CouchSurfing in Mendoza

I’m sitting outside the bus terminal in Mendoza, Argentina, waiting for someone I don’t know to pick me up.  This is set to be my first CouchSurfing experience, something I’ve heard a lot about but never been brave enough to try.

The idea is simple: people who have a spare couch or bed and who want to show other travelers around their city create a profile on the CouchSurfing website, describing themselves and what they like to do, the kind of people they get along with.  Travelers who are looking for a place to stay and who want to meet locals make their own profiles, and then group 2 searches from members of group 1 (who have usually been members of group 2 sometime in the past) in the city they want to visit, send a couch request, and then if dates and times work out—BING! a new friendship is born. 

That’s the idea, anyway.  I have a few friends who have traveled this way, jumping from couch to couch across the continent, and they have all good things to say about it.  The website, too, is pretty convincing, explaining that CouchSurfing is not about finding a free place to stay but is a whole knew way of traveling.  I was excited.

It wasn’t until I was waiting outside the bus terminal, watching the taxis filter past and looking for someone I didn’t know, that I started to get nervous.  I was in a country I had never been to, waiting for someone I had met on the internet to pick me up in his car and take me to his house.  Hadn’t I seen this story in more then a few movies, movies that end with the girl kidnapped or dead or never seen again?

When Jonathon (Jonathan! That’s not even an Argentinean name! This must be a SCAM!!!!) pulled past the taxis in his small white pickup truck I knew it was him—he looked vaguely like the photos he posted on CouchSurfing (read: brown hair, sunglasses) and by the way his truck slowed I could tell he was looking for someone.

He caught my eye, waved, and then jumped out of drivers seat to kiss me on the cheek South American style.  We talked as he helped me throw my backpack into the bed of the truck, and right away I began to relax.  This is the part of the movie where the music would slow, the air grow tense, but as we drove out of the through the tree lined city center, windows rolled down to entice the breeze, I could tell that he was buena honda.  I got good vibes.

My gringa friends and I have talked a lot about how it’s hard to make friends in Chile—where do you start?  You have to meet people somewhere, for one, and then there’s the whole language thing—but while I sat next to the pool with Johnny and two of his friends, it seemed easy. 

As the day began to fade, the temperature dropping dramatically from extremely hot to a mere kind of hot, we left the pool and Johnny showed me the area on his ATV.  He lives in the hills up above Mendoza, about ten minutes outside the city center, but as we tore across the dirt roads, kicking up dust and leaning into curves, it felt like I was in another world.  It was nothing like Santiago, and nothing like the Mendoza I had imagined, either—a small, shady city crawling with grape vines and tourists.  It was just fun.

Johnny tried to get me to drive the ATV, but after I caused a small traffic jam because I wasn’t going fast enough we pulled into the landing field of the Paragliding club—el club de vuelo libre—to rest.  The tall hill up the road from his house is the jumping point for paragliders, parapentistas in Spanish, and we sat in the grass of the open field and watched them land, some drifting slowly to the ground and others spiraling rapidly to their finish.  It’s an incredible thing to watch, parapente, the blue and red and yellow sails filled with air arching over the tiny bodies of the pilots.  It looks quiet, as if nothing from the ground could touch you.

From the air, Johhny says, the city of Mendoza seems insignificant, a glimmer that looks like it might, at any moment, be swallowed whole by the gigantic swathes of nothing that stretch in green and brown stripes from the other side of the mountain.  La nada, he calls it, and although there is grass beneath my fingers I am aching to fly.

From the air, another parapentista will tell me later, everything seems insignificant.  It’s a peaceful sport, but a dangerous one too: reacting too slowly to a gust of wind or pulling the sail in the wrong direction at the wrong time could send the pilot freefalling towards the ground.  It’s a sport that could easily kill you, but that’s part of the addiction, he tells me: you have your own life in your hands, and there is nothing anyone else can do to help or to hurt you.  Up in the air, there’s nothing but you and the sky.

There’s so much I could tell you about Mendoza: about the huge park at the base of the hills, about the way they call a pool a pileta instead of a piscina, about the open-air disco where we danced until five in the morning (and were some of the first people to leave), about sleeping up on the roof in the warm night air, falling asleep with the stars and waking up to the sun.  I could write for pages about all of that, but there are two things that have really stuck with me: the parapentistas drifting just below the clouds and the way this past week I haven’t felt like a tourist at all, but like someone visiting friends in a new city.

Johnny and his friends treated me like we’d been friends forever, like it was about time I came to see Mendoza, and they made sure I saw it—not just the center of the city or the bodegas where the tourists flock, but the discos they like and the pools that they know of and the beers that are good on that side of the Andes.  I was a little nervous about traveling on my own, but I hardly spent any time alone—there were too many people trying to make sure I had a good time.  And in five days, I didn’t speak a word of English.

Right now, riding on the high of an incredible trip, I feel the way the parapentistas must feel on their first flights, when the air has pulled their feet up from the ground and spread the earth before them.  He realized, one of the pilots told me as we watched his friends spiraling in the air, his body nothing more than a dark shadow against the sky, that the world is at once so much bigger and so much smaller than he had ever imagined.