Chapter 18

I had to slap myself again for being upset with silly travel woes. I had to catch an earlier bus than I planned on to leave El Bolson, which ruined my lunch plans with Rogelio. I planned on making Rogelio and Nora cinnamon French toast, one of my favorite meals and something I believed would be a monumental contribution to the El Bolson society.

I also planned on hanging out with this cute hippie vendor who works at the El Bolson artisan market. It's probably for the better that I didn't hang out with her because I would have forgotten all about Paul McPherson and most likely abandoned any semblance of a North American lifestyle after 20 minutes with her.

It was also tough to abandon my original plans to make it to the end of the world, hike Torre del Peña and see the massive glacier in El Calafate, but this blog was not created to find a big glacier.

Then I reminded myself that I was going to Bahía Blanca to meet Paul McPherson and I finally got to ride the second-level shotgun on the bus, so I got this view as we rode through Argentina’s lake district.

If I thought I was excited the night I found out about P-Mac's location, I was absurdly excited now. I just sat there staring out the window, scribbling down notes every few minutes, grinning with excitement.

I hadn't talked to anybody on the bus for the first eight hours of the trip. But when the bus stopped 20 minutes outside of Neuquén, which is a middle-of-nowhere landmark town, I decided to start talking to this women who looked about 60 years old with scraggly grey hair because she was one of the few people who had been on the bus since we started in El Bolson. I asked her where she was going and she told me Monte Hermosa, a small town outside of Bahía Blanca, that happened to be the hometown of P-Mac's current club, El Nacional de Monte Hermosa.

I told her that's where I was going to be in a few days because of a really long story which essentially boils down to their basketball team. Her eyes lit up and she told me she was a “fanatico.” I went out on a limb and asked her if she knew of Paul McPherson. Of course she did and she told me he has not played well in his first few games.

Things were already getting out of control. It was 11:45 at night, I was at a bus stop 20 minutes further removed from the official middle of nowhere and I was talking about Paul McPherson with a 60-year-old Argentine woman named Nené.

For the next half hour of the bus ride I sat next to Nené and asked her a million questions about her team, her town and anything else my tired, El-Bolson-ed brain could translate into Castellano. I got her phone number and told her I would call her when I got into town.

Ten hours later we arrived in Bahía Blanca, I gave Nené a hug and kiss and told her I would see her soon. Then I walked the bus terminal, trying to find a map so I could try to find the town's only hostel. Then a young guy with a thin beard and dark brown hair looked at me and said “Justin?”

Even though I had no idea he would be there, Marquitos, who I had only spoken to in e-mail, was waiting at the terminal for my bus to arrive nine in the morning. He gave me a ride to my hostel because he didn't have any room for me at his place. He made sure I was set up alright and then dipped off to his university.

I dropped my bags off and began to explore Bahía Blanca (which translates to White Bay) and quickly learn that the bay was not close and the town did not have much to offer. Even the people who worked at the hostel told me there was nothing to see in the town. On the way to my hostel Marquitos pointed out the old stadium of El Nacional. El Nacional used to play in Bahía Blanca, but three years ago the town of Monte Hermosa bought the squad, so they now travel the 45-minute bus ride to Monte Hermosa to play one game a week. The team still practices and lives in Bahía Blanca.

I walked two blocks from my hostel to the stadium, which was located in the middle of the city block and did not look like much of a stadium from the outside. A janitor let me in the building and I walked through the dark, decrepit building before reaching the basketball court. At first I passed a room full of antique looking gymnastics equipment. Then I entered a dark empty café with plaid red round tables, four blank walls with the exception of a mural which showed the head of a woman who looked like an 1980s pop star popping out of a Boca Juniors shield. Finally I walked through a narrow hallway into the basketball court. Much of the wood was warped and all of the painted lines were faded. Cracked concrete surrounded the immediate perimeter of the court and the locker rooms resembled prison cells. There were enough wooden bleachers to seat maybe 100 tightly packed people.

“This is no place for a hero like Paul McPherson,” I thought. Then I talked to a secretary who worked in the office above the gymnastics room and learned that El Nacional does not actually play any games there any more. I felt very relieved for P-Mac.

Chapter 17

When I wasn't being enlightened by The Chosen One, I was watching beautiful sunsets, having amazing steak dinners and enjoying the great El Bolson scene, which redefines laid back. The Argentine culture as a whole is quite casual as nothing opens too early and nothing happens at all on Sunday, but El Bolson takes it all a step further. The majority of the shops in El Bolson were open for about 15 hours a week, basically whenever the shop owner felt the urge to unlock the door.

Their fire department is named Servicio Protega y Lucha Incendio del Forest (SPLIF), which I am pretty was named for the sake of the acronym because “Forest” isn't even a Spanish word. When I told Nora, the hostel owner, about what spliff means in English she cracked up. When I wasn't talking to Russ I rapped with Nora who taught me a billion things about Argentina. Nora had lived in El Bolson since the town had 2,500 people, it now has close to 30,000. She used to be on the town's governing board and her and her husband used to act in El Bolson's theater. I would have killed to watched El Bolson theater from back in the day. But killing isn't very El Bolson-like, so I guess I should say I would have planted 1 million trees to watch their theater.


She also told me how many people in Argentina believe one of the mountains in El Bolson is an energy center. The town also declared itself a non-nuclear zone in the 1970s, even though the Argentine military has never been close to developing a nuclear weapon. There is also a fair amount of anti-Nazi propaganda around the town. If you don't like nuclear bombs or Nazis, El Bolson is the town for you.

Rogelio's failed attempt at scrambled eggs also wins the award for cutest moment of my trip. Apparently he had never seen scrambled eggs before so he asked me how I made them. I explained the simple process of mixing eggs with milk and pouring the two in a pan. I then ate my eggs in the family room. I walked back in the kitchen moments later to see Rogelio standing over the stove with a big green oven mitt holding a large plastic serving spoon as he stirred what appeared to be three eggs and a whole liter of milk in a pan. I told him that he probably used too much milk and he started laughing.

After our brunch Rogelio sadly looked at me and told me that he is very sorry to cut our time short, but he has to leave now. I asked where he was going. He told me he was going to his room to take a nap. I checked the clock, it was 1:30 in the afternoon. God bless this man.

The picture at the top of the page is Rogelio in his James Bond pose, which he struck often because he is the Argentine James Bond since his name is Rogelio Mur.

El Bolson was not all fun though as there were some rough times. While hiking alone one day I got met an older Argentine couple who invited me along to find a secret waterfall that was shown on the poorly drawn map the town tourism center provided. We ended up getting completely lost as the sun was setting and we were left clueless with no proper camping supplies. We ended up finding a farm and we talked to the teenager who lived on the land, he was of no help though as he had no idea where he lived. We eventually found a lodging facility and I caught a cab with the couple back into town.

The other mishap was much more devastating as I partook in a popular El Bolson leisure activity and the hit the town icecream parlor. I happily enjoyed a full quart of icecream and then realized there were more flavors offered than I originally knew about after I spent 10 minutes laboring over which three flavors I should chose. I will forever wonder what my life would be like if I had known there was cookies-and-cream on that ill-fated day.


Russ never left the house, except to go to the market every other day. He woke up late, ate breakfast and watched the BBC News. Then wrote his book, which was one of the primary purposes for being in Argentina. He told me his book was going to offer a solution on how the world can save itself within 10 years. When he told my fake parents this, they told him it would be too late as the Mayan calendar prophesied that the world would end in 2012. This just baffled Russ.

Even though El Bolson was a beautiful town nestled between two mountains, Russ chose to do all of his writing in the house's backyard, pictured below.


Russ' book was about a delusional bum who finds a Persian rug worth millions of dollars in a dumpster. Russ went on to explain how in his life he fought in the Navy and bypassed fighting in the Vietnam war, but the main character in his book is a crazy Vietnam vet who lives on the streets of New York.

If we are going to use that logic in life I should point out that I really spent July through December of 2008 hiding in Tucson, Arizona, but the main character of this story you are reading traveled in Argentina during that same time period.

Flogger de Tucson

Here are some pictures I took from my recent jaunt to Tucson. As always click pictures to enlarge.

Here's the bus and it's Peruvian owner. The bus has made it back to Tampa Bay twice, New York twice, and Guatemala once.

The cool Peruvian's girlfriend, Kim, let us inside and it was unreal.

The good ol' train.

This used to be the Alamo, which my friend Dustin and I tried to save one night to no avail.


Then we journeyed to BICAS, the greatest place on earth.


I know every cool hipster biker/wanna-be photographer in town has tried to get artsy picture inside BICAS, but here is my attempt. If nothing else it was good practice for when I will be competing against hipster bikers/wanna-be photographers in New York City.

I met this incredible kid Alex, who just bought this bus for $1,200 off Craigslist. He's 19, owns a bus, and will soon be heading to Seattle for art school. If I could do it all again (meaning three years ago), I think I'd do something like that.
Alex his bike, burrito, bed and bus. Three cents, a joint and a neat wallet. Ah, to be 19 again.

I looked into this thing for 30 seconds trying to figure out why the kaleidoscope did not work. Then I realized it was a tube of long-stick matches.


Me, Alex and Donovan.


Then I started taking silly MySpace-esque self-shots in the back window of the bus.

Then I got this photo, which followed my photographic goals as stated in #2 of this post, where I wrote, "And really whenever I'm shooting any photo I'm just hoping I get lucky and it looks like a Nas album cover."


So with a little editing....

Then we biked over to the Hay House (SW corner of Fremont and Waverly), which we learned was actually a straw house.
We hung out with the owner Billy, who told us all about his project.
Here is a list of things I learned:
1. Billy's old UA professor lives next door and came up with the idea.
2. Straw is a good insulator, but Billy claims the main reason for the straw use is because of its weight-bearing ability.
3. He loves the acoustics of the house and he has a lot of jam sessions inside it.
4. He lost almost everything a few years ago, but is now happy to be out of the rat race and living in a straw house in Tucson.
5. Billy is an odd, but great dude.



Here is Billy's straw bed.


This is Jim's Market, my favorite closed market in Tucson. I always dreamed of it opening and getting a great shake there. Unfortunately it never opened.

Even worse it appears Jim's Market is being taken over by Red Coats.

Chapter 16

It was 8:45 in the morning and I was rereading old wherespmac.com posts. This isn't something I normally do, but I woke up early and was still excited over the possibility of meeting P-Mac. I hopped on the house computer and decided to use some of my old journalism skills and start scouring the net for any new, relevant P-Mac news. I ended up re-reading the old Dime Magazine article, watching all his YouTube highlights and a then I began just rereading some of my old posts because there was nothing else on the net about P-Mac.

Then at 9:00 Russ walked downstairs and said, “I have a CD-ROM of supposed CAT scans I had done in Brazil. Do you think you could upload them to the computer so I could send them to some doctors I know?”

Jesus Christ. It was way too early for this shit. I had forgotten how certifiably crazy this guy was over night.

I should probably mention that Russ claims he had a brain tumor, which was partially removed (unfortunately the surgeons who removed the tumor were paid off by the government to also install the three tracking and surveillance chips in his head which were described in the e-mail from the Wayne Sigma 116818). The government also instructed the surgeons to only remove part of it so the rest would remain and slowly kill The Chosen One.

Now Russ is on a constant hunt for doctors who are not connected to the government to provide him with a CAT scan, however this is often a problem since the government agents often reach the doctors first convincing the doctors that he is psychotic, which he really is, and that he doesn't have health insurance, which he really doesn't.

Russ finally got a CAT scan done in the States and it showed he had no signs of a brain tumor. Great news right? Until Russ told this story to one of his taxi cab patrons who told Russ of the possibility the doctors scanned a healthy government agent and tried to pass off his results as Russ'.

“I can't believe I never thought of that, it was so obvious what they were doing,” Russ told me.

Soon after my breakfast Russ came down stairs with a folder holding medical information, written in Portuguese and a CD-ROM. Maybe this guy actually went to Brazil to get a CAT scan.

I popped in the CD, waited five minutes for my computer's edition of Windows 98 to load the disc and then started pulling up “alleged” images inside The Chosen One's dome.

There were about 30 images but I only had the time and patience to upload eight different pictures. I e-mailed the images to Russ so he could send them to whoever he wanted.

Then I packed my daily necessities of an apple, camera, water and journal and headed out for the day to do some more solo hiking.

On my way out of the house, Russ offered me a sincere thanks, “I really appreciate you helping me out this morning with my CAT scan images. Hopefully somebody out there can read them. You could have saved my life.”

I walked out of the house feeling better than I ever have in my life. It's not every day you get the chance to save The Chosen One's life. I think my parents would be proud.

I journeyed to the mountain and started to really get into the El Bolson spirit as I took off my shirt and rocked around my head. It was a perfect day and I was pretty happy that I was in a great hippie town and I had just saved the world by saving The Chosen One. I didn't see anybody else on my way to the mountain or on my ascent up the peak so once I got to the top I decided it would be in my best interest to remove all my clothing and just tune into nature. It was trill.

On my way back into town I ran into my fake parents Wayne and Susan, who had just checked into my hostel. I sent them an e-mail with my scouting report of the town letting them know they could stay in my hostel, since there was a nice, clean private room available. I told them everything was great at place except Russ, who I'm still not sure if he improves or hurts the hostel.

We grabbed some lunch and I tried to tell them how insane Russ is and how much of an honor it is to live with The Chosen One. We all walked back to the hostel, picking up some local beers on the way. As Wayne and Susan were in the family room I walked into the kitchen and found Russ eating alone.

“I think an agent moved into the house today,” said Russ, confusing my friend Wayne with Wayne Sigma 116818.

“No. No, don't worry that's my friend. He's OK,” I said.

“Are you sure. He looks classic agent,” Russ said. “A little older than the normal hostel crowd. He's very clean cut, he looks like an agent.”

“Russ trust me, I have known them for a month now. Wayne is definitely not an agent. Don't worry he's cool,” I said.

Wayne, Susan and I sat in the comfortable red velvet chairs drinking beers and living the good life. I invited Russ to sit with us, have a beer and meet my friends.

“Thank you, but I'm watching this movie where this guy has brain-implanted devices like I have. I don't know if Justin told you, but the government placed tracking and surveillance chips in my brain,” Russ replied to all of us.

Not a “Hi, how are you doing? My name is Russ. Nice to meet you.” Right off the bat Russ proved his insanity.

And then my fake mother started playing along with him to the point where I had to look away and shove a beer bottle up to my face to keep myself from laughing out loud.

Russ pulled a business card out of his wallet, and began telling the story of a doctor in Southern California who specializes in removing alien-installed devices in human brains.
Unfortunately the doctor refused to operate on Russ because his device was government installed and not done by aliens.

He also explained that there are many songs which directly allude to him, if not mention his name illicitly. I asked him which songs reference him. He listed a collection of 1960s rock songs I had not heard of and he also told me Enya has written several songs about Russ. I asked Russ if he had ever met Enya. He told me he had not.

Later on Russ told me he e-mailed the CAT scan images to his taxi cab friend in New York, a lawyer he met in Europe, the double agent Wayne Sigma 116818, a female model he knows in New York, another backpacker he met in Buenos Aires, and one of his disciples, who practices holistic healing. Basically every profession in the world who was not qualified to read a CAT scan.

Chapter 15

I deciphered a bunch of poorly organized Argentine web sites well enough to learn that Paul McPherson's next home game was in eight days. Then I had my new Bahía Blanca liaison confirm my findings just to make sure I wouldn't miss any precious P-Mac play time.

Having eight days to spare allowed me just enough time to make the trip down to El Bolson, only a 2-hour bus ride south of Bariloche. Before I learned of P-Mac's bearings, I thought El Bolson would be the climax of my trip. Its reputation as the hippie capital of Argentina and its notoriety for its microbreweries piqued the interest of my vices. Being a fan of reefer and beer, I thought this might be my kind of town.

My dream consisted of a tie-die-shirt wearing populace who always had a cloud of smoke hanging over their dreadlock-covered heads. When I got to El Bolson it surpassed all my expectations. Before I even got off the bus, I looked out the window and saw a gaucho riding his horse as he took a swig from his liter of beer.

I picked the closest hostel to the bus stop and walked in to find red velvet couches, hanging bamboo gardens, walls covered in tapestries and incense burning in the quaint two-story abode. A sweet old woman named Nora ran the hostel with her husband, Rogelio, the two of them had lived in El Bolson for the last 40 years.

I explored the small town, which has a population of just under 30,000 before I perused the street fair ran by shoeless hippies. Returning to the hostel I found an old, unkempt man who resembled Rick Rubin, if it were possible for Rick Rubin to look more homeless and dirty. I began talking to the man in Spanish before he cut me off in English.

I asked the typical traveling questions: Where are you from? How long have you been traveling? He introduced himself as Russ, told me he was from New York City and he was down here to write a book.

OK, I thought to myself. I want to live in New York City and I consider myself somewhat of a writer, perhaps this vagabond-looking fellow and I have a lot in common.

Then he told me he was down here because the United States government was persecuting him for his beliefs and he settled in El Bolson because a government agent betrayed his government-ordered mission to kill Russ told him he could find safe refuge in El Bolson.

I then realized that perhaps we don't have as much in common as I first thought. I responded as if it made perfect sense and left the kitchen allowing him to finish his meal in solitude.

Later on in the evening I cooked up my own meal and joined him in the dining room, falsely assuming I was ready to learn why the government persecuted him and why government agents followed his every move.

He then began the longest story of all time, revealing he was The Chosen One in the process.
He began by starting with his college years, at Middlebury (he didn't attend Middlebury, he just hung out there and in his mind became a legend to the town). He also dated George Herbert Walker Bush's niece, which eventually lead to his father being killed.

It was actually during his time in Middlebury he first learned he had healing powers and may be The Chosen One. He first discovered these special powers when his girlfriend at the time had a mild headache the night before she had an important exam. Russ then touched his head to her's and transferred the headache to himself so she could feel better.
I initially thought perhaps Russ was confusing an acid trip in the 60s with a subplot from a Michael Jordan, Bill Murray, Bugs Bunny movie. I also thought he could have saved himself the headache and just gave the girl an aspirin, but I decided it was better to not question The Chosen One.

I wanted Russ to prove his healing power, but nothing was really wrong with me at the time, except for this minor infection that comes and goes on my big toe on my left foot. But I figured it might be a little forward to ask The Chosen One to heal my toe on the first night I met him.

Later on during his Middlebury years The Chosen One seriously dated Bush's niece, before the Bush family decided his special powers were powerful enough to challenge their reign, therefore they allegedly sent him an indirect threat by killing his father. Russ later admitted that the small caveat that his father may have died of natural causes, but he still believes government agents poisoned his food.

Tragically Russ is all too familiar with food poisoning as the government agents constantly poison his food to this day, which explains why he always carries his toothpaste in his fanny pack, preventing the agents from poisoning his toothpaste, a feat they have stooped to the past.

As I sat there eating my dinner Russ explained that the poison frequently causes him to lose control of his bowels, in an effort to humiliate him. Therefore when Russ is working as taxi-cab driver in New York City he always carries a spare pair of underwear as a precaution in case the agents attack. He claimed the poison has additionally shrank his genitals and made him impotent.

His taxi cab profession is an even more cataclysmic story as he claims the government stole the hundreds of thousands of dollars directly from his bank account, as well as destroying his mansion and Mercedes Benz he owned when he lived in Vermont. Today Russ' only way to make more money is to return to being a cabbie in New York City and his pending lawsuit against a hotel in New Jersey, which he is suing for their collaboration with the government in which they placed bugs in bed which left hundreds of scars all over his body.

One hour into our conversation I confirmed that I was not a government agent or at least if I was I did not know it myself.

At times I tried to offer some of my back story because I thought the whole drop-out, graduate, find your childhood hero in Argentina was a fairly entertaining story. However Russ quickly cut me off and continued on explaining why he is the most paranoid man on the planet. In the end I was glad I didn't tell my story because if Russ really is The Chosen One and he does actually have government agents following his every move, it's probably for the better that I don't let him jeopardize my mission to find Paul McPherson.

He then began recounting all the times Jesus and God have directly spoken to him as well as referencing Nostradamus scriptures which indirectly mention him. Indirect is not a strong enough word since the scriptures that referenced Russ were lost scriptures he found on the internet that may or may not have been completely fabricated. He remembered the time Jesus appeared to him in a window curtain and he offered to show me he had a picture of the divine face saved in his inbox. I interrupted, “Yeah, I'm probably gonna need to see that.”

Later on he pulled up his e-mail and began searching page by page for the e-mail. I thought to myself that for The Chosen One he sure as hell can't use the search feature of his inbox. He searched through the first six pages of his mail before he got frustrated when he assumed the agents had hacked his e-mail and deleted the file. Eventually he found the file, opened it up and displayed an image which looked eerily like a... window curtain. He was just as amazed as the day he saw it as he gloated over the image remembering the time Jesus came into his apartment.

After his two-hour lecture was nearing an end and after the dubbed-over “Lethal Weapon 4” concluded on the television which played during the entire conversation, we moved the conversation to the computer.

Russ sifted through his inbox and began searching page by page for the photograph of Christ in a curtain. “For being The Chosen One you think he would be able to use the search feature on his inbox,” I thought to myself. After seven pages of nothing he became worried and thought perhaps government agents had hacked into his Hotmail account and deleted the e-mail.

Eventually after five more long minutes of searching he found the file. Russ acted just as excited as the day he saw Christ in his window as he pointed to the dark blotch on the screen. I pretended like I saw something in the tan curtain with darker tan mark, that could have been dust, a stain or simply dirt on the computer monitor.

“It's really incredible that the image remained there long enough for you to take a picture of it,” I said.

“It was actually there for three years,” Russ replied. “In fact Jesus actually spoke to me and told me to rent a good camera to take a quality picture.”

“Fuck,” I thought in my head. “You had three years to get the picture, and you may have rented a camera and the best image you have is this grainy, low-resolution shot of your curtain.”

“Wow,” I plainly said. “That's just amazing.”

Russ told me he tried to make the image into a greeting card, but the government prevented him from putting the plan into action because they didn't want The Chosen One to make any money.

Then I asked Russ to show me the e-mail he talked about earlier, in which a government agent told him about the tracking devices which were implanted in his brain.

And then I lost it. I could not read the e-mail with out bursting up laughing. So I looked at the screen and tried to think about sad things such as my parents getting divorced or getting my heartbroken. But none of those things were as powerful as the hilarity of the e-mail so eventually I just closed the screen to avoid cracking up.

The e-mail killed me because I pictured somebody just like myself, meeting Russ then claiming to be a soldier of the messiah/government double agent and typing him this work of art. Russ forwarded me the e-mail, which I am posting unedited in its entirety because this man is a far better writer than I could ever be.

Hi russ

hope you managed to get back to grand central in one piece!
just a few things that you need to know.
the implants that you had inside were two class three surveillance nodes and one class five node (optical). all three are biologically based and are very hard to track on standard MRI because of their likeness to normal human tissue.
all three have now been taken off line by an EMP burst that was administered while you were here.
also with respect to the bugs inside you, these were not placed in your bed by a british agent. they're chinese in origin, and can be time delayed. they do burrow into your skin - they are designed to burrow OUT. they do no long term damage.
you should also for the next six months, begin a course of 5,000 mg of vitamin c each day - take it all at once. this is way over the FDA's recommended dosage (but i'm sure you can appreciate how unreliable some advice can be!)
you should also take a high potency dose of vitamin e each day.
ding this will create an environment within your body that will make you immune to any further infestations or implantations.
only one dose of sabadilla and arnica is needed to clean out your system.
you'll also fine that over the next three to four months that your body will begin to heal up - this will include a remarkable improvement in your throat and genitals.

that's the best honest health care that i can give you my friend. your voice is heard in places you can only dream about - and your work is being done.
i wish i could tell you who i really am, and who i work with, but unfortunately that is out of the question. please keep in touch, and keep my identity to yourself for now. they cannot harm you anymore.

best wishes

wayne (sigma 116818)

After two and a half hours of listening to Russ I was exhausted and wildly paranoid, so I went up stairs to pass out.

Chapter 14

I woke up the next morning and decided it was time to set an end date to my travels. I crunched some important numbers and figured out where I could go, how much it would cost and if I would be able to continue to eat three meals a day. I started to get travel stress. A weird kind of stress that only exists for people traveling for months at a time. I was starting to get aggravated with my planning my trip and figuring out where I should go. Then I remembered that I am getting upset about where to vacation for the next month and that I could not lose with any of my options.

I finally got out of the hostel and headed to the airplane ticket office to buy a ticket from Ushaia, the southern most town in the world, back to Buenos Aires. I was making a commitment for once on my trip and I was nervous.

I switched out of my sweatpants, I'm not sure why but it helped me feel better about myself, and walked to the office. Then after all the build up. Cerrado. Closed. Of course, this is Argentina who would want to make travel plans on a weekend? I went with plan B: exploring the very touristy town of Bariloche and then going over to the hostel where Carlos, my friend from the mountain refuge, worked with hopes of getting high. Like I said it had been a stressful morning and I needed a way to relax. Because sitting in the park and looking at this view on a perfect day just wasn't enough for me.


After trying out a slew of chocolate samples from the tourist-catching stores I made it to the hostel where Carlos told me he worked. I had no intentions of staying there, I just wanted to kick it with Carlos. He was there and invited me in the hostel backyard to play a futbol game with his friends. We played the game for half an hour until Carlos, like I anticipated, decided we should all take a smoke break. God bless him. We talked about Argentine sports and politics for an hour and drank a lot of soda pop before the group disbanded.

I sat in the park next to the lake for a while longer just wondering if life could get any better. I then went home and checked my e-mail and learned it was about to get frighteningly better.

I received an e-mail a few days earlier from a guy named Marquitos, telling me he found my blog and that I should come to Bahía Blanca (a city in the southwest of the province of Buenos Aires) to check out some basketball. I knew nothing of Bahía Blanca other than the fact that it was the hometown of NBA star Manu Ginobili. I thanked Marquitos for reading the site, but told him Bahía Blanca was not in my travel itinerary.

Then in perhaps the most important e-mail of my life Marquitos told me one Paul McPherson was just traded to a team which plays in Bahía Blanca. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. I raced through a bunch of online news articles as fast as my 56.6 kilobyte-per-second connection would allow and confirmed that P-Mac himself had magically landed in the same country I had been living in for the past four months. Marquitos was my new favorite person ever.

It was all too much too handle. I ran over to my fake parents hotel to tell them the great news and celebrate over a bottle of cheap red wine. After dinner and two more bottles of wine I still had trouble sleeping. I woke up at 4 in the morning and couldn't fall back asleep. My favorite player ever was now within reach. I was finally close to finding Paul McPherson. This must be what it feels like for foster kids who are finally going to meet their biological parents. Will he like me? Will he know about my blog? What kind of guy will he be? I hope he's cool.

I couldn't fall asleep. I was way too excited. Plus I was pretty sure the guy who drunkenly returned to the room at 4:30 in the morning was masturbating.

Chapter 13

I began my search for a hostel in Bariloche with my new friend Hong-Jun from South Korea. I'm all about meeting new people from places I'm completely unfamiliar with, but Hong-Jun might have been taking it a bit too far. His English was pretty good, but not good enough to have a smooth conversation with or catch any of my jokes.

After a night at the hostel we decided to head up one of the mountains and sleep in the refuge at the top. The four-hour hike up the mountain was pretty painful because of how awkward things were between me and Hong-Jun. He was a very boring dude who only talked about his intense love for his Japanese girlfriend, whom he had met just a month ago. I tried to force conversation during the entire hike by displaying all my knowledge of South Korea, which consists of Chan Ho Park, Byung-Hyun Kim and Hyundais. None of this helped the conversation.

I started asking the same goofy questions Cara asked me and I rattled off James Lipton's "Inside the Actor's Studio" questions as well. I asked him what his favorite Korean word was. He didn't have one. I asked him if he had a favorite English word. He thought about it for a good 60 seconds, and then said, “'Maybe'. My friends always say I use 'maybe' a lot.” He then didn't bother to ask me any questions back, he just talked about how much he missed his girlfriend.

When we made it to the top I considered sleeping outside for a couple hours. Somehow I've gone 21 years and gone camping before, so I was set on sleeping outdoors before this trip was over. However, I didn't have a tent or anything other than a cheap sleeping bag that was not ready for a wind rushing over a frozen pond. Also Hong-Jun made this great point about his body being a temple and looking after it above everything else in life.

I cracked, paid my 30 pesos and set up shop inside the refuge. I began talking to a couple of Argentines, Carlos and girlfriend, who were staying inside our room. I got along with them much better than I did with Hong-Jun. I hung out with them the rest of the night as Carlos rolled joint after joint. I quickly forgot about the body-is-a-temple rubbish and smoked until I thought my left lung collapsed.

I don't think I have ever been so happy in my life than in my sleeping bag smoking with Argentines and cracking jokes in Castellano under a full moon on a snow capped mountain next to a frozen pond, which looked something like this:


Hong-Jun and I hiked down the next day and we parted ways before I headed back to the hostel. That night I met a girl from Australia who I got along with much better. She was a cute girl traveling all alone for the first time in her life. She also had one of my favorite lines of the trip, “My biggest fear for my travels is being mistaken for an American.” Yup. A cute girl, who only speaks English, traveling by herself for eight months around the world and her biggest fear is being mistaken for a Yank.

That same evening I checked my e-mail and I learned that my fourth set of parents also happened to be traveling in Bariloche. I ran over to their hotel and they took me out for a drink at the Irish pub next door. It felt great to see some familiar faces. Amazingly, the bar was playing Tupac's “All Eyez On Me” followed by “Hit 'Em Up.” An Irish Pub in Argentina playing Tupac. Everything was starting to make sense.