How to Walk a Puma (5 page)

The Empanada Disaster

Riding the bus from the airport into El Calafate, I felt a tingle of excitement as I took in the scenery, which was bare but not in that manufactured, blasted way humans so often create. Instead its barrenness was that of a landscape no machine could modify. After the streets of Ushuaia, with all those trinkets that were as authentic and tacky as a porn star’s moans, this felt special. It felt wild.

My attention drawn by a sudden movement on the plain I recognised a guanaco, a wild relative of the llama. Beaming as I do whenever I see an animal for the first time (and often on subsequent viewings too), I turned to my fellow passengers to see if anyone else shared my delight, but saw nothing but bland disinterest on their faces. When the next animal I spotted turned out to be a rhea, a large flightless bird that was also new to me, I kept my face pressed to the glass and enjoyed the sight by myself, not losing my grin even when we hit a bump in the road and my head bounced away from and then violently back into the window.

The landscape changed several times on our way into town, each change thrillingly different from the previous scene—the plain yielding to clefted red rocks, then to rounded hills, then to views of distant forested mountains. This was the place, I was sure. This was the place I would find the real wild Patagonia.

The central part of El Calafate turned out to be touristy, with buildings made of timber so rough-hewn it must have been aimed at creating a sort of rustic charm, but triple varnished so it gleamed like no wood should. The price of food was so high it was also clearly aimed at tourists. Still, you only had to venture down a side street to find the places where the locals ate, identifiable as such because they were crowded and because no one inside them was wearing branded outdoor gear.

The best food in most places is rarely found in tourist joints because restaurateurs in those places don’t have to worry about tourists coming back, only about getting them in the door. But if you cater to locals, your food needs to be good. And cheap. If the customers of a café or restaurant all went quiet when I entered, like the moment in a Western before a gunfight erupts, I knew I must be in the right place. Even if baleful glares and unresponsive service staff showed I wasn’t particularly welcome, the food was bound to be worth it.

Using this theory, I found an empanada restaurant which literally sold only empanadas, a sort of pie stuffed with fish, meat or vegetables. No pizzas, no burgers, no appeal-to-the-tourists llama steaks, just empanadas. If you wanted a soft drink, you had to cross the road to the general store. I ordered six of the little pasties, and ate them for lunch as I made my way to a lagoon I’d seen on a map of the region, cutting through back streets instead of taking the regular paved route. It was a mistake, but an enlightening one.

Dust puffed from my heels, swirling up and away on the violent wind which also caught the omnipresent plastic bags and pinned them to bushes and trees. Empty bottles swept by, glass ones tinkling, plastic ones drumming, while turkey vultures overhead simultaneously
battled the gale and tried to determine what in the scene below them was dead and what was garbage. The amount of litter was staggering, and made the neat streets I had just come from seem like deliberate fakery by the town fathers, like an apparently pristine apple that is rotten from the skin back.

Naturally, garbage had no respect for the fence that marked the perimeter of the small reserve where the lagoon was located, so scattered in the water among the ducks, coots, flamingos and geese were pink, blue and green shopping bags. Though I was excited to see birds in the lagoon I had never seen before, I worried for them, feeding amid such a lethal buffet.

As I walked around to the far side of the lagoon I felt my stomach flop, then flip, then twist, then gurgle and splutter. I clutched it in sudden pain, all the while trying to focus on whether it really was a Chiloe wigeon I was looking at.

As my hands started to shake I told myself that it would pass, sure that as with so many other lurgies I’d had in both Africa and South America this would be a small thing, and that the best course of action was to ignore it and carry on. So carry on I did, wandering around the reserve watching birds, saying hello to some horses that lived there, patting the stray dogs who followed me everywhere as if I were some sort of canine messiah (which would have been quite flattering if I’d had no sense of smell and couldn’t detect their malodour). Finally, I headed back to the hostel along litter-laden streets, battling against the wind. Sinister gurgles were emanating from my mid-section by the time I reached the hostel, but I hoped they might diminish if I lay down for a while.

They did not, staying with me through a dinner that I could only pick at. I forced myself to eat something because I figured I’d need
my strength for the next day, when I planned on hiking on the Perito Moreno glacier; indeed, I was already in possession of a pricey ticket to do just that.

I was staying in a share room, and had been allocated a top bunk over a sizable Italian woman with the most extraordinarily frizzy grey hair—it looked like a pompom that had been thrown into the wash with a Goth’s clothing. I felt sorry for her having to put up with me tossing, turning and tossing some more, trying to find some relief for my painful stomach. For the first time in years I felt genuinely lonely and homesick, but not for any place that I could name.

As the night wore on, the pain worsened, until it felt as if I was being jabbed by spears. Out of consideration for the other occupants of the room I went into the hallway, checking the time as I went. It was two am and I had to be up in mere hours for the hike. Finally abandoning my pointless stoicism I approached the front desk where—against time-honoured international tradition—the night watchman was actually awake.

‘Hello,’ he said with a genuinely warm smile.

‘Hello,’ I replied, trying to return his smile but grimacing as I experienced another spasm. ‘I think I need a doctor,’ I managed through gritted teeth.

‘Oh no, what’s wrong?’ he said, frowning sympathetically.

‘I …’ was all I could manage before—for the first time in my life—I collapsed to the floor in pain.

I was vaguely aware of the night watchman helping me up from where I lay gasping on the ground, putting me in a chair, and calling a cab to take me to the local hospital.

‘I finish in three hours,’ he said, after introducing himself as Julio. ‘If you aren’t back by then I’ll come and find you.’

At his kindness I didn’t feel lonely anymore; I wanted to express my gratitude but fell to the ground again as I was being poured into the taxi, banging my easily injured knee against the sill. I lay face down against the cracked vinyl for the short trip to the hospital; once there I half limped, half staggered towards the emergency room, where a nurse seemed startled to see me.

Glancing in a mirror above the reception desk I saw an unfamiliar face. It was pale, drawn, and looked fifty-five, not thirty-five. Even more dire, it was topped by a mullet haircut. Accidentally growing a mullet has been a sad but regular occurrence in my life ever since the hair on top of my head stopped growing as fast as the hair at the back. At least I was in the right country for such a travesty this time, as Argentinian men often have coifs not even an eighties rock band would have contemplated.

A doctor soon came to examine me and with no common language we used a mixture of pantomime and, on my part, the imbecile’s way of speaking Spanish, which is to talk in English with an ‘o’ tacked onto the end of words. This combination sometimes works, and many symptoms were covered in this manner before the doctor asked if I was suffering from diarrhoea, which, though far more sensibly spelled in Spanish (
diarrea
), is pronounced the same way as in English.

‘No,’ I replied in all honesty.

My answer was met with a cocked eyebrow suggesting disbelief. ‘
Seguro?
’ he asked. ‘Are you sure?’ A strange question, I thought. How could you
not
know?

I answered that I was sure, and he asked me again, and this time I understood his concern. ‘I’m not embarrassed!’ I said, or at least tried to say, before recalling that
embarazada
means something
entirely different to ‘embarrassed’ and that I’d just wailed at the doctor that I wasn’t pregnant, something his medical training had presumably made evident to him.

With this hurdle cleared (by now I
was
embarrassed) and having explained that any bulge in my stomach was made of empanadas, not a baby, we covered other symptoms. My limp was from banging my knee (that took some pantomime; and I decided against indicating that the scarring was caused by a puma), and I had no pain elsewhere apart from my stomach. I couldn’t believe that an empanada (or several) had managed to do what Roy could not, and put me in hospital.

The doctor left the room with a frown and my homesickness suddenly returned. My funds were low, cheap food was all I could afford, yet my gut was mad as hell about my eating whatever
low-priced
fare was placed in front of me. Perhaps Patagonia was trying to kill me for failing to appreciate its charms. Was Friederike right— was I asking too much of this place, wanting something exclusive that in reality I couldn’t afford? Or had I been wrong when I experienced my Jane Goodall epiphany, and perhaps I was too old and pathetic for my body to withstand the assaults it had shrugged off in my twenties?

The doctor returned with a needle that would have frightened a rhino, and a painkilling tablet the size of a small loaf of bread. With little ceremony he jabbed the needle into my backside. Miraculously, within minutes the writhing subsided, and soon I was feeling fine; in fact I felt so good by the time I made my way back through the hostel doors that morning that I was a little embarrassed. Anything that simple to cure shouldn’t have needed a doctor, I felt, blushing as I thanked Julio.

‘
De nada
,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’

I returned to the dorm room as the first light seeped through the curtains, disturbingly illuminating just how skimpy some Italian underwear is, and managed to sleep for an hour before the alarm beeped rudely in my ear, waking me for the Perito Moreno hike.

In that state of near drunkenness that exhaustion can induce, I could scarcely recall the agony of the night before. I was excited. Finally I was going to see something special, I was sure of it.

And just for once, I was right.

I watched in wonder as a minivan-sized piece of ice dropped from the sheer face of the Perito Moreno glacier in front of us. ‘That was huge!’ I exclaimed, my voice hoarse from lack of sleep.

‘Not so big,’ one of the guides said nonchalantly.

We were on a boat that would take us to the base of the glacier, the sight of which had already stunned me into rare silence until the enormous block of ice fell away.

Moments later we were docking, and a group of us then began walking on a trail through light forest. Sheer cliffs launched skywards to our left, with waterfalls that regularly sprayed us as we walked. I tilted my head to catch some moisture on my tongue and almost toppled backwards.

A condor soared from over the ridgeline; even though it was hundreds of feet overhead its almost three-metre wingspan was staggering. ‘Wow,’ I said, my wildlife-spotting grin already in place.

This was what I’d been searching for when I came to Patagonia, but hadn’t found in either El Calafate or Ushuaia. Patagonia had inspired writers, artists, naturalists and soul-searchers for hundreds
of years; its remoteness had attracted the mad, the adventurous and the hunted. I felt sane enough, and while I was fleeing the mundane, as far as I knew I wasn’t being chased. All I sought was the wildness and isolation that I’d missed so much living a ‘normal’ life in Sydney.

Still grinning, and lagging a little behind the others, I brushed my hands against lichen-heavy tree trunks, savouring the sensation of soft mosses underfoot. I caught up to the rest of the group at a staging point where the guides were putting them into
uncomfortable-looking
harnesses that bulged in unflattering places, making all of us, even the women, look like we’d sprung a grand tumescence at the activity planned.

I was soon rigged up and then the guide handed me what looked like a grand inquisitor’s roller skates. I’ve always thought ‘crampon’ is one of the language’s least attractive words, sounding like the bastard hybrid between something that causes pain and an item men are mortified to buy on behalf of their wives. But crampons on our boots would be essential here, their jagged metal teeth giving
much-needed
traction on the ice.

Clumsy at the best of times, I teetered as I hesitantly stepped onto the ice from the gravelly surface where we’d geared up, immediately forgetting any concerns of balance or verticality as I soaked up the view in front of me. The glacier was inconceivably vast. On my right it stretched back down to the lake from which we’d come. To the left it was a daunting, chunky, corrugated mass of blue and white for miles until it disappeared into mist, from the top of which poked snow-capped Andean peaks. This was totally unlike the jungly, fetid South America of my imagination, and the surprise thrilled me.