Consider the tourist

The trip is over. We are home now, but many thoughts have still been beating against my skull about the nature of travel. I was working on a big post about these thoughts, but it just ended up sounding like a contrived Travel:Good or Evil creative writing assignment.

I found this quote the other day, buried in a footnote of David Wallace's "Consider the Lobster," and it is no surprise that he is able to put into words what I have been thinking better than I ever could:

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it is only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim steely-eyed, let's-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. [...] To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

He hits dead-on what bothered me about the idea of mass tourism, most notably to places like Uyuni or Machu Picchu where there is a dependence on the influx of foreign currency to survive. By the mere act of being in those places, I felt deep-down that I was part destroyer (although just a soldier in a greater army). Every time I bought dinner or payed for a hostel, I felt that I was helping to perpetuate a type of tourist based welfare state, spreading my ¨alien, ignorant, greedy" nature...ending up disappointed in the mess that we had created.

Salar de Uyuni: Gringos

The popularity of our route was undeniable. Despite the fearsome appearance of this section of altiplano, which sitting at 14,000 feet above sea-level scarcely provides enough grass to feed a few scraggly and frozen-looking llamas, squat tourist refuges had sprouted like mushrooms over any halfway-potable source of water that the volcanoes saw fit to release from their slopes. Lines of parallel tire tracks raked the plain like plough furrows in a field. Where the ground turned rockier, a quartet of jeep paths beat in the boulder field intersected and bifracated. We climbed a small hill and passed a broken-down jeep, surrounded by a group of cold and angry-looking tourists.

We turned off a rough track and found the main road. “How many years have you been a guide,” I asked Carlos, our driver.
“16 years. It has changed a lot. It used to be a 5 day trip [now it is 3]. Only 3 or 4 tourists a week would come,” he answered without lifting an eye off the wheel as we speed down the freshly-graded track.
“It seems like there's more gringos than Bolivians here.”
“Yes, there are.”
I paused and thought for a second. “Well, I am here, too.”

The landscapes were mind-bendingly hallucinogenic. But the altiplano was suffocating on its own popularity. At the lake we found another half-dozen Brits from some another company attempting to stalk a couple of wary flamingos. We got out of the jeep to find our own flamingo to hunt and absent-mindingly tightened the altiplano's ligatures a little more.

We left the lake and speed towards our hostel, which had sprouted next to an anemic-looking stream, and added our own furrow to the loose gravel. We complained about the food loudly in English as it was served. After dinner, the Brits bought beer and were getting rowdy, when the fickle power cut out for good. I sat in the dark at the corner of the table for a few moments before I got up and went to the kitchen and, interrupting a conversation in Quechua, asked for a glass of my own.

If you lived in Bolivia and occupied the bottom of the labor pool, you might take home 20 Bolivianos (US$3) a day. And you wouldn't turn down even a single Boliviano, no matter how outnumbered you were in your own country, no matter what language its owner shouted at you.

Lift Thine Eyes

Some have the Romantic view (note the capital R) that the wilderness is unbounded good; humans are depraved. Perhaps Christopher McCandless might have thought the same before his trip to the Alaskan bush turned ill.

Yet, events both recent and distant remind me that the wilderness is not idyllic pastures with laughing brooks. It is also an unexpectedly snowy, cold, pathless place full of slide alder, seracfall and breakable crust. When you find yourself in such a place it's astounding how fast you are reminded that the wilderness is utterly apathetic about us humans. It will follow its own cruel law to completion.

However, simply drawing a dichotomy between the benign, pastoral view and the sublime, yet perilous view oversimplifies matters. Much of my attraction to wilderness is due to its wildness. Wilderness puts me and my petty problems in their proper place. It is a relief that while human generations come and go, nature proceeds with units of geologic time many orders of magnitude removed.

How many generations did it take for Bear Creek, in Kings Canyon NP to cut its channel through the resistant granite? Certainly more than just mine. That's obvious for me to type and you to read. Yet when I realized that a few years ago sitting next to Bear Creek, it was utterly comforting. The burden of my life's problems was removed and placed into context. Regardless of what I do, I am powerless in the face of the process of erosion, glaciation, uplift.

Yes, the unavoidable corrallary to this powerlessness is its danger. I am impotent in the face of nature. But where does my help come from? I lift up my eyes to the hills.

From Parque Nacional Los Glaciares

Terminus

We spent 13 hours on a bus to Ushuaia, Argentina. We ferried across the straight of Magallan. We squeezed onto a zodiac and crossed the Beagle Channel. We climbed into the interior of Isla Navarino and looked out towards the Southern Sea. There was no one. We counted ourselves lucky to have gaunaco trails beating through the calafate brush and deadfall sticks from the beavers to guy out the tent.

We waited days for a boat back across the channel. We finally departed late in the day. The sun had set. Dusk had arrived and from the looks of it, night was waiting impatiently. Motoring across the channel, I looked west at the final glimmer of light. Glaciated mountains on Isla Hoste beckoned. Miles of primitive coast on the Isla Grande extended westwards, sentinel to no one but a dark Beagle Channel.

I turned north towards the lights of Ushuaia. There were cars on route 3 heading towards Rio Gallegos and eventually Buenos Aires, illuminated cell phone transmission towers decorating the hillside, all the infernal creations of Mankind.

Then we hit a swell and the wind picked up. I didn't look back west.

Transporte a lo porteño

We have been walking lots the last few days and so have had ample time to observe and participate in bus-car-pedestrian-bike (yikes) scene in Buenos Aires. A few observations:

• The most prominant threat is feeling like you are going to be hooked by right-turning cars when crossing with the light. Consequently, I feel like I got to bring my A-game even if I am in a crosswalk with a green light.
• Ironically, turning right on red here is no different than cavalierly running straight through a red light, so it doesn´t seem to be done. Hence it is often less cruxy to cross against the light, when I know my enemy. Sure, cross traffic will murder me if it can, but I can see that coming.
• The bicyclists that attempt to exist on the roads frighten me to death. I constantly think I´m about to witness a tragedy. They ride (probably out of necessity) on the busiest avenues. Think Aurora, but with 12 lanes rather than 6. They ride on the left and traffic closes on them 30 to 40 mph faster than they are riding. On the smaller streets, some have no compuction against squeezing within inches of cars that are temporarily stopped, only to have the line of vehicles start again and pass them all the faster and closer out of spite.
  
• The above observations are probably due to different cultural expectations of personal space. Even when walking on the street, it´s common for people to pass each other at a distance that would perceived as threatening in the US. So if your personal bubble isn´t so big, it´s not so threatening make yourself intimate with speeding traffic constantly. This only holds if you proceed with the currently effective, but hardly tested assumption that drivers actually would prefer not to murder anyone, so proximity doesn´t immediately indicate threat.
  

Justification for existence

The arduous, yet cleansing fires of moving out, as well as leave-of-absences duly granted at work have suddenly illuminated the nearness of my trip. I'm told these blog contraptions are the wave of the future, and anticipate that there is at least one person in the world who might be interested in reading about what I'm doing (Hi Mom!).

I'm excited. I would be a fool to complain about the lovely rut I've worn into the streets of Seattle. It truly is a glorious track, filled with good friends, shelter and food, gainful employ, some climbing in the summer, some skiing in the winter, nearby family, awesome girlfriend. Nonetheless, just as moving house--while time consuming and physically arduous--does result in the distillation of one's possessions to the needed and useful, climbing the rut seems like it might shed a new spectrum on one's life and means of relating. And even if that ends up not being the case, it's probably not the worst idea.