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.