On the bus last night I tried my first South American lasagna and it does not even compare to the forty-five dollar lasagna I love to cook. I can't judge it since it was on a bus and not fine dining. They not only fed us three meals on the bus, but they also served us a small glass of Malbec. Quite delightful! "Greyhound, you should take notes, you dumb racing mutt!" I guess this is one of the benefits of traveling through wine country and paying the extra buck for the bang.
After dinner and a movie (nice second date, omnibus), I slowly dozed off as I watched flashes of lightning light up rectangular rooms before darkness swallowed up the light as if it never happened. It wasn't bolts of lightning, but was more like balls of light.
Today, I awoke far form the spine of the Andes, the highway ribbons away from the mountains just to head back into them again later, further south. The landscape reminded me of traveling through west Texas, western New Mexico, western Colorado, Wyoming, western Idaho, eastern California or eastern Oregon. It is a high desert-plateau, with scrub brush such as creosote brush (that they use the oils for railroad ties), acacia or cat-claw, pampas grass, chaparral with flowers mixed in in bunches and trees lining the Rio Negra. The plateau is called Baja Colorado. Cows and horses grazed along the side of the road in a vast and sparse countryside. The animals have to be careful grazing on some of these plants or they will injure their taste-bud apparatuses. Almost every plant and bush has a built in weaponry to fend off being grazed too hard by evolving thorns, spikes, claws and poisons/toxins. The cows and horses and deer must act like the giraffes of the east and south Africa where they slowly slither their tongues outwards grasping the green leaves of Acacia without getting poked.
I am not that impressed with their meager breakfasts of bread and butter or cereal with mermelade, juice, mate or coffee. I am much more of bacon, eggs and toast kind of guy no matter the day of the week. This is one of the freedoms of having a kitchen in a hostel where I don't have to eat the free breakfast food, unless I want and if I decide to cook this also allows me to save money by cooking in their kitchens.
Kites are the pre-dominant bird of prey species soaring and sailing low over the brush eagerly searching out small lizards, small rodents and small songbirds to peg with their piercing talons. I think they are in the falcon family and are much smaller than red-tailed hawks and about the size of crows not Ravens. CAW! They are a little bit bigger than kestrels and not as big as their African cousins, which I once saw swoop down and steal a chicken wing from right out of the hand of Mike England (the magazine editor of "Outside Bozeman") in Ngorro-Ngorro Crater in Tanzania, Africa.
Hoping once I start trekking high in the Andes to spot an Andean Condor with their nearly ten foot wingspan. Hopefully, it is not carrying a child in its talons.
Bicycle tourists are nearly at a crawl with the wind pushing them back and forth and off the road with each struggling pedal of their bike. At times, I wish I had my Surly (a touring steel frame bike) with me, but seeing this I don't envy them at all. Even the bus I am riding on struggles against the mighty Patagonian wind. Bus drivers are like sea captains navigating that black ribbon of highway through blustery winds that hit their invisible sails causing the bus to sway back and forth. A white volcanic ash and white sand coats the sky and ground. Mt. Lanin has been spewing this white ash into the sky where the Patagonian wind blows it every which way causing visibility to be absolutely nil at times like a white-out. Everyone I have met and talked to who have been down here as of late said be ready for the wind. The plants adapted to the wind with their tough defense mechanisms and growing close to the ground and having deep tap roots to hold them in place. I wonder if rain even hits the ground in this place or evaporates before it hits the ground. Vultures effortlessly ride the rifts of wind forever searching for animals frozen in time as carcasses
along the side of the road. Dust-devils whip and tornado across the landscape.
Traveling through the province of Rio Negro (a.k.a. the Lakes District) where humungous blue gems of water lay nestled amongst the folded ridges. The white-sandy desert lies in sharp contrast to the blues of the lakes. It almost doesn't seem possible or real to have this big of lakes or this many, but than again they are all glacially fed as the summer-time sun melts the remaining snows. As we near the Andes the north-western shore's vegetation changes from scrub brush to tall Ponderosa Pine looking trees. The green is a sweet relief for the eyes compared to the brightness of the white sand and ash. Black sea-eagles hunt along the lakes for the abundance of trout in these waters.
The landscape is continuously being shaped, carved and sculpted into these stone statuettes leaving behind white pillars and spires that resemble deities, stone gargoyles or gryphons silently waiting for night to come so they can take flight. Maybe the stone spires were once the above creatures, but are frozen in time by lava and are just remnants of a time gone past when dinosaurs also prowled and ravaged this landscape. I am starting to see more familiar plants and flowers of the alpine and montane of some of which are the same in Montana like the lilac-colored lupine, wild rose bushes, mullein and other yellow flowers, which are maybe arnica. I will have to figure it out when I am not two stories up in a bus.
I reflect back of the great people I met at the last hostel. Waves of French in the beginning of my weeks stay, then Germans and Belgiums and then Americans. I met Josh and Alice who Josh happens to work out in Washington D.C. for the national League of Conservation Voters, a group I am quite familiar with. Two of my friends Heidi Marcum and Becky Edwards work or volunteer for them in Whitefish.
Semi trucks, buses and other automobiles sputter and moan climbing the folded ridges that the meandering highway climbs as their fan belts, engines, exhaust manifolds belch and cough out black smoke as their lungs breathe in that fine sand granules and molten ash and the wind kicks their ass. The autos wince upon every uphill and downhill. If Subarus and Toyotas are the state cars of Montana then Volkswagons are the car of choice here for efficiency and smallness in Patagonia
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