Argentina: a little bit different

When I arrived at Camping Don Bartolo this afternoon, the caretaker, a short man with a manicured mustache, a broad hat, and a 10-inch long knife tucked into his woven belt, looked at me funny and said, "pero llueve." But it's raining.

"I know," I said. "I come from a very rainy place." He shrugged, named his price, and told me I was welcome to camp in any unoccupied site. (That was all of them, of course.) As I set up my camp in a drizzle, he went back to chopping wood, preparing for the long winter to come.

That winter is not far off here in the Argentine lake district. The songbirds are abandoning the cooling hills of Patagonia for the warmer pampas and tropical lands to the north, and the travelers seem to be going with them too: nearly all the tourists I've meet in the last few weeks seem to be pushing north to Salta, north to Bolivia, north to Peru and Ecuador, north to places where it is still summer. For better or worse, I am still headed south, but not for much longer.

The end of summer has necessitated a number of changes to my style of travel. Most Argentine universities and schools (but strangely, not mine) started classes a week ago, so the number of locals traveling has dropped. Not surprisingly, this means that public transit links to national parks have become almost nonexistent, so I've been hitching a lot more. "Ir a dedo" (to go on a finger: Spanish doesn´t distinguish between fingers and thumbs) has proven easy and enjoyable: I've never waited more that 10 minutes, and I've been invited to stay in touch or visit often. (I have a standing invitation to go water skiing with two doctors in Cordoba, for example.)

A couple days ago, I hitched a ride out of Parque Nacional Lanín with a group of park rangers. I rode in the bed of their truck as we bounced down narrow, potholed gravel roads through a forest of trees unique to Patagonia. From my perch atop a horse's saddle, squeezed between a spare tire and a chainsaw, I took in a view of crystalline lakes, hills covered with forests of contorted, strangely-hued trees, and towering above it all, Volcan Lanín.

Volcan Lanín is really quite easy to picture: it looks exactly like a mountain should. Lanín is a perfect equilateral triangle, with a broad, brownish-grayish-blackish field of cinder and scree at its base, and capped by a huge, glistening ice cap .

Camping Don Bartolo, my home for the night, is not much more than a pasture. Horses graze around my tent, only slightly interested in my spaceship-shaped tent and its sole inhabitant. I like to think the birds that have not yet flown north find me more interesting, but I suspect they are focused on my crumbs. Some sort of woodpecker--carpintero, I learned recently--is insistently putting holes into a living coihue beech next to my tent. I have been paying lots of attention to the birds here: so similar in form and function to those I know in North America, but subtly, almost imperceptibly different. Subtle distinction reigns in the Americas, it seems: I've spent lots of time in the parks here sitting, staring at plants, fungi, lichen, and insects that diverge just slightly from what I know.

Sometimes, though, the differences are more obvious. For a native Pacific Northwesterner used to fir, hemlock, maples, and cedar, staring at the trees feels like being very, very high: the trees are alien to me. Even their names--lenga, pehuén, ñire, coihue, guindo--sound otherworldly. The coihue  twist slowly skyward, branching into discrete canopies, while the pehuén shoots straight to the sky and bursts into a rounded, spiny ball of branches and needles at its top. Standing in the middle of one of these bizarre forests... there are no words.

I think I've been focusing on the trees, birds, and insects more than I usually do because I'm alone. I'm not sure if I appreciate the subtleties and the beauty of this place more or less as a solo traveler. with no one to share it with, I may notice more but I comment and consider less. I am still relearning how to be alone--it's been a while.

Not that I am always alone. Sometimes company comes in spades. I shared a campsite last night with a group of retired Argentine men out for a drinking and fishing trip. Around their fire, we shared weak beer and heavy wine and listened as one man--el gordo, they called him--sang traditional songs about women, horses, sadness, and drink. So close to familiar American country music, but just slightly different--like to much here.