From January through July of this year I traveled around South America. My parents are from Chile, and my family currently spans five continents, so I often enjoy sacrificing any long-term career goals to explore the contemporary Jewish Diaspora, à la Roger-Sauerteig.
This trip was inspired by the wedding of my favorite cousin, Alex, in Santiago de Chile in January. After spending a week in one of the smoggiest cities south of the Ecuator, I jetted off to Argentina to start a new life in Buenos Aires. Here I discovered what is now becoming a well-known secret by educated travelers: an amazingly hip city full of gorgeous, intelligent people who eat well and look to Europe for fashion and philosophy.
But this story isn’t about Buenos Aires; it’s about what I found after two months of partying and hedonism in a city of fifteen million. It’s about discovering a part of myself I never knew existed: the Andean Mountain Woman. It’s about the Argentine Patagonia.
My month in the Patagonia, the southwest region of Argentina and some of the southernmost regions of Chile, was espectacular. The first two weeks I spent in the northern part, the lake region, hiking around and staying in little refugios tucked away in the forest, or along mountainsides, braving wind and my own clumsiness as I crossed streams and clamored over rocks, while working off all the homebrewed beer I encountered along the way.
The best time in this part was this little town El Bolson, a hippie enclave of sorts, where I heard more American English than ever. A town tucked away in a valley with its own special microclimate (no wind or rain or snow), it is undeniably blessed by some incredible energy. Perhaps that sounds too California—but something happened to me there. I had not felt that peaceful in a long time, and El Bolson helped me realize how much I loved life, my friends, and the ability to clear my head from all the madness of the Big City.
I then hopped on a thirty-six-hour bus ride to head super south, to El Calafate, a city created only for tourists to see El Perito Moreno Glacier, the largest piece of advancing ice in the world. This bus ride could have easily been a nightmare, especially since I had brought no food and was struggling to get into the Da Vinci Code (a pseudo-intellectual novel I later hated admitting I learned from.) But waiting for the bus, I met this crazy Canadian mountain man, Frederic, who smelled like he had been trekking for two weeks in all his clothes and popped down the mountain just to get on the bus.
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