Reflections on Patagonia

Cucciolo is the name written across the top tube of a 1940s bicycle in the window of Ramos Generales, a panaderia cafe in Ushuaia, Argentina. The bike dons a cucciolo motor, from the earliest motorcycle days. Stump footrests have replaced the pedals, but everything else about this little puppy (which is what cucciolo means in Italian) is bicycle. Prison pajamas in bumble bee colors and long-john style down to the box weave and flimsy little cap hang flatly against the wall and stop the bike in its tracks. Against the black and yellow stripes leans a shovel. A long toothy saw, rusted and rough to the touch, fences in these antiques wherein tripacks of Cape Horn beer crop up within the frame like flowers.

It's taken me almost three years of living in Patagonia to make it down to Ushuaia, self-proclaimed southernmost city in the world: population 60,000, in case you're wondering how much it takes to make a city. I came here to meet up with Serkan on his trip and we've been reunited for a couple of days after we parted ways in Santiago, where I headed north to visit family and friends for a few weeks and he--more responsibly--headed south to start working and find us a flat.
I have missed him madly, but even so I found leaving this time sadder than other previous times. Maybe it is the family growing, kids growing up and new babies on the way, or that all of my friends are starting to make families of their own. Or maybe just that I have grown into the idea of having a family. For years I didn't know how to have a family. Now I feel it surrounding me in a way that I could easily describe as cozy, comforting.

Even though I haven't actually been to my new home in Puerto Natales yet, I am starting to feel back to normal here. It's always strange to arrive to Punta Arenas again. And every time I do it, I'm perplexed and exhilarated, simultaneously feeling at home yet light years away. This time I am here with my husband, so I need probe no further. And yet...

There is something beyond that fact that welcomes me home, but I can never quite pin the feeling down. Is it where I've come to grips with all my past sadnesses and let them go? It was the first place I visited when I started traveling in South America, straight to the farthest point possible. But it just as easily could have been Machu Picchu, the salt plain, the jungle or the desert if it weren't for the weather. It was March and, so, autumn. I'd chosen to travel on March 17, St. Patrick's day, you know, for good luck. The Patagonia season ending, my trip beginning. The distance, the seasons, time flipping over on itself--all of it is somehow symbolic, which I of course don't need to say.

So I still don't know what is so welcoming to me in this utterly inhospitable landscape? This desolate beauty so far off the grid. It toughens you a little, increases everyone's sense of loneliness, so while the buildings are wretched and the people usually unreliable, a sense of community pervades. Happiness is easy. Life is simple. And joy just is. Fleetingly, sure, but so are our moments--our presents. In more developed places happiness tends to be complicated, as it often assumes that we have to get such and such thing before we can be truly happy.

The pampas on the three-hour busride home from the airport are utterly barren. Yet pink flamingos fish gracefully in rain lakes and boggy puddles. Lovestruck caiquenes (Upland Geese) pair off and mate year after year--unaffected by the violent winds. Trees can't grow on the plain yet a random mix of cameloids and big exotic birds abound.

As much as I sometimes whine about it, I also love coming back here. Somehow it represents freedom. Freedom from what? I suppose it's something like freedom from myself. We're the only ones who truly have the capacity to commit ourselves to bondage. We are our own captors. The prison pajamas stare me down, their pattern mirrored by the teeth in the saw, the spokes in the bicycle wheel and the window reflecting passersby back to themselves. Sometimes they see through the display, and our eyes may meet before one side of the glass looks shyly away--beyond it all and out to the sea.

Journey's end...

We all get a little tied up in the regime of dailiness even if every day is exactly different. For the last month, the days of our eastern European honeymoon wore us onward. The rigmarole of entering a new city, figuring out how to get around, foraging for meat-free food, and finding lodging in hostels or with friends for 11 countries of time becomes routine. Leaving becomes routine. Departure is my favorite part of being on the road. No, being on the road is my favorite part of being on the road, and the first step of this requires departing. Destination: known, occasionally in advance. Though arrival is a slippery process and somehow the knowns wiggle around a little and always change.

This is going to spiral into another meditation on home, and it feels like there's not much discovery in that at present, for me or for you. Each day, I find, to be a shawl that I worm into or strip off depending on how chilly it is. Maybe the unworn days wear me and carry me forward and I suppose I hope they do. Increasingly I need to layer the days on for fall, the loose yellowing leaves feathering down and the gusts that scrape them red like a rake against each other and the asphalt.


Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria. Last stop before the night train to Istanbul.

Sarajevo Grays

We arrive to Bascarsija to its center to sit for a cup of coffee waiting for our room to be ready. The pigeons swirl in the square as an old lady tosses seed to them. Every place seems to have a square like this with an old lady scattering seed soon after daybreak. Breathing in the chill morning air and drinking delicious strong macchiatos is just what we need after the horrific busride to get here.

But let's not dwell on the night trip, because arriving to Sarajevo rocked. It's such a beautiful city, surrounded by green mountains with pleasant people sweeping the cobblestone walkways. It was a gray day when we arrived and the clouds stuck with us the whole time, but only really tipped once. The blending of religions is apparent in the skyline. It's mostly Muslim, also apparent from the skyline, as we could count (without standing up) 20 minarets just from the balcony of our hostel. Within an eyeshot, crosses, domes and minarets all cut at the gloomy sky.

Traveling through southeastern Europe after staying a while in Turkey, you definitely see the Ottoman influences everywhere: in the foods and the words and the Turkish Quarters, which seem to be every town center's highlight. In the morning we explore the narrow cobbled streets of the Turkish Quarter where no cars can go. Copper coffee pots garland the windows of every other shop. Silk scarves and pretty knit goods fill the stores in between. The rest are cafes bars, restaurants and more kebab and burek fast food joints than you care to sample. It's definitely not a good place for vegetarians, so I end up eating a lot of burek. Burek is also Turkish, but Sarajevo has the and the best damned burek on the planet. (Burek is a flaky meat-filled pastry, but veggie versions can contain cheese, spinach, potato, or more creative versions with pumpkin, etc.) Also we become instant friends with a young Dutch couple caravannig through Europe. The four of us spend a couple nights of merrymaking with beers, "alternative cuisine" (not kebab) in To Be or Not To Be, ice cream, margaritas and mojitos, scant dancing and a long morning after relaxing.

Next stop: Albania. Or not.

Poor Albania. It's supposedly beautiful: you know, mountains, beach. But the infrastructure is only inching along. Concrete bunkers abound and roads that require a snail's pace to navigate. Tirana, the capital, seems our most feasible stop in Albania, but the chore of getting there from Ohrid, Macedonia, is a bit ridiculous. A bus to the Albanian border. Walk across the border where taxis (hopefully) wait on the other side to take you to the first town in Albania, where (hopefully) there'll be a bus to Tirana. Once in Tirana, we'd have to find a place and then figure out how to leave, another feat since it's apparently complicated, even for locals. Add Cyrillic into the mix and you can see the attractiveness of an overnight bus that would bypass all of it.

Ohrid to the Montenegrin coast, direct, more or less. Nobody was allowed off the bus to pee even inhale Albanian air. It's pretty impossible to sleep on the bus, because the unpaved roads are so potholed the bus brakes and goes so abruptly for hours on end. From the window: nothing. Some may even call it a wasteland, though during the day I'm sure there must be some sort of view. At night, the only view is of gas stations. Gas stations lit up in all their glory, every two minutes at least. Astounding in their bounty. How could this many gas stations be on one road, where not even a single light glows in the distance.

We get to the bus station in Ulcinj, Montenegro, at 5 am, earlier than we'd hoped. I started to doze off at table while we waited for it to be a decent hour to find our place to stay or grab some coffee. Serkan found a bouncy bench seat, something that probably used to furnish the back of an old van, in the middle of an outdoor storage area. He led me there, covered me with a towel, and that was all she wrote.

Ohrid by night

From Sofia we head to Skopje, Macedonia, but we're already tired of the capital beat, so we stick around the Skopje bus station and wait for the next bus out to Ohrid instead. Ohrid is a lakeside resort town, a weekend escape place for locals. When we arrive, our big backpacks and other telltale signs reveal our traveler status, and the ladies offering rooms to stay and men offering taxi rides tug and prod at us relentlessly. Mind, we had planned to find a room with somebody selling space in their home. A cheap place to stay in a small town, so nothing could be too far away from the action. But they were so aggressive, all I wanted to do was hightail it away from them. We grabbed a taxi to the center and just found something from there.

Since it was Friday, Ohrid turned out to be a pretty hoppin' little town, where we danced in Aquarius. (Hemingway and Aquarius top the list of bar names in eastern Euorpe.) When the sardine pack of people started to get a little too snug, we wiggled our way to the back of the cafe nightclub. A patio dock stilted above the water with cushy sofas and low tables for chillin'. The full moon shone black glitter onto the lake, and underwater spotlights like moons brightened the schools of fish swimming in the teal below. This may very well be the coolest spot in Ohrid, but you have to be there at night.