Chapter 12

After three days I'd had more than enough of Pucon. Barioloche, Argentina was the next destination, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to get there via Puerto Montt, Chile or return to San Martin de los Andes to break up the trip. I decided to try Puerto Montt just because I figured I had already seen SM de los Andes.

Ever since I'd gotten my music stolen, I prayed for a movie every bus ride. Eight out of ten times there was no movie shown, one of out 10 times it was the worst movie ever and the other one time the movie would be tolerable. From Pucon to Puerto Montt I got “Walking Tall.” This qualified as somewhere between tolerable and the luckiest bus ride ever. Unfortunately the audio was badly messed up. At the start of the film Dr. Dre's “Next episode” oddly played over the movie. I would have loved nothing more than to listen to Dre's Chronic 2001 over the entire movie, but tragically the Dre died out after five seconds.

At the time I was more worried about forgetting what Dre’s drums sound like on the Chronic 2001 more than forgetting what some of my family and friends’ faces look like.

One of the more fun aspects of my trip is going to places with zero clue how they would look. I feel like anywhere in the States I will know how it looks just from watching movies and television. In South America I often knew nothing about a town until I showed up.

The Notre Dame crew and weird Oregon duo spoke highly of Puerto Montt, so I decided to check it out. The Lonely Planet called it “unscenic,” and when I arrived there I realized “unscenic” was a nice way of saying “shit hole, if Chile had a Detroit it would be called Puerto Montt.” I got off the bus and was greeted by a kind, old lady who sold me on staying at her place.

On the 4-block walk from the bus terminal to her house we had to take a detour because we almost got mugged by a deranged-looking bum. A great start for my first 10 minutes in the town. I dropped my bags in my new room and walked around the town enough to realize that Detroit is probably a lot nicer and safer than Puerto Montt. My place was nice inside, but was located in what I'd call the 8 mile/ kilometer district of Puerto Montt.

I was starving so I prepared myself a dinner in the vintage kitchen. Vintage may not be a strong enough word to describe the interior décor, which made my late grandfather's house (which hadn't changed since his wife died 20 years ago) look modern chic. After I cooked a potato dinner I crashed my host, Senora Maria Fresia's tea party. I felt pretty silly as I ate my dinner with three Chilean women all over the age of 60, it was like I crashed the set of a Chilean version of the "Golden Girls."

I walked around the town the next day until I learned there was nothing to see at all in the town. So I retired to my homestay, lied there and watched television all day. It was actually nice to take a vacation from my vacation. I caught an episode of “Will & Grace,” “The Weeds” and some CNN. I learned that during my mission to break my routine and try and change everything I forgot how happy I was doing nothing laying around watching television. Actually that was just the moral of the story in the “Scrubs” episode I watched.

Chapter 11

The following night a group of eight kids from Notre Dame invaded my hostel. Despite the fact that I came down to Argentina as an exchange student myself, I despised every exchange student I met.

While I was in Mendoza a group of kids from Duke took over the ping pong table to play beer pong. After a month of living in hostels, I learned that the only way to prove your country's superiority to another's is by holding your own in a game of table tennis. That being said these stupid Yanks were making a mockery of my homeland by using the sacred table for a bullshit drinking game. Everyone else in the hostel just glared at them with a look of death.

This group from Notre Dame was far worse than the Duke posse as they spent the night talking about drinking beer, shotgunning beer, doing beer bongs, talking about beer, drinking liquor and drinking beer. The following morning they stumbled into the family room and spent three hours analyzing what they had drank the night before, how hungover they were and trying to pinpoint the very moment they officially blacked out the night before.

Please don't ask me to justify my own actions of watching TV or bring up the Leonardo DiCaprio "Beach" theory because it will make my head explode.

Additionally my first meal in Chile consisted of a hamburger that contained living bugs on it and this was at the place the hostel recommended.

Chile wasn't all bad though as I went on a 40-kilometer bike ride by myself and I saw some of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen in my life. I made it to a secret waterfall where I sat alone, with no other tourists and no kids from Notre Dame for an hour in front of a gorgeous crystal clear waterfall contemplating how good life is. I thought about how fortunate I was to be on this trip and have health, happiness as well as the health and happiness of my friends and family. I then moved to a nice grassy valley, where all I could hear was the river gently flowing and the wind rustle between the trees. There in the middle of nowhere I thought about all the nice things I thought about in front of the waterfall in addition to how fortunate the world is that we can all watch LeBron James dominate the NBA for at least another 10-15 years.

I sat there for 30 minutes trying to capture the absolute tranquility in my day journal. Then I began to bike the 20 kilometers back home. The ride home wasn't as perfect as the ride to the waterfall. Rain began to pour and I was dead tired with no money or food on me. I started peddling in the direction of home and after a couple of kilometers I got lazy and put my thumb out with the intention to hitchhike back to town. I was told it was quite safe to hitchhike everywhere in Argentina and I assumed Chile would be no different. I also knew that if things got ugly and I was tortured, killed and left in a shallow grave in a country I hate, perhaps one day somebody would find my journal, be able to translate it and eventually turn it into a lame movie that was narrated by Katt Williams. Then I remembered that I didn't have my name or Katt Williams name in my journal. So I took cover in a bus stop (I didn't have enough money for the bus, nor was there room on the small bus for my bike) and wrote in the front cover of my journal “Si buscas este diario por favor escriba Justin Adler a justinadler1@gmail.com,” then I wrote in English that I wanted Katt Williams to narrate my life story should the situation present itself.

Chapter 10

I had never even heard of Pucon, Chile until a day before I hopped on a bus heading to the town on the Chilean/Argentine border. Truthfully, I hate Chile. I don't like their weird 2,000 pesos for a hamburger currency. I don't like their flag's colors. Even the shape of the country pisses me off. But I decided I should give it a fair shot. 

On the bus ride over I met two guys from Bend, Oregon. Neither one was much of the talkative type, but the younger one, Jason, did not say a word for the first eight hours we hung out. Eventually I directed a question toward him, forcing him to break his unwarranted vow of silence. I learned he was a senior in high school who had been home-schooled by his mother for his entire life. Outside of parents who lock their kids in a basement and keep them alive only for sexual gratification, I can't think of a better way to socially retard your child other than homeschooling. 

His friend, Kalon, who was slightly cooler, older and more talkative, told me he worked as an underwater welder, which if you are  going to travel and make up a fictitious profession is as good as they come. However when I tried to ask him more about his career in aquatic assemblage, he really wouldn't tell me anything. He also had seven tally marks scarred over his heart. When I asked him about the tally marks, which appeared to be self-inflicted, he gave me a weird stare before saying, “Yeah... I really don't talk about that.” 

I assumed he did it while high on crystal meth because the only other time I'd seen such ugly, painful looking body art, my co-worker admitted to giving himself a tattoo with pen ink, a needle and an RC car battery during his third straight day of doing crystal meth. Whatever, more power to Kalon for overcoming his crystal meth addiction to become an underwater welder. 

One day as I sat alone in the hostel eating lunch, I noticed Jason's journal sitting on the family room table. I decided to read it because I knew I wouldn't get caught, and also because I felt entitled since my travel journal is a blog in the public domain, but mainly because I knew I wouldn't get caught. Hoping for some outrageous psychotic writing, I was disappointed to read the most boring entries ever. It was nothing more than where he had been, what he bought from the grocery story and how it tasted. His mother is a shit writing teacher.

Chapter 9

I had high expectations for San Martin de los Andes as it was the birth place of my birds teacher Horacio, and I figured any environment that produced Horacio would probably be my kind of town.

I walked the entire town in 10 minutes, then found the cheapest hostel. I was the only guest in the entire hostel. Everything appeared too good to be true: the rooms were spacious and clean, the bathrooms were immaculate and the kitchen was fully stocked. Then I walked up stairs and found one of the employees, Deuel, holding a pair of pliers to his mouth as he sucked the final breath out a joint. I courteously waited until the Mamas and the Papas video stopped playing during the VH1 “I love America” marathon, and then asked him for a lighter to ignite the stove.

Deuel looked at me funny, paused for 30 seconds, then handed me the lighter. I realized that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the hostel other than the fact that it was being run by the most incompetent potheads in San Martin de los Andes. And by incompetent potheads, I mean awesome guys who get paid (albeit small amounts of money) to smoke pot and practice skateboard tricks in the backyard all day. In other words, people whom I am very jealous of.

I also learned that one of the hostel boludos, Nicolas, lives in a tiny cabin in the town and pays 300 pesos (less than 100 USD) for rent each month. And that is now my ultimate plan B in life.

During the day, I went on hiking adventures through the stunning mountains with nothing but an apple, notepad, camera, water bottle and ham-and-cheese sandwich. I sat on a massive rock over-looking the town, and thought about how I could give back to Argentina. I had met several people while traveling who would take a month off and volunteer at an orphanage or something to that effect.

So far, the only time I had given back to the good people of Argentina was when I installed Firefox 3 on a computer in Salta, and when I tossed a ball back over the wall of a school in Mendoza.

Maybe it was a result of too much hanging out with the guys from the hostel, but then I came up with the greatest idea I knew I'd never realize: become a volunteer firefighter in a small town. It seemed like the best idea ever: fight fire, have a free place to sleep, be able to put Argentine firefighter on my resume, but later on somebody told me you can't just be a volunteer firefighter for a week and I was too lazy to ever seriously look into it.

I continued to hike along seeing things that looked like this as I imagined myself fighting fires in Argentina.

The United States presidential election also occurred while I was in SM de los Andes. From what I was told, Americans were fairly excited for the election. I remember checking the early results online, but being more engrossed in a large bowl of pasta that the hostel "workers" and I had cooked up. Then I sent my friends this e-mail (which I have left unedited):

i figured everythig out in life almost. life in this city is nuts. its crazy people just live in cabins and do nothing all day. just get high and skateboard,.

san martin de los andes is where its at.

oh yeah i plan on opening up a hanggliding school soon, let me knwo if you want in.

should add that ive been on a big mix of argentine rock and james brown all night.

also should add that i have no clue at all what day it is. or what country i am going to be in tomorrow. i also didnt realize the elections were goigng on for half the fuckin day. alll i cared about was how ai is gonna fit in detroit.

To which one my friends replied:

Jesus christ i cant tell you how awesome it is. I am watching the elections, its kinda gay.

I am really into this indian girl, Dharini. She is the most ride or die chick ive ever met. on halloween she was rolling on 5 hits of e. sexy.

Then, after a bag of cookies and two loafs of bread, I passed out. I woke up the next morning feeling like one does after consuming large quantities of pasta, cookies, and bread. I walked outside and tried to figure out where I was, then everything came back to me and I turned on the TV to make sure Obama won. He had, which put a smile on my face only because I knew it meant one day this video could be made.

Chapter 8

I met a lot of good people in Mendoza. I wasn't sure how I could work them all into these silly anecdotes, so I did the only logical thing I could think of; I made power rankings of the people I met.

Mendoza Crew Power Rankings:

11. Sebastian – Disgusting. Gross. When a bunch of backpackers say you stink you have a problem. Alcholic. Nobody really liked this guy. Pictured on the left in above photo. I'm still not sure how my camera took a photo during the millisecond when he didn't have a cigarette.

10. Hostel manager Dino – Flaming homosexual, wore all denim or denim capris with an Afrika Bambaataa/Zulu tribe shirt. One night he got drunk, went up to a male guest and asked if he wanted to touch his junk.

9. Odd couple from Belgium – The token old couple staying in the hostel. These two never said a word, but often played table tennis against each other at 11 pm. The guy also rocked denim shorts and Timberland boots, which had not been done since Redman in the late 90s, so for that I respected them.

8. Josh and Shawn from Wyoming – Just some good dudes who live and die for fly fishing. They came to Argentina just to fly fish for 2 months.

7. The hostel nightshift boludo – Boludo is Castellano for dumbass/friend/motherfucker depending on the context. Many Argentines say boludo every other word, just like anyone who hangs out with me will notice I say motherfucker every other word. I never manned up and applied for a hostel job, but I imagine the first question on the application is: "If a guest needs drugs at 3 in the morning, will you be able to hook the guest up?" This guy definitely hooked the entire hostel up. Also, he killed the internet in the lobby at night so he could make out with trashy whores on the lobby sofa on the nights when he wasn't sprawled out on the same couch in a stoned stupor.

6. The old dude traveling from Auckland – Old, couldn't relate to that many people. Could roll joints with the best of them. Then could relate to everyone.

5. Matt the Canadian – A human IMDB. Thought the biggest problem with today's youth is that all the Legos have sponsorships which limits kid's imaginations. In the middle of a diatribe against Indiana Jones Lego sets, he said my favorite line of the trip, "I remember when I was growing up my little brother could make five different car sounds. I know kids today who can't even make one car sound."

4. The incredible Irish couple – Greg (pictured above) and Nadia simplified everything in life to a beautiful level. They both illegally live in New York City and both work at Irish pubs. I told them about my goal of moving to NYC, and they were the first people to tell me how easy it is to live in NYC. After talking to them for 30 minutes, they never once said the word "recession", nor did they complain about the high cost of living. I loved hanging out with them because they never over thought anything in life, an issue I struggle with. They reminded me of one of my favorite quotes in life, which came from the rapper DMX on an episode of Rap City in the late 90s.

"That's what happens when n*ggas start thinking," X said between twitching and wiping his nose. "That's why n*ggas shouldn't think." At first I loved the line for the sheer ignorance as DMX appeared to be encouraging African-Americans to never think. As I grew older I learned to appreciate DMX's line for the subtle brilliance as he was warning society of the pitfalls of over-thinking small issues in life. Due to my Irish friends and DMX I still plan on moving to NYC, as long as I don't over think it.

3.Two gay young Argentines – I don't care about people's sexual orientation. If you can cook empanadas like these guys, I care even less about your sexual orientation.

2. Cara – Just a dope ass chick. Would ask me a million weird questions, but somehow they were all enjoyable. I now know her favorite word, what she'd bring on a desert island, who she'd fuck, marry, throw off a cliff, and the three people she wants to meet in heaven.

1. Grass – One of the craziest, most abrasive, yet genuinely nice guys I have ever met in my life. Hardcore 33-year-old Aussie who mocked me for being a Yank every chance he could.

I can't do impersonations to save my life, but I can say "You fuckin' seppo!" in a perfect Aussie accent because that's all I ever heard. If you don't know, Aussies call Americans seppos because septic tank rhymes with Yank and they're both full of shit. The only way I can describe some of the greatness I witnessed would be to begin a new power ranking within this power ranking. So here are Grass' top moments:

5. Grass transformed his bunk bed into a fort. Then had sex in the fort despite the fact that his bed was no more than six inches from my bed.

4. Three new girls entered our hostel, one who was disabled and walked with crutches. Grass yelled to the other two, "You girls better hurry, she's almost caught up!"

3. Eating dinner outside the hostel, a poor child came up to our table to beg for food. Grass grabbed a slice of pizza and tossed it at her like a dog.

2. Grass explained how Aboriginals are the only second class citizens in Australia, but how they put themselves in their own situation. "If an Aboriginal ever asks me for money, I tackle him, put him in a choke hold and tell him to get a job and stop drinking," Grass said with dead serious conviction.

1. A new female guest entered our room after Grass and I had shared the room for a week. Grass peeked his head out of his self-assembled fort and warned her not to touch the shirt on the ground unless she wanted to get pregnant.

Chapter 7

I hung out for several days in Mendoza just because I had a solid group of friends in the hostel and Mendoza was the perfect town. If you enjoy perfect weather and streets perfectly lined by sycamores with running canals lining their perimeter, you would probably enjoy Mendoza.

We were all broke travelers so we hung out a lot in the hostel and watched whatever was on the TV. One night we watched “The Beach” because there is nothing better to do while traveling than watch a movie about somebody else traveling. As I sat there jotting down my notes and writing silly ironic lines like the sentence before this one, Leonardo DiCaprio beat me at my own game as he sat in a Thai hostel and said, “We all travel thousands of miles just to watch TV and check in to somewhere with all the comforts of home, and you gotta ask yourself, what is the point of that?”

And at that point I lost my mind a little bit, so I went to bed halfway through the movie. And then I realized that I always went to bed halfway through movies when I lived in the United States. And then I realized that Leonardo DeCaprio won again. And then I got angry. And then I fell asleep.

The next day Cara and I voyaged to some thermal baths that were a 40-minute bus ride outside of town. It was almost as if God knew I needed a reason to relax from an already relaxing vacation so he made the bus ride extremely annoying and stressful. Every kid from the greater Mendoza region seemed to hop on the bus and many of them sang and danced around the aisle. At one point a little boy decided to sneeze directly into my ear, filling my entire ear canal with snot. This was a little frustrating.

Then his older brother wanted to show off his English skills and vast knowledge of the United States, which involved him repeating three cities over and over again. He asked a few questions. When I told him I was from Arizona, he looked at his younger brother and confidently said Arizona is just like Feeladelphia.

Finally we made it to the thermal baths. Beautiful warm pools in the middle of a scenic canyon. The only tough part was not staring at the 16-year-olds wearing next to nothing because I didn't want God to give me diarrhea again.

I just sat there and stared at the canyon, the beautiful blue sky and thought about life. I didn't come up with much, but I settled upon a tattoo. I had been thinking about getting a tattoo a month before I left for Argentina. However I could never settle on what I wanted. While swimming in the hot baths, I finally figured it out. I used to have a mole on the palm of my left hand that has faded over the years. I decided I should get it redone because it would be the best tattoo ever. It would symbolize the beauty in the world's asymmetry and it would be very individualistic because I don’t know many people who have had moles redone. Then I realized that that could very well be the gayest thing I ever considered and I started doing Cara's crossword puzzle to try to bring my mind back to normal.

That night I sat in my chair and wrote as Cara watched TV next to me. I thought about how awesomely psychotic it would be if I just kept stealing the life story of whoever I met in my last spot and passed it off as my own when I kept traveling. Then “House” came on and they diagnosed a patient who has mirror disease, in which he steals other peoples illnesses. Fuck. This was the second night in a row the TV had stolen my ideas.

Chapter 6

Although my stay in Mendoza began with me sitting in a cheap restaurant thinking I was going to die, Mendoza ended up being the one of my favorite places in Argentina.

I ditched Sebastian and met a nice girl named Cara, who lost everything she owned to a house fire when she was 10 and then to Hurricane Katrina when she was 22. Recently she decided to give everything up on her own accord and start traveling. Her past misfortunes made me realize that losing some electronics was not quite the end of the world.

Cara and I decided we would try the popular wine tours in Maipú, a small town 15 kilometers south of the city of Mendoza. Mendoza is the wine capital of a wine-rich country and Maipú was one of the many small towns full of wineries. I woke up quite hungover from the night before but knew I had no real reason to puss out on a day which involved bike riding and drinking wine.

I stumbled out of my room at 9:30 in the morning with a gameplan of forcing as many breakfast rolls in me as possible, hoping they would absorb all the toxins in my body. Everything was blurry, but out of the corner of my eye I noticed a guy and girl still drinking with a pile of cigarette butts in front of them roughly the size of Mount Aconcagua. Five minutes later, I realized it was my friend Cara and some guy named Matt. I asked if she was still down for bikes and wine and without hesitating, she said of course. I definitely needed to shake my hangover off and harden the fuck up.

We biked from winery to winery, taking a tour of each facility. After that became too strenuous we settled in the middle of one of the vineyards with a great $4 bottle of red wine we bought from the winery which had the nicest tour and we ate the sandwiches we packed the night before. While sitting in a plot of dirt underneath a crystal clear sky with the snow-capped Andes in the bac as Cara told me she disliked Alanis Morissette simply because the song “Ironic” is really not ironic at all because each described scenario is actually tragic. Then, after we thoroughly analyzed Morissette's other work, we drunkenly rode our bikes back into the center of the small town. A local 10-year-old rode up beside me and gave me the look, so I had no choice but to leave Cara in the dust as we raced for the next three blocks. He won, but only because he had home street advantage.

We returned our bikes back to the shop and hopped on the bus back to the town's center. Two cute girls who looked about my age sat right in front of me and Cara. I was already quite content from the wine and the perfect breeze blowing through the windows, but then one of the girls put her arm around the other. I eagerly mumbled to myself “Please go at it! Please go at it!” And then they started making out. And then I was the happiest man in all of Argentina.