delta

Our time in Georgia was air-conditioned from beginning to end. Atlanta is just an airport, albeit the busiest. It is also a city, but the airport came first. The plan of the building is unavoidably diagrammatic; it has no scale, no reference other than a plane, a runway, all of which are in any case arbitrary benchmarks - the Airbus 440 that we saw from the windows of the waiting area looked impossible in itself, dwarfing the transatlantic Boeings. I looked at the map, a long spine from which dozens of arms spread, drawings of planes suckling on each one; some questions arose - does the Airbus make the airport bigger or smaller? What colour is the building? Can you walk from the airport to the city centre? - None of these questions are worth asking though. Those that spend the most amount of time there don’t even think about it – the runway staff, the airport police (on segways), the pilots and everybody else just get on with things, and a new reality is created. It is a place where 90% of commuters don’t see the building as we know the term, sucked as they are from a plane through customs to another plane, and none of these people, none of them, care. This is the new built environment, and when it is normalised, we will call other things strange.

The most alarming thing in the airport was the number of soldiers, marines, all heading to or returning from war. There seemed to be thousands of them; tight-knit groups of mostly teenagers, staring intently ahead of them, receiving solemn glances from other people. I couldn’t tell who was coming or going. All of them in grey fatigues, marked with a name badge and a flag. We all sat together in the food hall waiting for an aeroplane to take us away; there was nothing else to do.

The flight to Buenos Aires was good. We arrived early and I was looking forward to talking to people; we asked about getting into the city – it is 46km from the airport, and there were taxis which cost 118 pesos or buses which cost 1 peso, but you need change for the bus, so I had to find change, all I had was 100 peso notes and nobody will give you change of a hundred, nobody will even sell you anything for a hundred pesos. I would later find out that the lack of coins was a side-effect of the devalued currency after the economic collapse – coins were rare because people were taking them across the border to Bolivia and melting them. When Duhalde defaulted on Argentinean loans and abandoned the peso-dollar parity in Jan 2002 the currency lost so much strength that the metal of the coins became more valuable than their face value. It is still done, and change is still a problem but it’s becoming less profitable now, and it is hoped that soon it won't be worth the hassle. I finally got change from a bank in the terminal and we were on our way.

el corralito

We took the bus as far as we could and got a taxi the rest of the way to the hostel. The journey in from the airport involved strange detours and one stop in a petrol station. We went round a roundabout twice. When we finally arrived inside what felt like the city we soon realised that we would never understand it – the street that leads to the centre was perhaps 25km long. We had help with directions from the rest of the people on the bus, all of them, each with an opinion; one guy took charge though and told us where to get off, where to walk to, and how much to pay in the cab. Our taxi driver was a decent old man called Antonio. His people were Italian, they moved out after the war. We talked and he seemed to follow us most of the time, with some exceptions:

Me - y cómo és el uso del voseo?

Him – eh? El boxeo?

Me – no no, el uso de vos!

Him – pero que uso?

Me – de vos!

Him – che, nadie me está usando para nada!

And we pulled into our hostel in Palermo. We offloaded and headed out to the streets, our first stop was in a little coffee shop where we met a Colombian guy from Bogotá who told us where to find the best empanadas in the city but we didn’t find them. Palermo is huge and beautiful, and only one third of one of the 100 barrios of Buenos Aires (there is also Palermo Hollywood and Palermo Chico). The first day we wandered around and found a gorgeous place to eat, a lovely starter of blended carrot and tomato in a shot glass and a huge steak. The following day we rented bikes and cycled for hours, and then days, to the parks, to recoleta cemetery, to Colegiales to see graffiti, to the house where Gardel was born, to Barrio Once where they say do not go, to calle Lanin where the kerbs are painted all colours, to the architecture faculty of la nacional. We sailed to Uruguay in a day and drove a moped around Colonia, we kayaked through the delta of the Rio Plata in Tigre. I became a member of the Biblioteca Nacional. We went into a shop that sold a variety of dolls and nothing else, all handmade and stitched, all weird, non-existent animals, perhaps from Borges´ Chinese Encyclopedia. (Palermo is full of these shops, most with a half-life of 6 months, selling one thing at a time – belt buckles, customised towels, almonds. Later on at a market we would find a shop that sold, exclusively, vintage imperial weighing scales.) I filmed ewa cycle across an 18 lane avenue that smears itself through the city. We saw a guy walking 13 dogs at the same time. We met a Chilean lady and her daughter who invited us to lunch in Santiago. We went to one of a million tango clubs and saw the same band playing a week later on the streets. I suffered, from severe headaches, weakness, diarrhoea and constipation, a strange rash on my inside leg. I made promises that I didn’t keep, and some that I did.

A week into our trip we visited a friend of ewa´s aunt who grew up in Poland. Lucy is married to Domingo. Their daughter is Carolina who is married to Joselo. They themselves have two children, Ciro and Beltran. Domingo looks like he is carved from hardwood; he has the presence of a totem pole. The scar on his forehead is more like a knot in a tree trunk. He traces his ancestry to the indigenous Indians of the river plate and he hates Diego Maradona as much as he hates the current government. He wanted to know if I was half gay when I arrived with flowers for his wife; I liked him immediately. He took me into the garden to show me the meat he was preparing for us all. He had made enough. Carolina and Joselo are both dentists – they were fascinated with my crossbite, they noticed it immediately. They have a dog called Ringo Starr. Domingo played me his tango records and told me about the dances in the fifties (tango was the easiest chance of getting your hands on a woman – so when they put on a jazz record we´d all hit the bar...jazz is shite!). Lucy recorded a message in Polish for Krzrysha, she sounded like a child speaking it, a bright young child. It was lovely, she seemed to find the right words out of nowhere.

We ate soon after we got there, not much messing around, and it was great, we talked a great deal, argued, laughed a lot, and we left with new friends. Domingo grabbed my arm fiercely as we left and told me that when you have a good feeling about someone, that feeling will always exist. I told him that I felt the same. I also wanted to tell him that what he said sounded totally gay, but it would have been lost. Plus I was wearing his shorts at the time. Caro and Jose offered to take us to the train station, but we stopped in the guys’ apartment before we got there, and we had another beer. They explained to us how insane it was during the collapse – the government allowed a maximum withdrawal of 150$ per week, the corralito as it was known. The middle classes were ruined; all savings were withheld and as the currency weakened their money was lost. They took to the streets, millions of people, and a state of siege was declared. The country saw 5 presidents in 2 weeks. But those in cash businesses – taxi drivers, corner shop owners, and especially street vendors - those were the most affected. Having no backup, they were destroyed. Many of them are cartoneros now, cardboard collectors that sell it by the kilo to recycling plants for a pittance. We talked about this. It was difficult to see it as something that happened in a civilised country less than 10 years ago. The two of them were broke when it hit, but they started from scratch and saved up a living. They live in an apartment near San Miguel in the outskirts of the city, and they have bought land to build a house. All things considered they are doing well.

They walked with us to the train station to see us off that night. Ciro likes trains apparently, and he stared at one as it arrived at another platform. But this train was different – it had open carriages, and people sat on the sides with their legs hanging over the edge. Those that got on at the station carried plastic bags full of cans, and cardboard tied up with twine. It was a free train, offered by the government to encourage those from the shanty towns in the outskirts to come in to the centre and collect the rubbish. Women travelled with their children, young men look bent but unbroken. Many have moved out to the slums, non-places that have multiplied since the collapse. They make the trip daily and, it seems, unbegrudgingly, though many have respiratory problems as a result of walking the streets every day, and encountering heroin needles is a common danger. The indignity that they suffered seems to be long gone, they just get on with things, but I couldn’t help wishing that a day would come in which instead of cleaning the plastic and cardboard from the streets they would make it to the casa rosada and rid it of the real trash. Ciro waved to the people in the train and a few people that saw him waved back; our train came shortly after and we said our goodbyes.

huevon

Through its hypocrisies and inequities, through all the stench, I developed a love for this city of Buenos Aires, and for all the people that I met - Antonio our taxi driver, the jogger crossing the road, the girl in Palermo with the portfolio, the old guy outside the pharmacy selling coffee, our first waiter, our friends in San Miguel, the owner of che lulu, the kids playing football in la boca, everybody else we met except a prick in a bike shop in san telmo that tried to rent us bikes for 600 pesos a week, this guy was a prick. After two weeks here, we found ourselves very comfortable. In fact we hadn’t planned to stay that long, but it happened that Fabian Aristizabal came back from Colombia a week later than expected and we were to stay with him. My old friend who I hadn’t seen in over ten years had us over to his place; he was arriving back from Bogotá when we were sailing back from Colonia. We called into his apartment before he got back. Gabriela (another friend from Bogotà) had a brother (Manolito) staying there while Fabian was away, and we talked for ages and ages but it got so late that we went to go, I didn’t want to but ewa thought it best to let them have a quiet return and we would come back and see them in the morning. We headed downstairs but I knew, I knew we would see them. I knew it insofar as I believed it, and it came to pass. At 1.30 in the morning when we made it down to the street to grab a taxi, just as we were heading onto the main avenue, I saw the shape of Ura who I had only seen in photographs. Wait, I said, wait, and yeah, it was them! Fabian smiley and hairy, wearing a short-sleeved shirt that went down to just above his knees and had two little pockets down low to the front – thigh pockets. He was carrying a huge box that was falling to bits, no doubt from being opened and closed a thousand times by customs. They left stuff back in their apartment, had a bit of a wash and said hi to the cat. He hadn’t changed a bit; he still looked like a caricature of himself. Hugs and kisses and then we went out for drinks, to a Polish bar no less, complete with a mammoth Pole behind the bar, predictably enough called Tadeusz. He was the owner and let ewa put on whatever music she wanted. We sat and talked until 6 in the morning and took a taxi home.

The next day, Saturday, we called back to Fabian. It is funny to see the guy married, but this is the way it goes. Ura is lovely and serious in equal measure. They have a really great apartment, a nice balcony garden and they’ve done some not so bad renovations on the place. When we got there they were baked, Manuel included. They were unloading the box of stuff Fabian brought back from Colombia, full of sauces, coffee, spices, and a big box of kids chocolate bars, like animal bars, but inside you got a little sticker of an animal. And not just a cow, a snake, a bear, but specific species, each with their taxonomy. There were about 500 bars in the box but that number was decreasing. Ura had a sticker book out, the one that went with the chocolate bars if you were a serious collector (the Argentineans are great collectors); she was delighted because she had just got the tropical capybara to complete the Animals from the Pantanal section. We smoked a quick one and went in search of the rare and elusive arctic fox to finish the Tundra Predators set, but we gave up 10 bars in. I called home to say hi to the folks, and we headed out to Chinatown to eat something and walk around. Chinatown is weird in Buenos Aires, weird in its normalcy; the Chinese here are the same as anywhere else, with a bit of an Argentinean accent when they talk to you in Spanish. We ate for a bit, stuff on sticks, strange rolls and balls, and some beer. We took a bus back to San Telmo and got sorted out for a barbeque a friend of Fabi was having on the roof of his apartment. He is married to a German girl who seems to have planned the whole thing. Roberto, the guy, was sound, and lived in Dublin 10 years ago and knows Rory Murphy. More interestingly he is related to Frankey Rey, the man who discovered la ciudad perdida in 1972, the same guy who took me on a tour of the place in 1999. There was good craic, the chef was a Uruguayan lunatic who never shut up about women (a woman is like a harp, and a harp is like a dolphin, and a dolphin is like a rake, and a rake is like a chimney, and a chimney is like a woman, this kind of shit), and there was a Chilean couple and loads of porteños, and loads of Colombians. There was a musical duo that played boring stuff on a saxophone and piano but then everybody sat around the pool and drank aguardiente and smoked and had the craic. There was a pissed up madman there from Bogotá called Pablo who talked to everyone with su merced and was basically a deranged drunk. He wanted to go home with everyone who was leaving, and then when we were going to take him home he wanted to stay, and then he wanted to come with us. He made me nearly piss myself, he was so funny (si se va su merced a san telmo pues yo me voy con su merced huevon); ewa and I headed off with Ura and Fabian ended up driving round with him for ages in a cab trying to get him to remember where he lived but he couldn’t, so Fabian just left him back with Roberto and came home.

The next day was brilliant too, through markets and parks and bars, to the edge of the city, and later to an Armenian restaurant which was the best meal I have ever had, I can’t describe the flavours. It was great, and a nice last meal with the guys. When we got back we sorted out bags and I left my Nietzsche book with Fabian. The next morning we said our goodbyes, to our friends and to Buenos Aires, and we flew to the one of the last towns before the Antarctic Circle.

ivan the not so terrible

The flight stopped in Bariloche, a magnificent landing, and as we took off again, a pair of eagles followed our path. When we arrived in El Calafate there was no other bus (the first one was full, that was it) and there wouldn’t be a taxi for 40 minutes. As we made our way into the town, we had the impression that it was being constructed in front of us, a frontier town. The steppe continued south to Ushuaia, the southernmost settlement on the planet, and then that´s it. El Calafate and El Chalten 4 hours next door were established in a rush to mark political territory; the land was still disputed between Chile and Argentina in the 60´s, and its township urbanism has an air of a gold rush community, but the commodity here comes wrapped in North Face and Lowe Alpine. Half the tourists on the continent spill in here to get away from the other half, presumably, and the town replies accordingly – there are mountaineering shops everywhere, the hostels are called Last Stop, Adventurer, etc. How this will change as time goes on is hard to guess.

The main reason we came here was to see the Perito Moreno glacier, one of the only advancing ice fields in the world, and the third largest reserve of freshwater on the planet. It is 1.25 times the surface area of Buenos Aires. It is unfathomable; even when a boat sails close to it there is something strange about it, something off, as if it is a unconvincing piece of CGI. It rips the valley asunder, slowly. We took a boat out to get near it, and the colours of the glacier are seen more clearly – these colours are blue-violet, cerulean, and teal, among others. Bits fall off and collapse into the lake; they don’t look like much till they hit the water, and you realise that this one was the size of a truck, this one a house. Later, when we were about to leave, there was one massive collapse, a storm of noise, all around us – terrifying for a second – then we went back.

Ivan in the hostel was great, he told us to get in, see the ice-cube and head off as soon as possible. He proved to be the benchmark for sound hostel workers, and we would later end up meeting his best friend on the other side of the continent. We took a late bus to El Chalten and rolled into the Rancho Grande at 10pm that night.

big

El Chalten, the newest town in Argentina, is serious business. We woke early, the Fitzroy range looming over our heads as we made our way outside. the mountains here are some of the toughest peaks to climb on earth. The park wardens scare the shit out of you, intentionally, and there are black widow spider warnings on the notice boards. Here we climbed, and ate, and slept, and that was about it. We saw so many eagles that they became commonplace. On our first day, St. Patrick´s day, we made it to the base of the cerro grande after 9 hours walking and saw a condor hovering over the glacial lake in the valley, waiting. We were destroyed on our way down, it had been 9 serious hours, and there wasn’t much drinking. Dad’s horse was racing in Cheltenham and he came in fourth place I found out later, a great result, but the internet is a satellite connection, I didn’t find out for days.

The next morning we faced the reality of sorting out a 32 hour bus journey. Up until now we had come across our share of oddbods and lunatics, but the guy at the bus terminal that we bought our tickets from deserves attention, medical and otherwise. The shutter of his little window was half down so we had to stoop to talk to him. He was small and roundy and he had that strange feature where the hair of the moustache doesn’t grow in the middle, right under the nose, but only on the sides, giving him a benign Genghis Khan look. He gave us a price and we went to suss out the competition, but there wasn’t any, so we found ourselves back with him; it was better for me to kneel down to talk to him, which gave the affair a weird confessional feel. He sipped his mate serenely. What was on offer, the only thing on offer, was a semi-cama for 370 pesos. Semi-cama does not translate as half a bed; it is a chair that reclines “nearly” 180 degrees. There is also full cama, which goes “even nearer” 180 degrees, but such luxury wasn’t on the cards for us on this outing. Faced with the prospect of this for a day and a half, we asked him to show us how nearly nearly was. He showed us by leaning back on the chair he was sitting on – semi cama goes back about heeeere...and full cama goes baaack abooout – when he comes crashing off the chair and spills his mate all over his belly. Semi-cama it is so, we decided, having no other option anyway. Having this lack of options, we continued with stupid questions – will we get a good night sleep we asked, all the time still kneeling. He shrugged and said that nobody has been so uncomfortable so as to make the journey back to complain – this I thought was a beautiful answer, with a lovely shape (it reminded me of a great Bob Monkhouse line – my dad laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian – well he´s not laughing now...) and he was delighted with it himself, reclining back into semi-cama position.

For some reason he needed our passports, and when he saw mine he was delighted to see I was Irish. He didn’t seem interested in the usual stuff (drink, banter, etc) but instead he told me about and Irish movie he saw where a man put his brain into a kid´s head to remember what it was like to be a kid. Totally stunned at this turn of events, and unaware of the brain-swapping sub-genre in Irish sci-fi cinema, I rattled off a few US suggestions (Big maybe? The Man with Two Brains? or the recent Zak Efron masterpiece?) but no, he assured me calmly that it was Irish. Maybe, I said...The Quiet Man? And he goes – Yeeah thats it! – I realised then that I had to spend as much time with this guy as possible. What about the kid’s brain, I asked, where did they put that? Yeah, he said, they left that kind of open. And what, I ventured, from an ontological point of view was resolved, I mean, it´s the guy´s brain inside a kids head, did he feel like a kid? Unfortunately this will never be answered as it was one question too much for ewa, whose patience was wearing as thin as the skin on her knees, so we paid for the tickets and said goodbye.

On the second climb we ploughed through a raincloud to see the full range open up to us for the first time. We moved to the hotel next door that evening, a much better place at the same price, though the place was so new that the phones were there for show, and the TV was hung on a wall without a plug socket. We made it to a concert in the town hall but headed off pretty early. The following day was another huge climb, this time up to the base of Fitzroy to the most beautiful setting I have ever seen – the beginning of the snow level, with a huge glacier feeding a lake the colour of which is hard to describe. I washed my feet and had a snowball fight with some Germans. We made our way down with the sun. Later on we had a fine meal in a great restaurant, a huge steak, and then half of ewa´s. The next day was a short walk and the rugby match; we went back to the same place and had the piss taken out of us as Scotland ran in tries against Ireland. Then quickly back to the hotel, collected the bags, and we jumped on the bus. It stopped along the way, notably for 4 hours in Perito Moreno at the exact time of the Boca V River match, which ended up being cancelled 10 minutes into the game because of torrential rain. We continued on through the next night and arrived in Bariloche early the next morning.

a fold in the map 1

Our hotel was a steep climb up a hill along the bank of the lake. We sussed out prices for cars and took it easy after a long bus journey; we ate chocolate and had a bad dinner in a Germanesque restaurant – there is something here that seems Germanic – the sausages, the chocolate, the well constructed timber balconies; the people are a little more reserved too. The next day, after renting a car, we set off on what was supposed to be a day trip into Chile. The plan was to see a new project for a thermal baths built in the mountains over the border, and hopefully return the next day through San Martin. This reality was: 4 days travelling, camping 2 nights, a flight to the border coming back, a rally across the Andes on a dirt track in the pitch dark with one headlight, an overnight stay in no man´s land, a completely destroyed car, and a peculiar suspicion that we had met a devil.

It started smoothly as we made our way to the border, with condors hovering above us the whole way, and alpacas jumping out of the way of the car. The crossing was funny, particularly on the Chilean side; there were three windows we had to present ourselves at, police, customs and vehicle registration I think, all of whom taking a keen interest in where we were from. We were firmly on Chilean soil by 3pm. Across the border you arrive directly into Villarica national park, named after one of the many volcanoes in the area, all calmly exhaling thick black smoke from time to time. The first thing you notice as you cross the border is the richness of green, thick Cavan ditches alongside the roads, cattle feeding in thick deep grass, but the trees tell you you´re not in Ireland anymore – huge trees towering over the road, dripping with long ropes of ivy, branches spilling into the ground and becoming roots again, dead trees half fallen on others. The clouds that form over the pacific come inland but only to a point, and on this side of the mountains it lashes. We wound our way down a ridiculous zigzag until we got to the park warden´s house, where there was a sign saying –back in 5 minutes– which sounded improbable. After a quick snoop around, though, two ranch hand looking characters with John Deere caps and beer breath appeared from the house, saying they were the wardens. This sounded, and smelt, unlikely, but they were good help in any case; we even gave them a lift into town. Two hours driving later and not out of the national park, we realised that this would be a longer trip than planned.

We camped outside Pucon with a Jewish guy who had a meditation centre and that night we headed out to Los Pozones, a thermal bath that was open till 3am. This place was incredible, you arrive at it from a hill and you see a series of pools in the moonlight, all dimly lit, steam rising from each one, up through the valley. We spent 2, maybe 3 hours there, it was impossible to sense the time passing. We were mostly on our own, the odd visitor passed by, appearing briefly and disappearing in the mist. I sat and held my girlfriend and looked at the stars and felt the heat of the earth and it felt good.

Seeing that it would take us much longer than expected to find the project I was looking for, we stopped in Pucón for breakfast and bought tickets for our journey later on through Chile. The dogs are all insane in Pucón, travelling in packs and barking at anything doglike (which includes most things). This is probably a result of the constantly erupting volcano looming over the city of which the people seem to have a resigned acceptance. This is a country that recently suffered the 5^th largest recorded earthquake (8.8, February 2010), and regularly faces tsunami warnings along the coast (which, given the skinniness of Chile, is the entire country). But the dogs live in a constant state of madness, torn between a loyalty to their masters and a desire to flee to the hills. Getting things organised, we headed off to look for the termas geometricas, a renovation of other hot springs in the area, and a project that had won national architectural prizes and international acclaim. After literally lapping the volcano we arrived at a road leading up to the hot baths. 17km up the hill you arrive at a dip in the road from which steam rises, directly from the ground. There are a number of natural baths, but the geometricas is the best, an incredible scheme of timber bridges and walkways, painted a gorgeous red, through a huge cleft in the mountain from which hot water rises. A few minutes here and you allow yourself think that this is really one of the magic places on the earth. We couldn’t resist it. We stayed for hours, and talked about how strange the planet is, opening up to show us how deep it is, and how small we are. The volcano gave out belches of smoke above us, and the water bubbled beneath.

The guys in the baths were great too, giving us a lovely broth when we finished and showing us the best way to get back across the border – our options were to 1. go back around the volcano and across where we made the pass the first time, 2. take a dodgy road over the mountains on the condition that we have a 4x4, or 3. wait for the next day to take a ferry over a lake to the border near San Martin. Faced with the hassle of adding another day onto our trip, we went to a police station in Coñaripe, where we talked with a sergeant who said that if we wanted to cross today we could take the mountain road to Liquiñe, that it is eminently passable – in fact he would even call the border to let us know we were coming. The border closes at 8pm he said, but it was half six and it was a hour´s drive. Super we thought, get to the border at 8, into San Martin at 9 or so, and we´ll have the day trekking. Such was the idea. But as we make our way to Liquiñe, after a benign caution – road works sign, we find ourselves behind trucks and steamrollers that are literally laying the road in front of us. We managed somehow to get around them, onto the dirt track and after a half an hour at 20km/h we made it to the border just past eight. There was a small building, a flag and a barrier blocking the way to a dark path up the mountain. There was no light on in the building; I remember thinking when I went to the door that if they answer, then all will be ok. They answered, but all was not ok. Normal procedure with border crossing is to leave one territory and enter another but, crossing the Andes, normal procedures don’t apply. After 20 minutes of questions, stamping and registering the details of the car, Carabinero Loyola (I’ll never forget his name - the Jesuit, just following orders) told us that the Argentinean border crossing is located 60km over the mountain, and that floods and the earthquake have left the path with some complications, but as we have been stamped out of Chile, we were to leave. There was no recourse to sleep in the car and leave in the morning. We had complained that it was the cops in the first place that told us to take this path, this pissed him off. It was now 9pm and pitch-black outside. Ewa wasn’t looking forward to it, and I didn’t feel positive about the affair, but we had no choice; Loyola´s peon raised the barrier and we made our way into the blackness ahead.

a fold in the map 2

Despair hit quickly – I thought that we would be at least out of the valley before we found trouble, but our first turn up the track was the steepest and the worst. The car got immediately stuck, and I had to get out and push while Ewa floored it. This didn’t work and I started to realise that the car was just ploughing through mud and veering scarily close to the edge of the path (the drop was a sheer one down into thick forest). I found big flat stones with the light from my mobile and laid them out under the front wheels and wedged two huge branches behind the back ones, bb revved it and I gave it one mighty push and we made it out. As I got back in the car I realised a few things: that there is just the two of us in this, no one else can help, that to do this will take hours, many hours, and that it is going to test us. But I saw other things two, that my girlfriend had a level of grit and seriousness that I hadn’t seen until now, and that I would do anything to keep her safe. The road continued as it began but we learnt to read the path and keep the car in the middle. The car was taking such a beating though, from stones and craters that the right headlight packed in which meant I had to get out at most right hand turns to see where we were going. Most dips in the road were completely flooded, which involved me getting out and checking the depth of the water with a stick, and guiding ewa through the shallowest way. We got used to the low thuds under the car, but every so often there would hit a terrible clank, stone on metal, and we would look at each other thinking is that it so? But it wasn’t, each time the car continued and every flooded dip that bb flew through, now confident after 3 hours of beating this fucking path, I would think, Christ, I love this girl!

We were both avoiding the truth though, the awful truth, that we made 15km in 3 hours. Something had to give, the car or our patience. It was here though, where fate entered, and the events that transpired, or the significance of these events, are still floating in my mind, and my heart, looking for anchor. Even if this appears as merely a story I can only say that, interpretations aside, the events that I write about are all true.

At one of the moments I was out of the car, I took my time walking back to it after ewa raced through a sodden pothole. It was a clear and beautiful night, mercifully dry, and I found myself looking to the sky and talking to Paul, and asking for help as I have done a few times before, with the promise that if it arrived it would be recognised as such and acknowledged. We had discussed parking the car and sleeping in it, but till now there was literally nowhere that we had seen to pull over, and in any case, I had noticed that the forest was making strange sounds. So I suppose I was looking for something extraordinary. As got back in the car we set off slowly and made our way around a few bends until, as the road started to flatten out, we saw in front of us a thick low cloud sitting on the road. It was 11 at night, and in the one headlight it looked impossible, but there is was, hanging eerily in front of us until the car drove through it, and it parted. If we hadn’t spent time in Pucón and Coñaripe we wouldn’t have known the truth – that somewhere near here the earth had opened up and there are hot springs around us. At night the water vapour gathers in heavy sods and the cold keeps it low and clotted. We passed through three or so of these, registering their weirdness but perhaps being already too on edge to be scared. And then, 10 minutes further, we see a sign on the road, the first that we had seen. It said LahuenCo Hotel Spa 100 metros. This was 20 km into no-man´s-land in the Chilean Andes, but improbable as it seemed, here was a hotel. We took the turn into a driveway down to a low building, modern, timber framed, and totally empty. We entered into a lobby with leather sofas and a huge mahogany coffee table, but no reception, no desk, nobody. To our left there were rooms, numbered, but nothing else. A huge window behind the couches looked out onto blackness. I checked the doors to two of the rooms; all closed. The corridor faded away in the dim light; I thought of the corridors of The Shining but thought it sensible not to share this with ewa. We thought for a while of just sleeping on the couch and leaving a note beside ourselves, but we decided to explore outside. We lapped around the outside of the building, nothing, and we walked back up to the road to see if we missed a turn. Sure enough, there is a small sign saying reception 200 metres.

LahuenCo, as it turns out, is Quechua for “miraculous water”. The reception, restaurant and health spa is in a totally separate building of the same design further down the road, but is connected to the residential building by a wooden path. We make our way into a huge reception and ring a gong. The manager, young looking but grey haired, grey eyed, greets us. His dark eyebrows pointed in a gothic arches. We told him of our adventure, and he smiled and welcomed us, and told us to relax, that we would spend the night here. His name was Daniel.

He showed us back to the rooms along the path; it wasn’t lit but he had a torch. He checked the first room on the corridor, 14, but I knew we wouldn’t be sleeping there. He came out and told us that it was missing towels, so he showed us into room 13. It couldn´t have been any other room under the circumstances. On his way out, he asked us did we have a torch ourselves; we said no – well now you do – he said, and left us with his light. We showered and lay on crisp linen sheets and laughed. The previous night we slept in a tent. As ewa got ready, I went out to look again at the sky; the same sky as always but now incandescent, the stars cast shadows and the planet Venus (the Morningstar!) shone low and firm. I paid my respects and offered my gratitude. Daniel came up to get us at 11.30, the chef was about to leave so we went back to eat. The one other couple staying in the hotel had left about an hour ago apparently; the restaurant was ours. We had an onion soup and a fine steak and red wine, and then a lemon tart. Daniel took our orders and served us the food, and when we finished he cleared the plates. If the chef left, we didn’t see him go; it seemed that our friend the manager was the only person in the building.

Flushed after red wine, we had tea and felt complete. Red meat in no man´s land – it all fed an atavistic hunger inside us. Our surroundings were the most lavish we had experienced by far and the whole affair was spectacularly expensive, but inventions like money and national boundaries seemed to be all too human this night. We asked Daniel to join us; we were intrigued by him and curious. Where we are at the moment, geographically (he smiled as he explained), comes under the law of Argentina, but we were outside of the two borders. Basically it's complicated, he said. He kind of left it at that, and looked out the window, but in any case it seemed best to leave it nebulous. We asked him about himself, where he lived. He had been living here in the hotel since it opened 3 months previous. Before that there was just the forest. He was born in Buenos Aires but he seemed to hate the place. He had lived in hotels quite a bit, working as a manager in the Sheraton at the Iguassu Falls for 10 years (a hotel that sits directly on another border, between Argentina and Brasil). He was extremely open, telling us about his life, personal things – his split from a band he sang in, the break-up of his relationship with the mother of his kids, how he lives here and they live in Buenos Aires. The more he told us the stranger it felt, pity not being the first sentiment that a hotel manager usually inspires. And there were weird things, inconsistencies – he would say something and then deny it, or contradict it. He became strangely animated when we talked about frontmen in bands and I said that only someone like Jagger can really pull off a song like Sympathy for the Devil. He said he loved football but when I mentioned Henry´s handball against Ireland, he told us he didn’t know much about football. He chose to live away from his children so as they wouldn’t see him unhappy. Nothing freaky, but it was enough for me to think, and say to ewa, there´s something strange about Daniel. We finished up at half one. He told us that the hot baths outside were there to be used if we wanted. I tried to persuade ewa but I was a half-hearted attempt, we were both drained. So with our new light, we wandered slowly to our bedroom.