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. 

Moving Backwards

Where do I start?  It’s been a while since I lasted posted, so I think I’ll go backwards.

New Years Eve the whole country (it seems) makes it’s way to Valparaiso or one of the nearby beach cities—Algarrobo, Con-con, or Viña del Mar—and in the half hour before midnight there is a rush of people flooding the streets, pulled down the painted hills of Valparaiso towards the beach, as if finally, after 364 days of resisting, they have given in to the pull of gravity.

The beach is already packed by the time the six of us—three chilenos, two gringas and one aussie—pull off our shoes and slide our feet into the sand.  It’s delightfully cool under my toes, but there’s no time to linger—we barely have time to find a good space on the beach and pull our Caronas from Ashley’s backpack before the fireworks begin. 

It was the first time I’ve celebrated New Years without a countdown to midnight; there was no ten… nine… eight… or even tres… dos… uno… but instead a mounting feeling of anticipation, a chattering buzz in the air, and then, right when I started to think that I could stop craning my neck upwards, an explosion.

I’ve seen plenty of fireworks in my life—on Fourth of Julys, at Dodger’s Games, on other New Year’s Eves—but I have never seen fireworks like these.  Directly above me the sky burst with green and blue and white and yellow, and to my left and right, all the way up and down the coast, there was color raining down over the water.  It looked as if the fireworks extended forever, stretched along all 295,258 miles of Chilean coastlines, celebrating the fact that the whole country would begin the New Year together. 

The fireworks flew for more than twenty minutes, exploding into every type you could image—sparkling, swirling, spinning—there were even some that shot up into the air and fell halfway down towards the water, only to climb back up into the sky all over again.  They were all beautiful, but my favorites were the ones that sparkled yellow and white and fell slowly, hovering mid-sky: when you saw them from further down the coast they looked less like fireworks and more like an extension of the glimmering lights of the city, as if the hills of Valparaiso themselves were growing. 

We looked like aliens.  It was the last week of December and I was with my family in the south of Chile, canyoning in a valley near Puerto Varas.  I had never heard of canyoning, but it involves hiking (or trekking, as they call it here), down into the small canyons cut by streams, where you climb along the rocks, jump into deep water, and slide down smooth natural waterslides that have been cut by the stream.  The water—clear and clean enough to drink cupped in your hands, no filter needed—is the cold of water just recently freed from a glacier. 

Because the water is so cold, we are all wearing full wetsuits—socks, pants, and jackets with hoods (more than ten millimeters of neoprene! our guide had told us enthusiastically while we tried to pull the thick material over our bodies at the hot base camp.  It’s supposed to be tight!  he said whenever anyone asked for a bigger size). 

Because the jumps were high and the slides carved from rock, not plastic, we had bright red helmets strapped firmly on our heads (on top of the neoprene wetsuit hoods, of course) and clipped securely under our chins. 

If you could have seen us—an American family of five, a German man and his twelve year old son, and two Chilean guides—all dressed head to toe in thick black wetsuits topped with red helmets, lumbering across the rocks in the river (it’s harder than you think to walk in a wetsuit, and even harder when your neoprene socks are too big and your shoes too small)—you would have agreed that we looked like aliens.  You would also have noted right away that my father, with his camera strapped to the top of his helmet, would be the first to be abducted.

We didn’t look like we fit into the landscape, but we enjoyed it.  There is nothing like jumping off a rocky ledge into a pool of deep, cold water; nothing like paddling with the gentle current until you can slip yourself between the rocks where the stream leaves the pool and slide, twisting and bumping with the water until you drop into the next clear pool.  Once you’re in the water, it doesn’t feel alien at all.

On Christmas Eve, I was with my family in Valparaiso.  It’s hard to describe what it feels like to be with your family on Christmas after you’ve been living in another hemisphere for the past half a year, waking up in a different season.  The closest explanation is that it feels like being with your family on Christmas after you haven’t seen them in far too long: perfect. 

In Chile, Santa Clause doesn’t come tumbling through your chimney or munch on Christmas cookies after leaving presents under the tree; instead, sometime before midnight the children go outside to look for Papa Noel, and in that short time he enters their homes and leaves presents, using North-pole magic that will never be explained. 

A little before midnight, we left our apartment and climbed up our hill, Cerro Bellavista, hoping the botilleria wouldn’t be closed so that we could buy a few more bottles of wine.  We had to walk up a few steep blocks, but the night air was fresh and the botilleria was not only open, it was busy, with a small crowd of people passing their pesos through the gates that are locked around the liquor stores at night.  The owner’s son, who couldn’t have been more than ten years old, stood perched on a wobbly-looking stool, pulling bottles of vino tinto down from the high shelves and passing them to his father—Carménère, Pinot Noir, un Cabernet de Concha y Torra! Tres mil quinientos, feliz navidad!

On our way back down to our apartment we passed children wandering the hills in search of Santa Clause, urging their mothers and fathers and older brothers to go faster.  As we grew closer to home I heard the sound of a bell ringing, far away at first and then closer, louder, but among the twisting, hilly streets I couldn’t find the source. 

It wasn’t until we were climbing down the alley of stairs that led to our apartment that I saw him, riding in the back of a pickup truck, ringing a brass hand-held bell as the truck zoomed up the steep and winding street opposite our stairs.  It was a summer night in a beachside city, too warm a night for the thick red and white suit he was wearing, but with one hand holding onto the back of the truck and the wind in his thick white beard, Santa Clause didn’t seem to care.

You try trekking across this in a wetsuit