How to Walk a Puma (6 page)

If I’d done more research I might have had the foresight to pack some warmer clothes. I had thought that the light sweater I’d put on after my brief sleep would be adequate, but most of the group were wearing coats so thick and shaggy you’d think they’d skinned Chewbacca’s family.

‘What makes the ice so blue?’ an American woman in the group asked the guide. On our walk to the glacier this particular woman had delayed us twice by getting lost in an area only twice the size of a shoebox, and the group’s collective patience with her was wearing a little thin.

‘Smurf piss,’ I answered; though I was joking the colour of the ice was so vivid it seemed as if it could only be fake. I’d never seen such an intensity of blue outside of a butterfly’s wing, but unlike the flash of blue from a tropical moth in a forest, this went on for miles.

The woman looked at me blankly for a long moment.

‘The ice crystals are packed so densely that the only light that reflects off it is in the blue spectrum,’ our guide replied.

When I was a guide I might have run with the Smurf-urine theory just to see how long people believed me, but this guy was apparently more professional than I had ever been.

‘Here’s something,’ said another guide, a New Zealander, as he hunched over a small dark object on the ice.

I clomped over, the crampon blades crunching into the ice with each step, and looked down to where he was pointing. Incongruous in this pristine environment, a turd sat starkly on the ice.

‘Well hello, Roy,’ I said. ‘You following me?’

‘You name your poo Roy?’ the guide asked.

‘Um, no, that’s puma poo, and I had a puma named Roy.’

That undoubtedly made as much sense as my previous statement so I shut up. In Africa I used to hear stories of leopards turning up in unexpected places (a sports stadium in Cape Town, the summit of Kilimanjaro, and on a small island in the middle of the vast Lake Kariba). The leopards’ adaptability and ability to survive in any habitat were legendary. While the jaguars I yearned to see might look more like leopards, I was learning that pumas were the continent’s real equivalent.

As we went deeper into the glacier I concentrated on lifting my feet cleanly with each stride rather than shuffling lazily. If I put the spikes down on uneven ground or they caught because I dragged my feet I could be felled like a tree, hitting the hard blue ice face first. A slip and slide away from the carefully chosen route the guides were taking us on could lead to any number of deadly chasms. The guides pointed out one of these, and the sheer scale of the glacier became shockingly apparent as I peered down a shaft of over thirty metres, at the base of which water rushed as if possessed of a ferocious hunger.

My fear of heights kicked in and I was glad of the firm hold the New Zealand guide took on my belt. ‘Easy, mate,’ he said casually, and I realised I’d been swaying as I looked down into the chasm. With enormous concentration I lifted my clawed feet one by one and backed away from the hole.

We ate lunch soon after, some of us sitting on cloths that soon grew damp as the ice melted through them. Those who had brought plastic sheets probably felt smug—until their body heat melted a slick layer underneath the plastic, causing them to toboggan forward into the nearest obstacle (usually someone sitting on a cloth).

After lunch we were allowed to wander on the glacier by ourselves. I split from the others and made my way over mounds of ice carved
into sensual shapes by wind and water, walking until I was out of sight of the group, then pausing, watching the steam of my breath plume in front of me in short bursts. It had taken Roy four weeks to get me fit and slim me down to wiry, and I’d spent the six weeks since piling weight back on at such a rate I was now fatter and less fit than when I’d first come to South America. After Roy I had the dedication to exercise of a sloth, and was rapidly getting the physique to match. I’d begun to find myself out of breath at the mere thought of doing something strenuous. Like chewing. I probably needed to do something about my weight, I thought, then stopped myself with a mental slap. I was trying to leave such city thoughts behind, avoiding places where what you looked like was important. In the wild, experience and ability are all that matter.

I stopped worrying about my gut and took in my surrounds. Around me was nothing but blue and white patterned ice, and I thought, ‘If I was left behind here, I would surely die.’ It had been years since I’d had such a thought, the last time being in the very different landscape of the deserts of Namibia. It was exhilarating to be able to think it again. In places where man is not dominant, but dwarfed and made insignificant by nature, I get an adrenalin rush. My time with Roy had been a rollercoaster-ride of adrenalin, but this was different. It was what I’d been missing for seven years. I promised myself to never again go without it for such a long time.

The feelings I had on the glacier have no name in English that I am aware of. It was a blend of respect for a place so inhospitable to my existence, coupled with gratitude that thus far it had not snuffed me out. Awe was also in there, as was a sort of love, both words so overused that they’ve lost much of their power. Contentment, that underrated emotion, was also present, but not for any good reason
I could think of. (What sort of person mellows out on a chunk of ice destined, albeit slowly, to go off a cliff?) All I knew was that right then if I’d had a tail I’d have wagged it.

Funnily enough, I hadn’t expected to feel like this here, having previously only felt it in places where animals might eat me, and—snobbishly, naively—I hadn’t expected to experience it on a group tour. I realised my guides would probably scoff at such feelings, just as I had once scoffed when people on my safari tours told me that they’d been sure they would die after receiving an aggressive look from some lion/elephant/sparrow. Maybe I owed a few people some apologies.

My reverie was interrupted by one of the guides, come to check that I hadn’t fallen into a ravine. ‘You okay?’ he asked.

‘Better than okay!’ I shouted back.

Then it hit me: I’d just been soul searching. ‘Well, I’ll be,’ I thought, surprised at myself. ‘The place works!’

The Road from Patagonia

After the awe-inspiring magnificence of the Perito Moreno glacier I was brought back to earth with a thud by my next Patagonian stopover in a place called El Chaltén, a day’s bus ride from El Calafate. My stay there turned out to be pleasant but unexciting; the rare and endangered deer species I had hoped to see turned out to be as elusive as a park ranger had predicted, and the pumas he’d told me other tourists had seen also stayed away. Even the well-known peak of Mt Fitz Roy stayed shrouded in fog.

El Chaltén’s bars were filled with glum-looking climbers, some of whom had been waiting weeks for the notoriously temperamental weather to clear enough for them to summit. I was amazed that any cloud could stay put, as the wind was even fiercer than the other places I had been in Patagonia so far. It shoved me around like a schoolyard bully, making me wonder if maybe I should join the climbers for a few beers and fatten up even more.

As it turned out I might have been able to keep a better eye on my backpack in the bar: I returned from a trail walk to find my wallet emptied (I hadn’t taken it with me due to stories of banditry on the paths, which in hindsight was ludicrous as the trails were too busy for a mugger to choose a target). El Chaltén’s only cash machine was as empty as my wallet, and the nearest bank was in Bariloche, whose townspeople had figured out being considered part of Patagonia was
a good thing, so had redrawn the region’s boundary to include themselves. I wasn’t sure that the small change in my pocket would be enough to buy food until I made it there, and was not looking forward to the trip. Little did I know how it would change my travels.

The crowd that formed for the bus to Bariloche was made up of a broad cross-section of humanity. All continents, ages, colours, shapes and heights were represented. Spotting an unusually tall blonde woman with pretty features, I wished (not for the first time) I had more confidence when it came to talking to attractive strangers.

Argentinian buses are remarkably punctual, and this one took off promptly at the time advertised. Within minutes we were chugging through spectacular mountain scenery, made all the more striking because the clouds had finally lifted. At each sharp turn in the road there was a small shrine, often in gaudy colours, marking the place where one or more vehicles had gone over the edge. These markers reflected a mix of Catholicism and the more ancient local traditions, with statues of Mary and Jesus as well as the brilliant colours and animal totems that harked back to a time before the Incas. As perturbing as the sheer number of these markers was, any anxiety was forgotten in the thrill of the falcon-haunted cliffs, multicoloured rock faces and distant snowy caps. (I resolutely faced these rather than looking at the terrifying drop off the other side of the road.)

I kept my face turned to the window, but happened to spot the tall blonde woman sitting a few rows back from me beside an even taller man. I envied him for a while until I noticed they weren’t talking. ‘They must be fighting,’ I thought, and as a shorter man often will when a taller one suffers, felt a small pang of glee.

After a while, the engine noises changed from a hard-working grumble to a smoother purr. We had levelled out and abruptly left the mountains behind. The arid plain we emerged onto was so featureless that the world seemed nothing but horizon. Despite its silken-smooth appearance outside, the bullet-straight dirt track we were driving on was pitted and corrugated, making everyone’s cheeks jiggle and teeth chatter.

I can find beauty in the stark, and I appreciated the view outside as much as any other. Occasionally the flat stretches were interrupted by a glimpse of a distant lake in shades of the most impossible deep blue or green. As the glaciers that fed these lakes ground away, they crushed rock into such a fine powder that when it reached the lakes it stayed suspended, and only allowed certain wavelengths of light to reflect, creating marvellous palettes. Just as colourful was the odd shrine, similar to those in the mountains but to my mind even more perturbing on a dead-flat road. The monotony was clearly soporific for some drivers and, judging by the slack drooling mouths of many around me, some passengers too. I started looking at the driver periodically to check whether the long straight road wasn’t acting as a lullaby for him too.

Though I was happy taking in the view outside the window, some of the passengers who weren’t sleeping wanted more stimulation, and to appease them the driver put on some videos. First was an American action film; the video had clearly been pirated and was dubbed into Russian, then translated back into English subtitles. Whoever had written the subtitles wasn’t a native English speaker, or perhaps they had a juvenile sense of humour, for the word ‘bomb’ had been incorrectly translated, leading to not-quite-Shakespearean lines of dialogue such as: ‘Oh no! He’s got a bum!’ and ‘We don’t
know how big his bum is, but we do know it is powerful. It might take out a whole city.’ At the film’s midway point, translation duties must have been handed over to someone else, since one character’s name suddenly and inexplicably changed from Gordon to Norman and all the unintentional bum jokes stopped.

The action film over, music videos began with a much more local flavour. Reggaeton originated in the Caribbean but spread quickly throughout South America. It has a jangly beat and is invariably accompanied by a clip of a man in large dark glasses surrounded by impressively proportioned dancers. The men snarl and rap, making hand gestures that I presume are meant to look like they’re holding guns but make them appear palsied instead. After five hours of the music I was afraid my ears might vomit, but no relief was in sight.

While the videos alternated between bad and worse, the view outside retained my interest (with an occasional glance in the window’s reflection to check on relations between the tall blonde and the man beside her; to my satisfaction, it didn’t appear to have thawed). We stopped every few hours to stretch our legs and once for lunch. The bedraggled store we visited had a gutterless roof weighed down with stones, suggesting a place of howling winds but little rain. The soil was clearly poor, and it seemed all that grew here was despair. A sad-looking lamb near the store bleated at us plaintively, then went and sat beside an outdoor barbecue, as if aware of its eventual fate and more than ready to accept it.

The wind soon drove everyone back into the bus, and we hit the plain again, leaving the hapless store and suicidal lamb behind. At times the only feature outside at all was the bus’s shadow, expanding and contracting as we rocked from side to side.

As night fell we reached a one-taxi town with the same name as the glacier I had fallen in love with, Perito Moreno. This place had far less charm though, consisting of a few stores selling auto parts and gasoline, and a single hotel run by a bear of a man and his three tiny daughters, all under ten, all working behind the bar. The cost of the bus ticket included accommodation, and I was billeted to a room, arriving at the same time as a slightly built German man who smiled heartily at me. Though clearly from a place where dentistry wasn’t in vogue, he was very friendly and spoke perfect English. We spent at least five minutes insisting the other person should have the larger of the three beds in the room before agreeing to take the smaller ones and leave the bigger for whoever else was sharing with us.

The door opened and in walked the tall woman’s even taller boyfriend.

‘Where’s your girlfriend?’ the German and I asked almost simultaneously in Spanish, and I wondered if he of the bad dentistry had also shared rooms before with couples whose sense of discretion was no match for their randiness.

‘I don’t have a girlfriend,’ the newcomer replied, looking at us as if wondering why he had to share a room with two deranged midgets.

We quickly established that he was French, that our only common language was a smattering of Spanish, and that the woman he’d been sitting next to on the bus was unknown to him, and that they’d hardly exchanged a word all day. He didn’t know her name nor where she was from.

Interesting, I mused.

At six the next morning our three alarms rang, and six weary fists rubbed sleep from six eyes before we all politely argued over who should use the bathroom first. The Frenchman’s bladder won.

Soon we were outside waiting for the bus, then were told to wait some more. And some more, a wait of more than three hours, before our original bus was declared dead and we were herded onto two replacement buses that must have been there all along. I landed on the second, only to watch the first bus peel away before hearing ours splutter and fart, then gurgle so wretchedly it was clearly the sound of something breathing its last.

‘The bus is not fixed,’ said our driver, which I thought was quite a clever spin on the situation.

Herded back off the bus we waited and watched the driver and a local mechanic’s legs for half an hour. They moved little from their position jutting out from under the bus until a voice shouted ‘Bravo!’ and they emerged with greasy triumphant grins.

We clambered back on and for the first time I noticed that the tall blonde woman was on the same bus, in the seat immediately behind mine. I mustn’t have rubbed the sleep out of my eyes hard enough.

‘Bloody hell, if we don’t move soon we’ll never get there,’ said an Australian accent behind me. It wasn’t the tall woman (who I’d begun to think of as ‘the good-looking tall woman
without
a French boyfriend’), but the woman in the seat next to her.

Never one to miss an opportunity, I swapped names with the Australian (hers was Ange) and we soon figured out we were both from Sydney. The blonde looked out the window, occasionally flicking her eyes towards Ange and me as we chatted. I presumed she was from somewhere Nordic and was bound to have that enviable
European ability of casually speaking half a dozen languages. (If you ever express admiration for their learning they seem astonished. ‘You don’t?’ is the implication in their reply.)

Back to taking in the view outside, at one point I shouted ‘Armadillo!’, startling those around me, except the now frustratingly impassive tall blonde sans French boyfriend, who continued staring out the window. The animal I had seen had dashed away from our looming tyres and dived into a culvert, so I was left in the awkward position of explaining that I had indeed seen an armadillo, but that it was now gone. I glanced at the blonde, wondering why she was so aloof, then saw the telltale trail of headphone cords in her hair.

Doofus!
I said to myself. Still, I had to admire her method of blocking out the reggaeton.

In any case, we didn’t get far before the bus began a series of hopping lurches. The driver managed to coax it on a few more kilometres to a service station, where we were instructed simply to get off the bus and ‘wait’.

It could have been frustrating, but years in Africa had taught me that impatience only gives you wrinkles, so it’s best to make the most of such situations. At least we were liberated from the confines of bus seats that were as wide as toothpicks and about as comfortable to put your buttocks on.

Still intrigued by the tall blonde I sidled closer to her, keen to impress but with little to offer in the way of witty banter. I decided instead to stick to the one subject I can talk confidently about, and fortunately and animal soon approached. I watched it a moment until it began behaviour I recognised, which I interpreted for her benefit: ‘Oh look! That cat’s about to puke!’

‘Um, thanks for showing me that,’ she said, blinking in disbelief.

‘You’re English?’ I asked, startled not to hear a Nordic lilt.

‘Welsh actually,’ she said.

I mentally kicked myself. I should have spotted the difference.

‘But both my parents are English,’ she added, ‘so my accent is a bit mixed up.’

This little piece of self-deprecation made my small but burgeoning crush crank up a notch. It ratcheted up further as our conversation continued and she mentioned she was a fan of rugby. ‘And Wales is the best team in the world,’ she announced.

‘Ranked about sixth officially though, aren’t they?’ I said.

The withering look she gave me made it clear I’d blundered again. It had been some years since I’d simultaneously been single and spoken with an attractive woman. I was clearly still not good at it.

I really wanted whatever I said next to be at least correct, if not impressive, so I thrust out my hand as if in a business meeting and said, ‘My name’s Peter.’

‘Lisa,’ she replied, shaking my hand with a slight smirk, presumably at my awkwardness.

‘Nice name,’ I said, then felt foolish. ‘But I think I will call you the Minke,’ I added impulsively.

I couldn’t believe it. Had I just nicknamed her after a
whale
? What self-destructive urge had taken over my tongue?

‘Why?’ she asked.

At this point a smarter person would have backtracked, issued a blanket denial or pleaded a brain injury. I said, weakly, ‘Because you’re from Wales.’ Apparently unable to stop myself, I continued, ‘And because you’re big.’