Six Israeli dudes get on the bus with me at the terminal in Bariloche.  My Jewish Bros. Last year they were all probably serving in the IDF. Manning checkpoints, driving tanks,  looking through scopes and down sights aimed at various animate and inanimate targets.  Now they’re all traveling in Patagonia wearing Nike low-tops and not looking worried about shit. They’ve got a young American or maybe Canadian girl with them. I feel jealous somehow. In the terminal it’s cold and windy. There’s the usual diesel smoke from idling busses.  Down below, Lago Nahuel Huapi looking cold and windblown, irreducible. If I were a kite surfer maybe I’d be seeing all of this with different eyes.

I’ve just come from 20 straight hours of travel by bus. Santiago de Chile to Osorno, Osorno to Bariloche. Some kind of gnarly congestion had erupted in my sinuses the night before, a leftover from the Santiago smog. I don’t know how people look at traveling as ‘glamorous.’ Most of the time it’s a kind of suffering, really.

Rolling out through Bariloche now. The ugly and depressing monobloques section of town.  Traveling to Mexico with my family once we passed through a similar looking outskirts and my my mom cried behind her sunglasses (I could tell by the way her chin moved).  I don’t know why she cried and I doubt she’d remember if I asked her. At the time I had the feeling it was because she thought maybe we’d made some terrible mistake and all of Cabo San Lucas was going to look like this. Coming too close to cinderblock wall and tin roof reality makes it harder to maintain a ‘vacation’ pretense.

I unwrap another Halls mentholyptus for my throat (my only food for the last 2o hours). The girl sitting next to me has the big round face of a Mapuche. On the ride to Bariloche I heard a young American kid blathering about how the Mapuche were “the most successful tribe in South America at staying in the woods and resisting assimilation.” Of course he couldn’t know that the last part of his statement inadvertently described my ‘game plan’ and in fact the very reason why I was traveling now.

The bus is out of Bariloche and winding through the caminos sinuosos to El Bolsón. There are big woods to hide in here where you can prevent assimilation, or perhaps better said, actually be able to assimilate.  It’s not easy getting down here. You really have to want it. Twenty hours in a bus leaves you needing some serious water, food, lying down completely flat and closing your eyes. Looking around now, 4 out of the 6 Israeli kids are asleep as is damn near half the bus, all of us headed to this next place, El Bolsón, Patagonia.  Raining hard and the Cordillera completely fogged in now. I’m glad I packed my hunting boots.