I left Tilcara relaxedly but with a desperation: I wanted to return to a solitude that I had grown to love and hate in just the right ways, and I realized that being around people you can´t communicate with correctly is really what loneliness is. Then I tried to take a bus into Chile from a scruffy city named San Salvador de Jujuy, but the next border-crossing trip wasn´t for another two days, and so I dragged myself back (tail between the legs) into Salta and checked into a hostal. I had CouchSurfed for a while there before, and the city showed an entirely new side of itself to me: I met a rock band from Buenos Aires which was on-tour, along with a University of Denver student studying-abroad in Argentina named Leah, and we all shared dinner and slang between our languages for two lovely nights. I learned a traditional folk-dance with a French girl and one of the hostal workers played me folk music from five or six different cities in Northern Argentina . . . each with its own speed and style and intonations. My last night in Argentina saw me speak more English than I had for the entire five or so weeks before, talking with Leah over empanadas. The next day I arrived in Chile, and I had no voice. I was in Chile for two-and-a-half days and I did not have my voice for any of it. I drove through the only real touristy destination I could have gone to for the sake of moving. Every person I had a real conversation with was either Peruvian or going to Peru. I was on a quest to reach Lima on the 28th of September, to meet my good friend Nate Allen and start a new chapter to my trip. As a result, Chile felt like a sort of comfortable pit, a satin-lined one, that I fell into and clawed my way out of rapidly. The city I stayed in was Calama, and it was comfortable and clean even though it was not huge and mostly an industrial town. After a night-bus and an early-morning border crossing followed by another seven-hour bus I found myself in Arequipa, Peru, and my voice returned to me. Only to need it for denying a before-unseen group of beggars and goods-hawkers setting their sights on me . . . I am more obviously a foreigner here than I had been at any other point before. It was two days of ceviche (a sort of delicious cold shrimp dish) and watching confusing Peruvian Tourism Weekend parades before I hit Lima right on the dot -- arriving early-morning on the 28th -- and checked into a dusty hostal filled with old oil pantings and crumbling busts right across from a Franciscan monastery and there I waited.
The past week in Lima has been different. I feel relaxed and natural, and enjoyment is always on the tip of my tongue with my three new companions. But I am not contemplative. I enter the world we have created and have a hell of a time, but the difficult confusing chaos outside of us has started to become more and more distant from me. And that chaos is something I crave, it is something I want to toy with and something I want to hurt me and it is the very thing I have left my life behind for. It is all yet another billboard telling me that yes, it´s true, I really do not have the constitution for being comfortable. These people are my friends, for sure -- one of them is one of my best friends in the world -- but returning to the world of my mother tongue left incomplete some mission I didn´t know I had. My Spanish was beginning to blossom, my sight was more piercing, I had a wingspan like an Andean condor . . . and the English language was a little secret I tucked away at every moment, only to reveal it to myself delightedly when I could. That has all fallen away.
But kickin around with these brahs, we have done some hard hard chillin for real. Throwin round soles like Benjamins and dissin my loud snorin and speakin like Sarah Palin. Dontcha know. When you start laughin, the little details and parts of stuff that some dorks think about you know it all dont mean nothin to me. You talk chill, you think chill, just chillin out. Vacation. Relax, man. Tranquilo. ´´Travelling is as much about being away from where you were as it is about being where you are.´´ Right on man. Thats the sermon, and this guy right heres the son of the preacher man. The guy youre listenin to. Now lets be goin to catch ourselves a good time cuz we dont have forever now. Hop on board and blow your whistle and chugchugchugchugging along now and we dont stop and hop, hop on, hop on, for the love of God man hop on Im waitin for you. We´re all waitin for you here we dont got all day and you know you dont wanna be left behind. Nobody wants to be left behind here, hell no. I know you wanna go, I won´t listen to you sayin you dont wanna go. This is the party of a lifetime. Nobodys gonna wanna be stranded.
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Apologies, Drew, for not checking back earlier on your trip to see if you had made any entries after the first few. An email from your dad jogged my memory and I read, so far, only today's entry. I'll work backwards to the point where your jeans were new and the experience likely a lot more foreign than it seems at this point. I hope you don't mind if I do it that way.
My first thought as I read about your exit from Argentina to Chile was, "I wonder if he got to travel through Mendoza?" and "I wonder how he liked those Argentinian long distance buses." I guess I'll have to go back to the previous posts to find out about that.
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