A Travel Junkie's Diary

by Dina Bennett

  Reaching Ushuaia, we park our car at the airport Avis office in a form of nonviolent protest, hoping the sight of a Suzuki with Chilean license plates will elicit the sympathy, or horror, needed to get us swiftly out of the way. By now, I am more familiar with Avis’s cheerful red sign than I ever planned or wanted.

  Our newest Avis agent, however, is a breath of fresh air. A raven-haired pixie of a sexpot, she is nothing if not empathetic to our plight. Informing us that no papers have arrived from Avis Santiago she raises a manicured forefinger to the air as if to bring down the wrath of God—and picks up the phone. Within seconds she’s arguing ardently on our behalf. The Chileans seem to divine her beauty through the phone lines. I can almost see them cringing in the face of her passion. “Yes,” they tell her. “Of course we’ll fax you the necessary insurance papers. Of course we’ll get them to you by five this afternoon if that’s what you wish.” When she mouths to me that they claim this is the first they’ve heard of the problem, I roll my eyes and tsk to show what a lie that is. Despite her verbal abuse, which is lavish and all of which I can understand, they’re falling all over themselves to comply and they can’t even see her. But when she turns her kohl-rimmed green eyes on us and says “Come back later,” I get the queasy feeling victory is anything but assured.

  Argentina has labeled Ushuaia the southernmost spot on the South American continent. This is without the consent of Chile, which turns up its nose at Argentina’s marketing baloney. Chile knows full well that its territory includes a minuscule island, Isla Navarino, farther enough to the south to put Argentina’s claim to shame. Nevertheless a happenin’ spot on the cruise circuit, as well as the jumping-off point for trips to Antarctica, Ushuaia sits on a hill overlooking a sweeping blue bay fronting the Beagle Channel, not a sop to the Westminster Kennel Club, but to Charles Darwin and his boat of exploration, the Beagle. Now that we have some hours to look around, I notice that Ushuaia might more aptly be named Rubbishville, or, since this is a Spanish-speaking country, Punta Basura. The town is a dirty hodgepodge whose general problem with litter shocks me only until I see Río Gallegos up north several days later.

  For a while, I try to dismiss how pervasive the garbage is. But it’s like trying to ignore a python intent on squeezing you to death. It’s all around. As we stroll down the street I’m repeatedly assaulted by plastic bags that tumble and frolic in the channel breezes. These capering non-biodegradable flocks are supported by their cohorts, the foil chips bag and the sparkly candy wrapper. They tickle my legs, wrap themselves around my knees. While sipping a coffee outside a restaurant, I’m mugged by a pack of bags whipped into a frenzy by the wind.

  To stop my mind from worrying over the car insurance calamity, I focus my intellectual faculties on litter. I attribute much of it to economic doldrums, which are real despite the tourist trade. And there’s that distinct lack of trash receptacles, evidence not of disregard but of constrained budgets. Placing myself in a local’s shoes, it strikes me as unreasonable to expect people to carry their trash home. More to the point, I’m all for focusing what modest public funds are available on major social issues such as education and health care, which already are strapped and which now face competing demands from the beavers. Yes, those. What started as fifty beavers imported in 1946 to start a fur trade has boomed to a quarter million flat-tailed furry rodents, who find themselves in the equivalent of beaver heaven: miles of rivers and no natural predators. The threat to forests, cattle pasturage, and water flow is real. So what are a few thousand bits of tinfoil and plastic detritus compared to economic devastation?

  Aside from introducing me to what I eventually learn is Argentina’s ubiquitous garbage trouble, Ushuaia also unveils Argentina’s rampant stray dog problem. Combine the fact that a dog can go into heat and therefore breed up to three times a year, with the idea that spaying or neutering stabs at the very heart of Latin machismo, and you have a recipe for a dog population explosion. The homeless dog situation here is of recent enough vintage that all the hybrids are still distinct from each other. We see everything from a groomed and well-nourished German Shepherd, to a pack of what look like basset–Giant Schnauzer crosses, a cartoon dog with four-inch-long legs, wiry coat, big body, and floppy ears. It’ll take many generations of unsupervised street copulation before these mutts are blended down to the doggie blandness seen in more sophisticated homeless-dog countries like India, where they’ve been at it for centuries and where the pariah dogs of the street have been reduced to a common denominator of slim well-proportioned body, long legs, satiny beige coat, whip-like tail, and pointed nose.

  Tired of dodging street trash, we return to our hotel to unpack. A sour temper has replaced the sturdy chuckle that saw me through the past week. Bernard asks me which side of the bureau I’m going to use for my things, an innocent question that is standard protocol when we invade a new room. On our long road trips, changing hotels every night, we approach each new room like conquering generals, taking the measure of our spoils. Is there a bureau for T-shirts and socks, perhaps a closet (though hangers aren’t a given), a towel larger than hand size, enough outlets to recharge both his gadgets and mine? It’s our way of ensuring that each gets a chance at the better drawers and that we take turns returning to the reception desk to ask for whatever’s missing. Now I snap an unhelpful reply: “Take whatever side you want. I couldn’t care less!”

  Throughout the P2P my irritability had risen in proportion to my depths of exhaustion and strain. The further I fell, the quicker I was with a sharp, dismissive comment, each a mirror of my character. It showed an unappealing travel companion, someone unable to collect herself, unfit to manage adversity, in short everything I didn’t want to be and not someone I liked. On this trip I’d vowed not to let myself be transformed into passenger-seat hellion by my personal djinn of doubt and dread. Yet here I was, snapping out a rude response. The silence that greeted me made it clear Bernard was chagrined. So was I, in particular to learn that my recent cheerfulness has been more of a temporary lapse than a permanent transformation.

  Bernard does his best to lighten the leaden mood in the room. “Let’s eat,” he says. Eating is our ibuprofen, what we resort to when one of us is bruised, sore, unable to cope, when we need soothing of the most profound sort. For Bernard, the act of chewing seems to release positive endorphins, something a scientist, preferably a French one, should study. For me, restaurants provide weapons of distraction, in particular a menu, which I can place in front of my face like a cop with a riot shield. Behind the menu I can avoid conversation and reorganize in peace, emerging not just knowing that I want ceviche, but more tranquil as well. It’s worked before, and it works now.

  Bernard steers me up the road to a small elegant restaurant atop an Ushuaia hillside. We’re at an altitude too high for plastic bags to reach. The Beagle Channel sparkles far below, the setting sun sending an orange blaze across the choppy, deep blue bay where a multitude of mammoth white cruise ships bob like toys in a bathtub.

  In the quiet dining area where we are kept company by a handful of empty, white-clothed tables, all the ugliness of Ushuaia falls away. Cars aside, good fortune has stayed with us, at least on the culinary front. It’s centolla season. This relative of the Alaskan king crab is the most prized seafood in Ushuaia and we are determined to eat our fill. Each ten-inch diameter crustacean requires the focus of a watchmaker to deconstruct. The crabs are as immense as our insurance problems, but infinitely more satisfying. There’s something elemental about breaking open a cracked shell with my fists, gouging out succulent flesh, feeling a warm runnel of buttery juice drip down my chin. It clears my mind, reduces me to my inner child and as such infuses me with feelings of contentment. The copious amount of icy white wine with which we wash down that crab doesn’t hurt either. After a silent half hour, I discover that my ability to multitask has returned. I am able to apologize to Bernard for my foul mood even as I lick my fingers.

  Finding Dereka

  AXU
M, ETHIOPIA, 2011

  Cars can be hospitable conveyances. A back seat normally home to camera bags, cracker crumbs, jackets, and two Tilley hats can be swiftly transformed into just the right size bench for an unexpected passenger. Passengers are a world unto themselves, a walking incarnation of the whole story of life through which we are driving. I have noticed that no passenger is unaccompanied. Every one of them brings two things with him: bundles and body odor. The former are just lumpy, unobtrusive extras, stashed at the feet or held on the lap like a small child, though less wriggly and quieter. The latter is a stealthier presence, making itself known only after the car door has been slammed shut, as the passenger leans forward, extends his arm over the glove box to shake hands and exhales a heartfelt thanks.

  None of these passengers has the money for bus fare—if there even were a bus going their way—or they wouldn’t be walking down the long, empty dirt road on which we’re driving. As I take the extended hand, feel the dry, leathery palm in mine, I know their thanks are genuine. But that displacement of air, slight though it is, changes the conditions in our car radically. It’s like an autobiography in elemental form. I’m not talking about the locker room essence with which any Westerner who’s gone to high school is familiar. This is something far more fundamental, a slow, steady accumulation of life on the body of the person sitting behind me that snuck into the car just before the door closed and now slowly fills all available space, most particularly my nostrils.

  We have given a lift to mother and daughter, farmer, village entrepreneur, salesman, locals in sandals or dusty black lace-ups, ethnic attire or an old-fashioned faded blue suit over a shirt washed to frailty. One has a weary briefcase, another a small case with a torn zipper, a third just the hand raised, palm forward, to ask us to share our wheels. The odor that joins us is old and new, speaking of small, shared spaces where everything in life takes place. I sniff. There’s that greasy smokiness that hints of a bit of meat with the vegetables in the pot last night. Or an odor of that omnipresent cook fire mingled with Ivory soap, still the cheapest bar in this part of the world. Or maybe it’s Dove. There’s a soupçon of goat, a garnish of loamy soil, and over it all, the icing of old sweat from work, from the pervasive heat, from water being so precious that it’s always used first for cooking, drinking, keeping goats and cows alive. Whatever they’re wearing is likely to be their best, because they’re going somewhere, cause enough to dress up.

  In the month we’ve been in Ethiopia I’ve become hyper-aware that a bucket bath is a luxury most villagers rarely get. Since we are choosing our own route through the country, taking the dirt roads that track through villages rather than the swift pavement connecting tourist centers, I have ample opportunity to see how locals live. We stop when we wish, drive at our own pace, our only goal to see what’s around us, and hopefully to reach our planned shelter at the end of each day. Even when I was young, traveling with a backpack through Europe and Israel for five months after college, I took more pleasure in just looking at what was around me than in spending a day in a museum or traipsing through a monument or ruin. The opportunity to be part of a country’s “here and now” has always held infinitely more appeal to me than perusing that country’s history. In Ethiopia I would have had to be blind not to glean from even one day on the road that access to water severely circumscribes the life of most Ethiopians. Water is carried by donkeys or on women’s backs, from a seep or an area standpipe that can be miles away. Children may spend much of their day in pursuit of water, one plunging up and down on a hydrant handle to keep water trickling into the five-gallon jug that once held peanut oil, another striding purposefully home, the forty-pound jug balanced on their head. When so much time and effort go into securing water just for basic survival, it is no surprise to me that our passengers are ripe. It is also cause for me to cherish the hot water spilling out of a hotel bathroom at day’s end, a shower which I curtail to a few minutes while acknowledging to myself the immense luxury that is indoor plumbing.

  Not far from Axum in the northern Tigray region of Ethiopia, we decided to search out the one rock-hewn monastery in the area: Dereka Abba Meta. These rock-hewn places are exactly what the words themselves mean: church or monastery buildings chiseled down or otherwise into a rock massif, rather than free-standing buildings built of stone blocks from the ground up. They’re not much to look at from the outside, just a low wood door, or a square hole for a window. But inside are rooms sculpted from the cliffside, complete with columns, arches, frescoed walls, and ceilings soaring thirty feet. In other words, something worth driving far out of the way to see.

  We start down a road and might just as well have been driving on Mars for all that the landmarks resemble what my guidebook describes. Unlike most travelers, I tend not to frequent a guidebook for trip planning other than to get a general sense of what our route may be through the country where we’re heading. Apart from that, we like to decide what to do when we get there, “there” being any place on the road as well as what’s around the place where we sleep for the night.

  This last-minute aspect of travel can have unexpected consequences. It means that at times we miss something that in retrospect we wish we’d seen. It also means that, absent a plan, many days can have too much of little consequence in them. This being said, the nature of travel is that it’s transitory, which means there’ll always be someplace else to see, time that feels frittered away instead of meaningful, something that’s missed while another opportunity is taken. Being open to opportunity is what defines our days.

  Tossing the guidebook onto the cluttered back seat, we stop whenever we see someone on the road. “Dereka?” I ask three women in my best Tigrayan accent. They point us northward. In five minutes we dead-end in a schoolyard full of sulking students. “Abba Meta?” I ask the kids, whose directions soon reward us with an up-close inspection of a weedy lot, the sort of place even a rat wouldn’t find hospitable. When, all on our own, we chance on a road into the open countryside, we take it without even discussing other options. Even if it’s not the right way at least it promises a pretty drive. After less than a mile, the good dirt lane we are on dissolves into a sand track, one vehicle wide, so littered with pointy gravel it’s as if a civic improvement project to fortify the road base got started, but never finished. Allowing us to share the road are small groups of people strolling back from market, the men sauntering with sticks over their shoulders, the women laden as heavily as donkeys. The donkeys, apparently, were given the day off. After another stretch we reach what looks like a cobbled street, not neatly laid like the central square in Brussels, but with blocks flung helter-skelter, creating a torturous bed of sharp ends over which we bump and rattle at two miles an hour. It would have been nice to give up and go back, but the road was too narrow to turn around.

  Ahead we spy two priests, paused in a holy moment of impromptu blessing for a young couple, their three children, and assorted friends and relations. It’s divine intervention. Even I, who haven’t spent more than five minutes in my life chatting with the priestly kind, know that when it comes to finding a monastery, a priest is your man. Adding to my relief is the assumption that, if they don’t know the way, they can always call on that guy up above, the one who doesn’t need a GPS to know where everything is in this world.

  As soon as we stop the car, the two tall, elderly clerics leave their blessing business, trot around to the passenger door and, without us even having the chance to say anything, jump spryly into the back seat. Apparently, we are the answer to their prayers, too. They raise their crosses at us in a general blessing and smile ear to ear, one of them displaying a full set of rotting brown teeth, the other displaying tiny yellowed nubs worn down by decades of qat chewing. They set their crosses on their laps, put their sun umbrellas and sticks between their knees, wriggle their bony fannies into place, and graciously motion us to proceed. Though they speak no English, from their enthusiastic nod when I say Dereka Abba Meta, we figure they live there.r />
  We bump further and further into the hills, passing small farms walled with dry laid pink and gold rocks. Inside each enclosure is a square stone house with four-sided tin roof, topped by a silvery finial that looks like a snowflake with little tin bells dangling from it. There’s always a thatched rondavel for livestock, and next to that a further enclosure guarding ten-foot-high puffs of bleached yellow hay. Fields are already tilled, clumps of bronze earth turned over, ready for planting. Sometimes the way narrows, wedging us between a stone wall on one side and a thorny cattle corral across from it. It’s not a place to drape one’s arm languidly out the window, unless you like petting prickly pears.

  Finally we must stop, to the dismay of our passengers, who keep urging us to continue. Perhaps they’d imagined we would be chauffeuring them right to the hand-hewn doorstep of their rock dwelling. But the track is no longer a track, just a collection of red boulders skirting the edge of a low brown cliff, where driving is impossible. We all get out and start walking through the red sandstone rubble, the two priests in front, white shawls flapping, caps which look like a three-layer cake with coconut frosting, pulled down over their foreheads. Though we’re miles from the nearest homestead, a swarm of children appear, gamboling over the stones, shouting at the priests, laughing and pointing at us. The priests shoo them away like so many flies, but they tag along behind, motioning, I feel sure, at my own decidedly not boney fanny.