Onward I went to my first border crossing by foot. There is something very exciting about walking across a border to a new country, especially, when your life is on your back, you have no plans in the world and it is the day before your birthday, as was the case this brisk sunny Sunday morning. It was also Argentina, the country and culture I had been most looking forward to getting to know. After the mission it took to get there, booking it across most of Bolivia and back again within a few days, it was tremendously gratifying to finally step over that border line. I wouldn’t go as far to say my excitement was on Martin Lawrence’s level after he realizes he just unintentionally escaped across the Mexican border at the end of Blue Streak, but you get the idea.

Once in La Quiaca, I went and sorted out a bus to Salta, the biggest city in the north of the country, and seven hours later, I was ringing the bell at the hostel front door. That first night out I received a crash course on Argentinean nightlife and quickly learned that the rumors regarding the late hours in which it takes place were facts and not rumors. I got back at sunrise and, consequently, spent the bulk of my actual birthday asleep until about 5PM.

When I woke up, I introduced myself to the only person in the room, Davide, who was 35, traveling by himself from Italia. He asked if I had had a big night and I told him yes, indeed, it’s my birthday, and we soon had plans to go to out for a parilla later that night. Then entered Nicolas, 21 from Brazil, who opted to join and the three of us strolled out to the main strip in downtown Salta.

Quick note: in Argentina they pronounce the “y” and “ll” sound as a mix between our “j” and “sh.” So, where we learn parilla to sound something like parreeya, here it is pronounced “parreesha.” Not “me yamo Jose,” but me shamo Jose,” etc. Also, the word chamuyero (shah-moo-sher-ro) is slang used to refer to something like a bullshitter.

Los Tres Chamuyeros

Both Nicolas and Davide are fluent in Spanish and since my Spanish was better than their English all of our time together was spent speaking the language I had hoped to improve upon, which was a welcome change after hanging out exclusively with gringos during my four weeks in Bolivia. Davide’s espanol, or castellano as it is called in Argentina, was especially entertaining to listen to because he spoke it with the same rhythm and demonstrative hand motions that you would expect an Italian to speak with.

When we sat down at dinner, I hadn’t the slightest idea what a parilla was, but the two of them seemed to know what they were talking about so I just followed suit. It turns out a parilla, when ordered at a restaurant, is basically a massive amount of meat in some variety. It can include several different animals, different cuts of steak (as we are accustomed to seeing), or, as we enjoyed that evening, all different parts of the cow. I tried several cuts I had never indulged in like tongue, blood sausage and other parts of the body to which Davide would just laugh and point to when I asked what I was consuming. It was all surprisingly delicious, if not a bit barbaric. That night was also the tail end of Carnaval, so we had an impressive parade of festively dressed dancers and musicians pass by while we enjoyed our cow and a few bottles of red. Alas, I was in Argentina.

After an amazing meal, we stumbled upon a local dive bar and proceeded to entertain and confuse groups of local girls with our peculiar trio of origins and accents. I couldn’t have asked for a better way to bring in 24.

The next couple days we spent exploring Salta and having parillas of our own back at the hostel, inviting whoever was around. Davide is a diehard fan of Inter Milan and they had a big match vs. a good French team one of the days so we all gathered in the TV room to pull for the Italian. I didn’t realize, but I guess the Italians and the French have a long running feud, so this was an important match. It went on back and forth and looked like it was going to end in an acceptable 0-0 draw until the French team scored 3 minutes into stoppage time, literally on the last play of the game. Davide flipped over one of the lawn chairs and frantically paced around momentarily cursing in Italian, but we were all laughing within minutes at how the whole thing panned out.

Early the following morning, we set out to Purmamarca, a small one-horse town famous for its “7 colored mountains,” about 3 hours north of Salta.

We hiked around the surrounding hillsides with an Argentinean girl, Micas, that we’d met at the hostel and returned to have my first instruction in mate. Not mate like a Brit or Aussie would say, but mah-tay, the herbal tea drink that local people of all ages are sucking down all hours of the day. If you didn’t know it, you’d think they were doing some sort of funny drug because of both the appearance of the device used to drink it and the communal manner in which it is shared. They drink it out of a round gourd made of pumpkin or butternut squash with a metal straw called a bombilla and pass it around in a circle for hours on end, pouring a new fill of hot water for each person next in line. While there are believed to be many health benefits to drinking mate and although it gives you a nice little buzz and heightened focus, its cultural importance far outweighs any physiological reasons for its mass consumption. From the responses of the people I’ve asked, they start drinking mate when they are two or three years old, in very small quantities to start and by the time they are a teenager they each have their own setups and drink multiple mates a day with their friends and family. Micas explained to me, when you’re young you see your older family members enjoying mate together and it makes you want to partake in the ritual even more.

Learned quickly not to ever move the bombilla

The whole thing fits in perfectly with the Argentine culture, and that of all of Latin America for that matter, in which time spent together, especially with family, is much more valued than in most other Western cultures. In the U.S. we become impatient and even angry if our server does not bring us our food out quickly and then the check immediately once we are done. In Latin America, it doesn’t work like that. There isn’t this inherent sense of urgency to quickly move on with your day and get to the next task at hand. You usually don’t get the check right away, not because the servers are lazy, but because they don’t expect that you want to get up and leave as soon as you’ve taken your last bite. Instead, meals are one of the, if not the, most important parts of the day, and they often last hours. Instead of cleaning the dishes and turning on the T.V. and tuning each other out, here, in Argentina, they enjoy long meals together and then pass around some mate, and I love it.

I spent three out of the next four nights on overnight buses, getting down to my final stop in Bolivia, Salar De Uyuni, or the Salt Flats. The three-day tours weren’t running because the roads to the other lagoons you usually go see after the salt flats were closed due to bad weather. I didn’t have a problem because I was only planning on doing the one-day anyways, but the fact that it wasn’t even possible helped appease my omnipresent FOMO. (Fear Of Missing Out, for the less hip)

My bus arrived just in time to make my tour at 10:30 and I hopped into my jeep with a couple tall cans and a huevo y tomate sandwich, excited to meet my fellow tour-mates. I had been lucky thus far in having mostly English speakers in my groups, but my luck had run out here in Uyuni when I discovered my group consisted of two Japanese couples and two older German guys, who I’m still not sure were father and son or partners. None of them spoke very much English at all and neither did our driver/guide, so I had to play translator between the driver and the other six in the jeep, which consisted of more hand signals and nods than words.

As soon as we drove onto the terrain that eventually became the salt flats, it became apparent that any language barrier was insignificant. I could have been with aliens, Eskimos, zombies or kangaroos and it would not have made a difference because the chilling feeling you get when you see something this breathtaking and the ensuing open-mouthed, wide-eyed expression your face takes is the same in every language. The beauty of Salar De Uyuni cannot be understated. It is truly out of this world. I don’t know what it is like year round, but when I was there in late February during the peak of the rainy season, there was a thin layer of water that rested atop of the seemingly endless plains of salt that served as a mirror for the blue sky and dramatic clouds whose puffy white matched perfectly with the ground that day.

The result was a jaw-dropping spectacle in which the earth and the sky seemed to blend into one blue and white heavenly image that left me dumbfounded and unsure if I was still on the third planet from the sun. The most common question I am asked by people is some version of “what has your favorite place been?” While warranted, this is still a frustrating and impossible question to answer because each day and week reveals new stunning scenery, an amazing group of friends, a hilarious evening or an awesome excursion, each unique in its own. However, I can answer one version of that question with conviction. Some will ask, “What is the most beautiful thing you’ve seen? I will tell them Salar De Uyuni.

(Many people have inquired about this picture, let me explain. I simply did a big push-up, launched myself as high as I could off the ground and my Japanese friend was skillful enough to get a decent shot. The thing hanging below me is the scarf I was wearing that has been recurring in a lot of my pictures.)

After a few hours taking pictures and admiring one of our world’s true marvels, it was time to head back to catch my overnight bus to the Argentinean border. Our driver, however, was nowhere to be found and we were now the last group out with no clue where he was. An hour later he came stumbling out of the little “salt hotel” some people opt to stay at, blatantly hammered. Every one of my guides in Bolivia had gotten drunk at some point, so this was nothing out of the ordinary, except that this time the guide was also the driver. Seeing as though we didn’t really have a choice besides freezing to death we all hopped in and buckled our belts, hoping he could pull it together for the thirty minutes we had ahead of us. Sure enough, he thought it would be fun to go off-roading and one of the German guys actually had to shake him awake at one point. I eventually made it to my bus and after four amazing weeks capped off with Salar and that jeep ride, I felt good and ready to leave Bolivia.

Sleepy time

Finally, it was time to go see my monkeys. I showed up to the bus terminal ready to get my Rafiki on, and was blindsided by the news that the road to Santa Cruz was blocked due to protests and no one knew when it would be opening. Feeling deflated and intent on getting to Argentina by my birthday, I considered just getting the first ticket south to either Uyuni or Petosi and sadly leaving the monkeys behind. While I was pacing in debate, I saw a girl sitting on the stairs that looked like she spoke English so I asked her where she was heading, reaching out for some direction or sign to help make my decision. It turned out she was from Wisconsin and trying to head to the exact same little town I was and had bought an overnight ticket to Cochabamba where she hoped she could get a ticket to Santa Cruz the next day. I had my doubts if this was a wise move by her, but, still wrapped up in the spirit of success of my last spontaneous decision, I decided to jump on board with her plan. Luckily, we were able to catch a bus heading to Santa Cruz as soon as we got to Cochabamba. However, once on board we soon realized we were literally the only two non-locals on the entire bus and coupled with the janky seats and week old KFC smell I began to have inclinations that this was a going to turn out very badly. My suspicions worsened after the first two hours consisted of a strange man giving a painfully obnoxious sales pitch for some snail cream lotion in which he persistently gave each passenger a large dollop on the hand to prove it would really make you look “diez anos mas joven.” My seatmate, Allison, and I took bets on how many he would actually sell (in my optimistic state of mind I wagered 0) and we were shocked at how many people actually took him up on his offer.

Hours later, after looking at a map and seeing signs of towns out the window, we realized we would pass by Saimapata about 3 hours before arriving to Santa Cruz, so we asked the driver a few hours beforehand if he could drop us off there and he said yes. When I walked up to remind him with a little tip when we were 30 minutes out, I was surprised to find a completely different driver in the cockpit. I scratched my head, wondering momentarily where Houdini had escaped to, and delivered the message to the new driver who assured me “no hay problema,” a favorite phrase of theirs whenever you express any degree of concern, even if there actually is a problema. When we jumped off the bus and opened the bottom luggage compartment to grab our bags, we found the original driver fast asleep using them as pillows. Ballsy move by him seeing as though we had just finished 10 hours of hairpin cliff-side turns on a gravely dirt road. These are the types of fun surprises you discover when traveling through Bolivia.

Pumped that our gamble had paid off, we went for a nice dinner and stayed the night at a seemingly benign hostel. To my chagrin, when I went to brush my teeth in the morning I looked in the mirror and saw that my left eyelid was swollen shut and the only explanation I could come up with was that I was mauled in the night by some angry jungle bug. I popped a couple benadryl, threw on the blublockers and woozily walked my way to the animal refuge. Thankfully, one good eye was all that I needed that day. Within two minutes of walking into the refuge, one of my lifelong aspirations was fulfilled when I had a playful female howler monkey chillin’ on my shoulders with her tail curled around my neck.

Allison had a matching little youngin’ on her head and we spent the next few hours hanging on a jungle gym with those two and a couple others watching them play together and tangle themselves around us.

Mine loved a good tummy scratch and whenever I would take a break to grab my camera or swig some water she would immediately grab my hand and bring it back to her black belly. I’m sure our dogs would all do the same thing if it weren’t for the whole opposable thumb debacle. At one point, I put my iPod camera in reverse mode to try and snap a picture of her resting calmly in my lap and she saw what she had to think was either herself or another monkey and became intensely interested in it, popping up and grabbing the iPod strongly with both hands, staring right into her own eyes. It was fascinating. We saw the little one, who had just arrived to the refuge one week prior, grow up right before our eyes. He was initially a bit apprehensive, but as the morning continued on he began behaving increasingly like an annoying younger brother should, pestering the older and much bigger female, pushing his luck until she would eventually put him in his place and then proceed to clean him. By the end of our time he was swinging around everywhere, acting more like you would expect a young monkey to.

As silly as it all sounds, it really was a cool experience for me and worth all the crazy traveling and detours that had to occur to make it happen. Special thanks to Allison, had I not asked you where you were heading at the bus terminal I honestly wouldn’t have made it.