Peter Allison - How to Walk a Puma

They did not, staying with me through a dinner that I could only pick at. I forced myself to eat something because I figured I’d need my strength for the next day, when I planned on hiking on the Perito Moreno glacier; indeed, I was already in possession of a pricey ticket to do just that.

I was staying in a share room, and had been allocated a top bunk over a sizable Italian woman with the most extraordinarily frizzy grey hair—it looked like a pompom that had been thrown into the wash with a Goth’s clothing. I felt sorry for her having to put up with me tossing, turning and tossing some more, trying to find some relief for my painful stomach. For the first time in years I felt genuinely lonely and homesick, but not for any place that I could name.

As the night wore on, the pain worsened, until it felt as if I was being jabbed by spears. Out of consideration for the other occupants of the room I went into the hallway, checking the time as I went. It was two am and I had to be up in mere hours for the hike. Finally abandoning my pointless stoicism I approached the front desk where—against time-honoured international tradition—the night watchman was actually awake.

‘Hello,’ he said with a genuinely warm smile.

‘Hello,’ I replied, trying to return his smile but grimacing as I experienced another spasm. ‘I think I need a doctor,’ I managed through gritted teeth.

‘Oh no, what’s wrong?’ he said, frowning sympathetically.

‘I …’ was all I could manage before—for the first time in my life—I collapsed to the floor in pain.

I was vaguely aware of the night watchman helping me up from where I lay gasping on the ground, putting me in a chair, and calling a cab to take me to the local hospital.

‘I finish in three hours,’ he said, after introducing himself as Julio. ‘If you aren’t back by then I’ll come and find you.’

At his kindness I didn’t feel lonely anymore; I wanted to express my gratitude but fell to the ground again as I was being poured into the taxi, banging my easily injured knee against the sill. I lay face down against the cracked vinyl for the short trip to the hospital; once there I half limped, half staggered towards the emergency room, where a nurse seemed startled to see me.

Glancing in a mirror above the reception desk I saw an unfamiliar face. It was pale, drawn, and looked fifty-five, not thirty-five. Even more dire, it was topped by a mullet haircut. Accidentally growing a mullet has been a sad but regular occurrence in my life ever since the hair on top of my head stopped growing as fast as the hair at the back. At least I was in the right country for such a travesty this time, as Argentinian men often have coifs not even an eighties rock band would have contemplated.

A doctor soon came to examine me and with no common language we used a mixture of pantomime and, on my part, the imbecile’s way of speaking Spanish, which is to talk in English with an ‘o’ tacked onto the end of words. This combination sometimes works, and many symptoms were covered in this manner before the doctor asked if I was suffering from diarrhoea, which, though far more sensibly spelled in Spanish ( diarrea ), is pronounced the same way as in English.

‘No,’ I replied in all honesty.

My answer was met with a cocked eyebrow suggesting disbelief. ‘ Seguro? ’ he asked. ‘Are you sure?’ A strange question, I thought. How could you not know?

I answered that I was sure, and he asked me again, and this time I understood his concern. ‘I’m not embarrassed!’ I said, or at least tried to say, before recalling that embarazada means something entirely different to ‘embarrassed’ and that I’d just wailed at the doctor that I wasn’t pregnant, something his medical training had presumably made evident to him.

With this hurdle cleared (by now I was embarrassed) and having explained that any bulge in my stomach was made of empanadas, not a baby, we covered other symptoms. My limp was from banging my knee (that took some pantomime; and I decided against indicating that the scarring was caused by a puma), and I had no pain elsewhere apart from my stomach. I couldn’t believe that an empanada (or several) had managed to do what Roy could not, and put me in hospital.

The doctor left the room with a frown and my homesickness suddenly returned. My funds were low, cheap food was all I could afford, yet my gut was mad as hell about my eating whatever low-priced fare was placed in front of me. Perhaps Patagonia was trying to kill me for failing to appreciate its charms. Was Friederike right— was I asking too much of this place, wanting something exclusive that in reality I couldn’t afford? Or had I been wrong when I experienced my Jane Goodall epiphany, and perhaps I was too old and pathetic for my body to withstand the assaults it had shrugged off in my twenties?

The doctor returned with a needle that would have frightened a rhino, and a painkilling tablet the size of a small loaf of bread. With little ceremony he jabbed the needle into my backside. Miraculously, within minutes the writhing subsided, and soon I was feeling fine; in fact I felt so good by the time I made my way back through the hostel doors that morning that I was a little embarrassed. Anything that simple to cure shouldn’t have needed a doctor, I felt, blushing as I thanked Julio.

‘ De nada ,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’

I returned to the dorm room as the first light seeped through the curtains, disturbingly illuminating just how skimpy some Italian underwear is, and managed to sleep for an hour before the alarm beeped rudely in my ear, waking me for the Perito Moreno hike.

In that state of near drunkenness that exhaustion can induce, I could scarcely recall the agony of the night before. I was excited. Finally I was going to see something special, I was sure of it.

And just for once, I was right.

I watched in wonder as a minivan-sized piece of ice dropped from the sheer face of the Perito Moreno glacier in front of us. ‘That was huge!’ I exclaimed, my voice hoarse from lack of sleep.

‘Not so big,’ one of the guides said nonchalantly.

We were on a boat that would take us to the base of the glacier, the sight of which had already stunned me into rare silence until the enormous block of ice fell away.

Moments later we were docking, and a group of us then began walking on a trail through light forest. Sheer cliffs launched skywards to our left, with waterfalls that regularly sprayed us as we walked. I tilted my head to catch some moisture on my tongue and almost toppled backwards.

A condor soared from over the ridgeline; even though it was hundreds of feet overhead its almost three-metre wingspan was staggering. ‘Wow,’ I said, my wildlife-spotting grin already in place.

This was what I’d been searching for when I came to Patagonia, but hadn’t found in either El Calafate or Ushuaia. Patagonia had inspired writers, artists, naturalists and soul-searchers for hundreds of years; its remoteness had attracted the mad, the adventurous and the hunted. I felt sane enough, and while I was fleeing the mundane, as far as I knew I wasn’t being chased. All I sought was the wildness and isolation that I’d missed so much living a ‘normal’ life in Sydney.

Still grinning, and lagging a little behind the others, I brushed my hands against lichen-heavy tree trunks, savouring the sensation of soft mosses underfoot. I caught up to the rest of the group at a staging point where the guides were putting them into uncomfortable-looking harnesses that bulged in unflattering places, making all of us, even the women, look like we’d sprung a grand tumescence at the activity planned.

I was soon rigged up and then the guide handed me what looked like a grand inquisitor’s roller skates. I’ve always thought ‘crampon’ is one of the language’s least attractive words, sounding like the bastard hybrid between something that causes pain and an item men are mortified to buy on behalf of their wives. But crampons on our boots would be essential here, their jagged metal teeth giving much-needed traction on the ice.