Braving the aroma, I hung out with him for thirty-six hours, laughing the whole way, talking about the beauty of Pachamama, and sharing toilet paper and empanadas (mini meat-filled pockets of fried or baked dough) in true backpacker style. This guy basically lives out of his tent 350 days a year, sleeping in snow igloos in British Columbia, goes on rock climbing expeditions to Mexican volcanoes, and takes pictures for National Geographic along the way.
We pretty much had nothing in common. We headed down to El Calafate, and spent a night in his tent listening to the Perito Moreno glacier melting. The prelude to our fist kiss was Frederic’s dropping of my little digital camera and breaking the lens shutter. The glacier is enormous and beautiful, we had an almost full moon, and the devastations of global warming have turned this block of ice into a national park treasure, where pieces break off every twenty minutes. The crashes it makes causes your bones to shake and eardrums pop: like intense thunder. We listened to it all night, lit up by a full moon, in a clandestine little spot tucked away in the trees (illegal camping: very exciting). It was an epic experience, only to be topped by the next twelve days.
We decided to continue on together, heading to El Chalten, a sort of nothing little windy town, no ATMs or banks, and a rock climber’s paradise. The summit of Fitz Roy has eluded most alpinists, with only ten people ever having summitted the peak successfully. Fitz Roy Park is here, and it’s truly unbelievable. This is basically where my concept of life and limitations and my relationship with nature changed for good. Fred and I were still camping together, nothing really romantic, but he was totally taking care of me, letting me sleep in his down-filled sleeping bag and keeping me warm with his thermal Canadian slippers. The guy does not get cold, but of course I was freezing every night.
The trekking up here was phenomenal: crazy steep mountains covered in ice and snow, glaciers everywhere we looked. We still had a mostly-full moon, and wind that blew you twenty meters back every ten minutes. There were Israelis everywhere, comparing how much they spent on dehydrated soup and trying to talk to me in Hebrew (luckily, the word for "no" is lo in Hebrew and one of the few things I remember from Sunday School).
