Chapter 24

After the El Nacional game and my lighthouse experience I had done everything that needed to be done in Monte Hermosa. I walked back to Nené's house and chatted with for an hour to kill time until I caught the return bus to Bahía Blanca. I learned that Nené was a celebrity in the town as she hosted a radio show for eight years before her husband passed away.

Then I returned to Bahía Blanca and sat in the bus terminal with a 45-year-old wild backpacker, Christain, before I took a bus ride to Puerto Madryn. I asked Christain how long he had been travelin for and he told me 25 years. He had lived on every continent and had all his life's belongings in a single backpack. He was merely traveling South America until he found a suitable city to set up shop and try to teach English.

Eighteen hours later I made it to the marine-life-rich town of Puerto Madryn. Unfortunately boat rides to see massive right whales or day excursions to the Peninsula Valdés, the home of thousands of penguins and sea lions, were out of the budget so I just kicked it within the town.

I took the cheap alternative and found a nice museum in the town. My favorite exhibit featured a hallway of hanging rope you had to walk through to enter a dark rectangular room, which was covered in small smooth rocks. The room was completely dark, except for six soft lights which illuminated the room enough so you could see the eight speakers which emitted whale sounds. Alone in the exhibit I laid on my back in the center of the rocks listening to the whales sounds for 10 minutes until a family came in, to which I awkwardly got up, said nothing and walked out.


Then I walked up stairs and found a room which overlooked the ocean and was full of couches. Also relaxing. I ended my museum tour in the kids room where I took this picture because I like the stuffed octopus a lot.

I found a good hostel that was not listed in the guidebooks and subsequently was not as crowded. At night I was eating my dinner and watching “8 Mile” when some other guests entered the room and asked to change the channel. Not wanting to admit that I was closely watching the movie for the third time in my life, I let them change it to “The Last King of Scotland,” which frustrated me because I was wanted to see B. Rabbit battle rap and not watch Forest Whitaker kill 300,000 Ugandans.

In a silent protest of films which could actually teach me something I walked out of the room and hit the computer to send P-Mac an e-mail thanking him for his time. I told him of my plans to return to Bahía Blanca and let him know I'd contact him again when I got back in town.

I got a prompt reply from mailer-daemon@googlemail.com telling me:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

pmcpherson@yahoo.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 554 554 delivery error: dd This user doesn't have a yahoo.com account (pmcpherson@yahoo.com) [-5] - mta594.mail.mud.yahoo.com (state 18).

Well that's just great. Part of me believes P-Mac was not smart enough to remember his own e-mail, another part of me thinks maybe he was just too paranoid to give me his real e-mail address. And then there is the logical side of me which believes P-Mac is part of a larger government conspiracy and its to the United States' advantage that P-Mac's whereabouts remain a mystery.