A Travel Junkie's Diary

by Dina Bennett

Instead of returning the next day to Fitz Roy, we decide to heal our wounded map-reading egos with some ice climbing on Viedma Glacier, one of forty-eight outlet glaciers flowing from the colossal Southern Patagonian Ice Field, its crumpled white tongue breaking off in mammoth chunks into Lago Viedma. The rugged rock cliffs at the glacier’s edge have been worn to rounded heaps of deep umber, met at their base by the lake’s midnight blue waters. It’s spectacular, breathtaking, everything I yearn for. We are part of a small group that has signed up to go with a guide on the glacier. I’m feeling pretty cocky about the day ahead, because I have some experience with ice climbing. Banging an ice axe into sheer blue ice walls is just what I need to vent my aggravation at the previous day’s fiasco. That my experience has been gathering cobwebs for thirty years doesn’t worry me in the slightest. A boat carries us across the immense glacial Lago Viedma to an outcropping from which we can access some good ice walls within half an hour of the shore. Our guide distributes a pair of crampons to each of us, which I now buckle onto my sneakers. They’re as unsuitable for the enterprise as possible, as loose and goofy as clown shoes, but the only footwear that doesn’t press on my big toe. I cinch the crampon straps another notch tighter, wiggle my shoes, cinch some more.

  I do know that my sneakers, which aren’t even adequate for hiking, are far from ideal for crampons. To perform well, crampons need to be attached to a rigid surface; my sneakers are squishy soft and a size too big. Still, I elect to ignore this, in part because I refuse to accept that another day’s plan may go awry. There’s no way I’m going to tell Bernard my crampons are too loose. What would happen then is he’d turn all his attention to me, devising an entirely new, undoubtedly brilliant, system of crampon attachment. The inner woody core of me is a person who generally does not want to be anyone’s focus and who definitely wants to be left alone right now. I just want to climb an ice wall, go back to the hotel, and consider how I’m going to get up to Fitz Roy tomorrow. So I stump over the crevasse-ridden ice, crampons clanging. At the thirty-foot-high wall that will be our first climb I throw my arms up and inhale deeply, hoping to distract Bernard and the guide from what’s obvious to me: that my crampons, missing the support of stiff hiking boots, are wobbling about. After the guide ties me onto the safety rope I head up the wall, eager to illustrate competency for a change, in this case that I haven’t forgotten the ice-climbing technique I learned a generation ago. I slam the front points of each crampon into the ice, whack the ice axe in overhead, and step by vertical step slam-whack my way to the top. It’s exhilarating, a mix of physicality and pure fun, banishing jittery nerves. “This is just what the doctor ordered!”

  Leaning back, I rappel down and for good measure brashly swing across the base of the wall to try another route. I’m having a hell of a good time, ready to scale another pinnacle, when the front points of my right crampon hook into the ice while my sneaker continues traveling. I feel as well as hear the telltale pop from my knee, a sound as familiar to me as my best friend’s voice but decidedly less welcome. When I’m released from belay, I cast a rueful glance back at Bernard. “I think something’s happened,” is the best I can say. Now I really do want him to focus his attention on me, because I know I can’t walk back to the glacier’s base without help. Then I bend over, standing gingerly on my weakened knee, determined not to crumple to the ground.

  En route to the El Chaltén medical clinic, I decide that since my precarious knee joint was a fait accompli, I am not going to worry further about it. Surgery can wait. “We could go home now,” Bernard offers, tentative and solicitous. “We should go home now.”

  “No. No! Absolutely not. Look around. We’re in a climbing mecca. People have knee accidents here all the time. What better place to be with a hurt knee than where a doctor routinely tends to them.” At the medical office, waiting for a doctor to arrive, we have a good laugh about how this voyage has turned into a personal sampling of health services. “Maybe I should write a guidebook on clinics and hospitals in picturesque settings,” I say. “You know, come to think of it, I find it bizarre that on the P2P, we never had any such problems.” It seems to me that on that drive we were doing far more hazardous things, as our fifteen-pound medical kit complete with stitching thread and oxygen mask would attest.

  The reason hits us both at the same time and as we start laughing harder, remembering our unrelenting problems with our car’s suspension system throughout the P2P’s thirty-five days, we squeak out, “Of course not. We never got out of the car!” Which I follow with, “Except to fix …” and Bernard finishes with, “Shock absorbers!”

  Looking around, I go over to a wall where a tattered poster advertising dental treatments is displayed. I translate it for Bernard. Tooth extraction: $1.50. Cavity filled: $3.00. Cracked tooth repair: $7.00. Root canal with crown: $15.00. “We’re on a roll with these clinics,” Bernard says. “Maybe I should have that old crown replaced while we’re here.” I’m not enthusiastic at the thought of dealing with Bernard under the influence of any ailment. He doesn’t do sick well.

  The timely arrival of my pale, slender doctor saves the moment from degenerating into the sort of petty disagreement that can lead one of us to harbor hurt feelings for a long time. The doctor’s eyes are interested and kind, eyelids smudged with fatigue. His sallow skin and hunched shoulders tell me the glories of the local outdoors are something this man rarely gets to experience.

  He escorts me into his small office, where I sit on the exam table and let him gently jerk my lower leg. Bernard lurks behind, eager as always to engage the physician in a detailed review of knee surgery techniques à la Argentina. My knee isn’t much swollen and the doctor pats it reassuringly as he confirms that the ACL still is torn, and perhaps a little something else too. He lets out a small sigh and smiles, as if to suggest he’s used to seeing much worse than this. Unlike US doctors, this one seems in no hurry to go anywhere. With the diagnosis complete, we spend time chatting with him about medical costs. “The price list outside?” he says. “That’s new. With this latest government we have some new policies. And one of them has eliminated free dental care.” He and other doctors are dismayed by this, he tells us, because they don’t just fix visiting climbers here. They’re the clínica campesina for the indigenous farmers of the entire valley. That locals have to pay anything for a dentist’s help is an insurmountable obstacle to treatment for those who need it most. He shrugs, not with nonchalance but with resignation. “We are a small clinic and very far from the cities. We have tried to protest, but they don’t hear our voice in Buenos Aires.” For his present diagnosis, the orthopedist now humbly requests $5.00.

  Body

  VöLS, ITALY, 2012

  Picture me: I stand alone, naked and shivery in a treatment room decorated in Italian faux-barn. The whitewashed walls are adorned with iron pots, wood butter paddles, pitchforks, and scythes, all looking too new and clean to ever have been used for farming. A black cast iron stove squats behind me like a garden elf, still hot from hours spent heating tubs filled with Völs’s sweetest, most tender meadow grasses. In front of me, a cot spread with a clean white sheet beckons. But I’m not here in the Italian Dolomites for a nap. I’m here for a hay bath, and right now, goosebumps are the least of my worries.

  Our drive into the Dolomites of the Tyrolean Alps is a short one, the sort of shakedown excursion we sometimes do after finishing one long drive—in this case the nine-thousand-mile jaunt from Istanbul to Kolkata—and before starting off on a new one—in this case, a planned tour of the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat in western India the following winter. Even on the best of long road trips a point comes where we both feel the onset of road trip weariness, something I’d sworn after the P2P never to undergo again. Bernard, though by nature willing to do whatever needs to be done, will seem jaded, and dog-tired. He’ll get in the car in the morning with an “Okay, here we go again,” sigh, followed by a tight, dutiful smile. I’ll see him lost in a trance staring at the fuel gauge, he
ar his muttering as he argues with his seat belt. The jousting with traffic and bad roads that would draw a shout of glee at the start has lost its luster.

  Since Bernard has more stamina and commitment than I do, I am amazed how at certain points in our driving we feel exactly the same way. On this road trip Bernard has been relaxed the whole time. That it took only a few hours to get to our hotel, most of it spent on smoothly paved roads so twisty they resemble a nest of fine Italian spaghetti, probably had a little something to do with his good humor. As for me, the road trip’s been my ideal of what a driving expedition should be: hardly any time spent in the car, days filled with hiking under the dolomitic spires of Val Gardena and evenings sitting with Bernard over cocktails and dinner, nary a stressed-out muscle in my body. It is unusual that I should be able to utter the words “road trip” without adding the phrase, “I need a massage,” immediately after. But there you have it. I feel great and am of sound mind when our innkeeper starts to expound on the glories of hay massages. What he cannot know is that seeking out the unknown local habits on our road trips is my not-so-secret addiction, a guilty pleasure best accomplished behind the curtain of a visa. Being one who cannot say no to a local body treatment I am hooked before I can even say “Achoo!”

  This helplessness in the face of something new is why, when I waggled my head side to side at Bernard in a sign of inquiry, he waggled back immediately. This head waggling is an endearing Indian gesture that we had to practice at first, but that we now do almost without thinking. It’s an agreeably indeterminate signal, always accompanied by a smile, that says, “I see your lips moving but don’t understand a word you’re saying” or “I have to think about this, so I’m going to waggle my head to buy myself some time.”

  In this case, the waggle means, “I’m so glad I’m married to you, that we both feel the same way. See you in the hay!” I am thrilled by his willingness to accompany me into the hay quarters. Bernard doesn’t do such treatments at home, let alone in a country where he has to yield his body to unknown hands.

  I understood that for reasons having everything to do with long, dark winters, large meadows, and isolation from normal civilized entertainments, Italy’s South Tyrolean farmers have long used the hay bath to cure rheumatism, arthritis, and general aching muscles—and as a major social event. However, that was a century ago; in 2012 I am having serious doubts about what I’ve signed up for.

  I have more hay experience than most. At home I’m surrounded by it, as our Colorado ranch produces more than a thousand tons of the stuff, which I’ve often helped to rake and bale myself. I’ve walked those fields of waving, waist-high grasses to inspect the coming harvest, and I know those stalks are more likely to induce itchy eyes and a running nose than soothe, as my annual contribution to the profit margin of the firms making Claritin, Zyrtec, and Allergan will attest. I’ve helped load twenty tons of hay bales on flatbed trucks and stacked them in the barn to feed our horses through the winter, so there’s nothing about the unpleasantness of prickly dry grass with which I am unfamiliar.

  My hay bath attendant arrives, while a second attendant goes into Bernard’s cubicle next door. Each has on red oven mitts to carry the shiny ten-gallon copper cauldron in which hay has been steaming for two hours. She lifts the lid, releasing a fragrant cloud redolent of lady’s mantle and mountain arnica, thyme, and cinquefoil. It’s grassy, fresh, an alpine meadow in a pot. If I were a cow I’d have stuck my face in the pot immediately. This is no average bovine lunch, though. The hay in the pot is highly regulated fodder, subject to Italian government rules on content, altitude, and minimum distance from roads at which the grass with its forty native herbs can grow.

  She hands me a crinkled wad of pale blue tissue paper and I hear Bernard say a laughing, “Thank you,” at what I imagine must be a similar little gift. It’s a tiny disposable G-string, barely enough to cover that part of the body where I would not want damp hay to intrude. “Put it on,” the attendant instructs, in a heavy German accent. (Most residents of Italy’s South Tyrol prefer to ignore that they haven’t been part of neighboring Austria for nearly a hundred years).

  Somewhat embarrassed by attire that would make a Las Vegas showgirl blush, I peer around the corner to inspect Bernard and find him standing awkwardly wearing the same little triangle as me. We both let out a snort and then, trying to stay quiet and respectful, convulse in the sort of giggles that can quickly transform into hiccups. I wait while the attendant spreads a mass of dark green, wet hay on a water bed. “So. Lie down please.” Steam rises as I crawl onto my sylvan bower. It’s hot, but surprisingly soft. Lying on my back, arms clenched at my sides, I hold my breath while the rest of the hay is spread over my body, including a moist hay pillow under my neck.

  “That’s it,” I think, just before the attendant pulls a flannel blanket over me, yanks the edges tight and then seals me in with a vinyl sheet. “This will keep the heat. I will come back in ten minutes, yah? To see how you are.”

  All I can think is that if I sneeze—and why wouldn’t I, what with hay all over me—I will not be able to wipe my nose. Grateful now that South Tyroleans are so Germanic-ly punctual, my only concern is that the next ten minutes will feel like an hour. I close my eyes, do a full-body inspection searching for itches, detect warmth seeping into my skin. Perspiration dots my forehead. My breathing slows as I inhale a meadowy bouquet with overtones of mint. Swaddled inside my hay blanket bundle, I fall into a reverie, thinking about how the purple-flowered prunella herb, commonly called “heal-all,” should soothe the scratch on my calf from our hike that day. I also think this is what it must feel like to be a steeping teabag.

  Suddenly a cool cloth is dabbing at the sweat on my forehead. “Yah, so, it is ten minutes now. All is okay?” the attendant asks, more grandmotherly than authoritarian. I nod. “Good! Ten more minutes and I will check again,” she tells me. The clack of her spa sandals fades, leaving me to percolate in peace.

  My world is now one of hot, aromatic dampness. The heated waterbed keeps the grass mix warm while the soft scratchiness of the hay makes my skin feel alive. If I had rheumatism, I have no doubt this would cure it.

  In what seems like too short a time, the cloth is again clearing beads of sweat from my face. My kindly attendant looks searchingly in my eyes. “Twenty-five minutes is the maximum to be in the hay. But if you would like to end the treatment now, it is okay.” I shake my head. I have no desire to end the treatment ever.

  OUTSIDERS

  PREAMBLE

  Paul Theroux said it best when musing on the peculiarities of travel: “You’re like a wraith, with your face pressed to the window of another culture, staring at other lives.” This situation often demoralizes me. I don’t want to be the Little Match Girl, nose flattened against that frosty window, able to see the indulgent glories a few feet away, unable to join in. I want to feel I’m standing under the Niagara Falls of sensory experience, drowning in serendipitous personal interaction. On every road trip, after days of driving and no human encounters to speak of other than with gas station attendants, I reach a point where I’m disheartened. My mind grumps, “What am I doing here? Why am I once again putting myself through this numbing routine that’s predictable only its continuous uncertainties, something I’ve never enjoyed?” I don’t say this out loud, in part because it’s usually too clattery in our car for Bernard to hear me, but also because doing so would inflict my anxieties on him, and I learned long ago he has little understanding and less compassion for my fretting.

  I’ve thought endlessly about my reasons for once again getting back in a car, maps in hand, to see what’s out there. For one thing, driving through a country gives me an unparalleled view of ordinary life as led by the locals. We are all cursing at the same potholes, waiting for ages at the same railway crossing, having our flat tire fixed at the same repair stall, buying our fruits from the same street vendor, and drinking from the same kettle of tea. More importantly, at some divine moment during our ofte
n tedious, always arduous road trips, the car will place me at just the right place at the very instant someone looks up and locks eyes with me. Before they can even say, or more likely mime, “Would you …” and definitely before Bernard can be consumed by French manners that require him to decline all invitations on the premise that “they’re just being polite,” I am in, ready to participate in whatever they have to offer, regardless of what it is. Does that make me a bit of a Peeping Tom? Sure. But every good traveler has a bit of the voyeur in her. Besides, I’m a hosted Peeper, happiest when inspecting someone’s musty rumpled bedroom, seeing what’s hanging in their closet, looking at their toiletries, realizing their floor isn’t carpeted, it’s cardboarded. I thrive on sheer sensory overload. I’m Alice down the rabbit hole, one minute on the sidewalk, the next inside a village compound in the midsection of Turkey, picking herbs from the owner’s garden and making a mid-morning salad with him, all because I chose to linger staring at sheered fleeces drying on his whitewashed wall.

  The most memorable encounters often begin one way, and then, without me noticing, veer in a different direction, something I discern only after the fact. I’ll share one such with you, by way of example.

  On a sunny day in February 2011 we were walking through the fifteen-hundred-year-old Muslim citadel of Harar, Ethiopia, a maze of winding cobblestone lanes hemmed inside old stone walls. With the majority of Ethiopians devoutly Coptic Christians for two millennia, Harar is an anomaly: the fourth holiest city of Islam, after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem.

  As we wandered a narrow lane, pressed by house walls painted lime green and ochre, I noticed a hand reach out from a curtained doorway to wave us in. While I never know when or where such contact will occur, I have learned that world events have nothing to do with the hospitality and warm openness of local people. That I, an anonymous Jew, should be bidden into the home of an anonymous Muslim did not surprise me, but the unexpectedness of it certainly did thrill me.