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.

Chapter 5

Before I boarded the 18-hour bus ride from Salta to Mendoza I tried to turn on my Zune and discovered it was dead. Dagger. This made the bus ride even more miserably long than usual. I finished my book within the first two hours and read the a generic Men's Health magazine three times over.

Just before the we got to the terminal I began talking to the guy behind me, who I avoided for the first 17 hours because he sounded like he was deathly sick. I learned his name (Sebastian), his country of origin (France), and his former profession (restaurant server). He reminded me a lot of a server I worked with named Adam¹. I then learned he was also a sports journalist at one point in his life. We got off the bus and I grabbed my backpack from the under-bus stowage. Sebastian didn’t grab anything because he was traveling for his entire three month trip with only a bag the size of a bowling ball case and a small guitar he bought in Brazil.

We decided to hit the town together in search of a hostel and restaurant since we were both starving from a long ride in which they never offered us food. Within minutes I was sick of Sebastian. He chained cigarettes, hawked loogies and blew snot rockets with a cadence that would have been soothingly melodic if it weren’t cigarettes, loogies and snot rockets. Additionally the fact that he was an admittedly broke 31-year-old ex sports journalist with no job hit a little too close to home for me.

We found a cheap restaurant and sat down just before everything went to shit. I still don’t know what happened, but I got very light headed, everything began to spin and I thought I was going to pass out. Suddenly the gross Frenchman was my best friend and the only person providing me any comfort in a town I had arrived in 10 minutes earlier.

I tried to talk myself down and shoved as much food in my mouth as possible, hoping some sustenance would return me to a healthy state, even if it was a greasy fried steak sandwich. After a few very long minutes, I was able to catch my breath and the restaurant stopped spinning around me. Then I was back to subtly hating Sebastian, but not as much because he kinda saved my life.

A while later, we found a hostel and I still felt like shit. I just wanted to charge my Zune, listen to Juelz Santana and zone the fuck out. I opened my large backpack and discovered that somebody felt I should be traveling lighter than I already was. My camera case, which held all my electronics aside from my camera was stolen. I was out a camera charger, my old cell phone, and my Zune charger. I still remember the last song I listened to on my Zune was Tori Amos’ “Cornflake Girl,” which was helping me cope with my Frosted Flake relapses. I knew nobody would have a Zune charger because nobody else in the world has a Zune except for the girl I fell in love with from Perth.

Ideally I wanted to leave all hip hop behind, but I knew I couldn’t do it, so I had packed my Zune seven Carters deep (Reasonable Doubt, Blueprint I, Carter I, II, III, 3:16 the 9th Edition and End of the Beginning). Now my hip hop along with 8 more gigabytes of audible greatness were all gone. Additionally I lost a thumbdrive which contained the latest episode of Entourage I had been carrying around like a tiny crack rock hoping somebody would have a spoon and lighter in the form of a laptop so I could freebase my way back into HBO programming euphoria.

Sebastian opened up his small bag and pulled out a couple ounces of weed he had been carrying on him since he was in Brazil. He began rolling small joints using the toilet paper from the bathroom, but I declined his invitation to smoke because I was still trying to figure out what was going on in my life.

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1. Adam has nothing to do with my travels, but if I am trying to write a good story I figured it couldn't hurt to tell the best story I have ever heard. Adam believes he is a genius and in his own way, he very well may be a genius.

The story goes that Adam made his way on to the show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” To which legend has it, he made his way to the $64,000-question and then insulted the audience by saying, “I'm gonna go ahead and ask the audience now before the questions get too hard for them.” The audience then sabotaged Adam and gave him the wrong answer, causing him to lose his shot at 1 million dollars. Adam then went home and blew the money on hosting a desert rave. Any one of these points could be the best part of the story, but the best part comes from learning that Adam never declared taxes on his winnings and the genius still owes thousands in back taxes.