.. and even then.. i don´t think pictures could justify the emotion i felt.



however. in the midst of all this happiness, a person i was lucky to have met a few years back in montreal and who i hoped i would see again in 3 weeks in buenos aires has passed on... seb from drop in caravan was shot and died in brasil last week.

i can only wish the best for his son and claire at this point, because it´s terrible news and i´m still in shock.

all the more reason to stay safe...

péripatéticienne

when i last left you, i was in the company of my intrepid argentine adventrurer friend in puerto madryn.
we spent a night there, staying with friends of his, sonia, her son mauro, his (seventeen year old) girlfriend pamela, and their seven month old son astor. much maté was had, and a very tasty patagonian tort that i can´t for the life of me remember the name of.
we decided to head out on the night bus to trelew where we could pick up a collectivo to ruta 3 and spend the night at the station and wait for a truck. before that, though, ché b. needed to find some porro material and so we stopped at to see a friend of his at the feria artesenal. while he went off and did stuff, i stayed with the bags and played accordeon, attracting the attention of nearly every one of the artisans who came over to ask if they could try it out. i walked around and found a necklace for a certain someone who has helped me out quite a bit, no names yet it´s a surprise, and one for myself, and the artisan threw in a free piece of petrified wood from a prehistoric forest in the heart of patagonia.
of course i had to put it in my hair.. if not, i´d lose it, for sure.
by that point the children of the artisans all came over and started playing with my midget. and then started fighting over it. so i had to put it away.

we got on our merry way and got into trelew at 23h30, and then jumped on a bus to the outskirts of town and spent the night drinking maté, chatting and exchanging travel stories. at 6 we went to a station about 1km away where there were more trucks and therefore a better chance of getting picked up. after about an hour, i furiously started rubbing my thumb on my st christopher medal, and roughly 10 minutes later a trucker who had said he was going to ushuaia but didn´t want any hitchers finally honked at us and told us he´d leave us at comodoro rivadavia.

his name was claudio and he´d been driving for 10 years. he married a french girl and was expecting a child. he liked dire straits, the grateful dead, traditional argentine folk and old metal a la g n´r, and had a battered copy of castaneda´s the teachings of don juan in his truck. i figured he couldn´t be a bad guy!
he fed me some sort of pickled cow tongue for dinner, and i HATE tongue, reminds me of summers at my grandparents´ with my cousins, looking at eachother wondering how we were going to succeed in stomaching my grandmother´s leathery, slimy tongue dishes. but this was actually pretty tasty, maybe because it was in between two pieces of bread and i´d been living off of cheese and crackers for 2 days.

or maybe it´s just my grandmother´s cooking was nasty and tongue is actually pretty good.

after a joint and a couple matés he decided he´d bring us all the way to rio gallegos. so we spent the night sleeping in a field under THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SKY EVER (tm), i saw 3 shooting stars in less than a minute, and could clearly see the milky way and satellites. amaaaaaazing, as jes would say.

this morning at 5 we took off and i saw the sun rise over the plains and almost cried. every fibre of my being started to sing and i swear i felt i was going to have a heart attack my heart was going so fast. guanacos looking up at me, and then away, jaded, "another one of them killing machines, meh, ooOoOoh, look, a shrub!" *chomp*. claudio put on use your illusion and did his best axl rose impression while i threw on my hat and did my best slash impression and we all burst out laughing.
he drove us 1200km to a gas station called san cristobal (GASP! A GOOD OMEN? not really.) here in rio gallegos where i´ve been since 10 am.

i said my goodbyes to ché b. and we parted, and i tried and tried and tried to find someone to jump on with but they´re all going north to el calafate, so i decided to walk down ruta 3 through the city and ran into che b who kindly offered to buy me a beer and some internet time.

it´s a shame claudio didn´t bring me all the way to ushuaia, cause now i´m stuck in this sandy, depressing town and no one wants to pick me up, and the bus costs over 100 pesos and i have 200 pesos for the next two weeks so that´s not really an option. my options are either stick it out until someone picks me up, or stick it out until tomorrow at noon and take a bus to punta arenas in chile.


in the meantime.

patagonia is beautiful. i think i´m in love with her. every night i sleep with her, and every morning i wake up to find her peeling off another layer for me to discover.

now. my main concern is getting the fuck out of here.

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.

horses and emus and cows, oh my!

so here i am.

viedma, on the rio negra, the door to patagonia.

the train was not 14 hours as announced when i bought my ticket (i´m starting to get used to this) but insteadd about 20, as i left BsAs at 19h30 and got in here at 15h30.

on the train i met a couple of intrepid argentine travellers, including one who is going down ruta 3 to rio gallegos, now we´re sitting at the bus station sharing a maté and an egg sandwich waiting for a micro to take us to las grutas where we can pitch up our tents on the beach and tomorrow dip our feet in the water before continuing on south.
we were transported in an old rusty cattle truck from the train station at c. de patagones to viedma for a mere peso and a half, which i found ridiculous, and funny, and surreal all at the same time. ha.


my feet hanging out of the door, holding on to the metal bar, accordeon in hand playing melodies out to the patagonian steppe, wow. just. yeah.
it reminded me of la camargue, and it has a very garrigue like quality to it like in provence, but no lavender - instead, cows, sheep, horses and ostrich run around the treeless plains. salt flats here and there, a couple rivers, dunes, and a beautiful sky with huge, looming fluffy clouds.

and it´s only the beginning.

from here on it´s survive or die, but now i´ve got adrian the gaucho to accompany me down south, so all is good in the world of cat.

do what you´re afraid of

an old friend who goes by the name of dirt told me that today, and that´s exactly what i´m doing, what i´ve been doing.

3400km. i know people can hitch across canada in a week.. surely in 3 weeks i have time to do what it is i need to do?

i need to get a really big knife. and a can opener. and maybe a little camping stove. but i can always just make a fire. or just eat canned corn, used to live off of it, why should it be any different now?

i am kind of scared even though i boldly proclaimed that i´m not afraid of anything, which is false, i´m sure there are some things out there that would send me screaming and running in the opposite direction, but for some strange reason i have absolutely no fear regarding what i´m about to do.

buenos aires is wonderful beautiful and exquisite, the people i´ve met here have truly marked me and i am seriously thinking into finding a way to come back here, and live here maybe, who knows. i really like this place, i like that it´s cheap and beautiful and makes me feel safe, it makes me feel alive and happy.
montreal did that for me when i first moved there.. and now it just makes me feel empty and sad, i go out cause i have nothing better to do, always the same hollow faces, always the same sketchy places. i gave up everything i had in france and took off for a better life in montreal, i got a better life in the sense where yes i have a roof, and a family, and good friends.
but i lost my reason to be. which is to just be and live.

the road is long but it is there, waiting for me, calling out, i haven´t come this far to tread water in buenos aires, i was just testing it..

so, my route starts at viedma, which is a short ferry ride from c. del patagones, and then it´s straight down on road 3 for about 1700 km. and then.. the end of the road. the end of the world. alone. finally.

alone.

a lot of the things that i am running away from....

what exactly am i running away from, anyway? why the hell have i had this dream stuck in my head for as long as i can remember, to sit on top of a cliff and look out at the icy cold waters where the south pacific and atlantic join, and smoke a joint and forget about everything and everyone?
i´m going to prance around in my tutu on the edge of the world and cross my fingers i don´t slip off a glacier and end up in a museum in 2000 years.

i have this weird running away from everything syndrome that i think i´ve had ever since i read on the road and decided i was going to run away from boarding school with my guitar and my friend julien. obviously it didn´t work, but i was 12, and that need to escape was already well anchored within me.

the thing is i can´t really run away from myself, well i do, in some ways, i suppose, but what i´m trying to do now is to try and figure out what exactly, who exactly, and why.. why i need to run away constantly. maybe i can find my brain down there, maybe i´ll fall in love with a little stretch of land that i can call my own, raise some guanacos, maybe i´ll learn mapuche and find a new cause to fight for.
or maybe i´ll just come back the same and feel disappointed.


my accordeon is quickly becoming my best friend. it sounds human enough to maybe be human, wailing out my lament to the world, wailing out my immense tristesse to whichever air current will listen..

il n´y a plus que la patagonie.. la patagonie qui ne convienne a mon immense tristesse..