Peter Allison - How to Walk a Puma

As it turned out I might have been able to keep a better eye on my backpack in the bar: I returned from a trail walk to find my wallet emptied (I hadn’t taken it with me due to stories of banditry on the paths, which in hindsight was ludicrous as the trails were too busy for a mugger to choose a target). El Chaltén’s only cash machine was as empty as my wallet, and the nearest bank was in Bariloche, whose townspeople had figured out being considered part of Patagonia was a good thing, so had redrawn the region’s boundary to include themselves. I wasn’t sure that the small change in my pocket would be enough to buy food until I made it there, and was not looking forward to the trip. Little did I know how it would change my travels.

The crowd that formed for the bus to Bariloche was made up of a broad cross-section of humanity. All continents, ages, colours, shapes and heights were represented. Spotting an unusually tall blonde woman with pretty features, I wished (not for the first time) I had more confidence when it came to talking to attractive strangers.

Argentinian buses are remarkably punctual, and this one took off promptly at the time advertised. Within minutes we were chugging through spectacular mountain scenery, made all the more striking because the clouds had finally lifted. At each sharp turn in the road there was a small shrine, often in gaudy colours, marking the place where one or more vehicles had gone over the edge. These markers reflected a mix of Catholicism and the more ancient local traditions, with statues of Mary and Jesus as well as the brilliant colours and animal totems that harked back to a time before the Incas. As perturbing as the sheer number of these markers was, any anxiety was forgotten in the thrill of the falcon-haunted cliffs, multicoloured rock faces and distant snowy caps. (I resolutely faced these rather than looking at the terrifying drop off the other side of the road.)

I kept my face turned to the window, but happened to spot the tall blonde woman sitting a few rows back from me beside an even taller man. I envied him for a while until I noticed they weren’t talking. ‘They must be fighting,’ I thought, and as a shorter man often will when a taller one suffers, felt a small pang of glee.

After a while, the engine noises changed from a hard-working grumble to a smoother purr. We had levelled out and abruptly left the mountains behind. The arid plain we emerged onto was so featureless that the world seemed nothing but horizon. Despite its silken-smooth appearance outside, the bullet-straight dirt track we were driving on was pitted and corrugated, making everyone’s cheeks jiggle and teeth chatter.

I can find beauty in the stark, and I appreciated the view outside as much as any other. Occasionally the flat stretches were interrupted by a glimpse of a distant lake in shades of the most impossible deep blue or green. As the glaciers that fed these lakes ground away, they crushed rock into such a fine powder that when it reached the lakes it stayed suspended, and only allowed certain wavelengths of light to reflect, creating marvellous palettes. Just as colourful was the odd shrine, similar to those in the mountains but to my mind even more perturbing on a dead-flat road. The monotony was clearly soporific for some drivers and, judging by the slack drooling mouths of many around me, some passengers too. I started looking at the driver periodically to check whether the long straight road wasn’t acting as a lullaby for him too.

Though I was happy taking in the view outside the window, some of the passengers who weren’t sleeping wanted more stimulation, and to appease them the driver put on some videos. First was an American action film; the video had clearly been pirated and was dubbed into Russian, then translated back into English subtitles. Whoever had written the subtitles wasn’t a native English speaker, or perhaps they had a juvenile sense of humour, for the word ‘bomb’ had been incorrectly translated, leading to not-quite-Shakespearean lines of dialogue such as: ‘Oh no! He’s got a bum!’ and ‘We don’t know how big his bum is, but we do know it is powerful. It might take out a whole city.’ At the film’s midway point, translation duties must have been handed over to someone else, since one character’s name suddenly and inexplicably changed from Gordon to Norman and all the unintentional bum jokes stopped.

The action film over, music videos began with a much more local flavour. Reggaeton originated in the Caribbean but spread quickly throughout South America. It has a jangly beat and is invariably accompanied by a clip of a man in large dark glasses surrounded by impressively proportioned dancers. The men snarl and rap, making hand gestures that I presume are meant to look like they’re holding guns but make them appear palsied instead. After five hours of the music I was afraid my ears might vomit, but no relief was in sight.

While the videos alternated between bad and worse, the view outside retained my interest (with an occasional glance in the window’s reflection to check on relations between the tall blonde and the man beside her; to my satisfaction, it didn’t appear to have thawed). We stopped every few hours to stretch our legs and once for lunch. The bedraggled store we visited had a gutterless roof weighed down with stones, suggesting a place of howling winds but little rain. The soil was clearly poor, and it seemed all that grew here was despair. A sad-looking lamb near the store bleated at us plaintively, then went and sat beside an outdoor barbecue, as if aware of its eventual fate and more than ready to accept it.

The wind soon drove everyone back into the bus, and we hit the plain again, leaving the hapless store and suicidal lamb behind. At times the only feature outside at all was the bus’s shadow, expanding and contracting as we rocked from side to side.

As night fell we reached a one-taxi town with the same name as the glacier I had fallen in love with, Perito Moreno. This place had far less charm though, consisting of a few stores selling auto parts and gasoline, and a single hotel run by a bear of a man and his three tiny daughters, all under ten, all working behind the bar. The cost of the bus ticket included accommodation, and I was billeted to a room, arriving at the same time as a slightly built German man who smiled heartily at me. Though clearly from a place where dentistry wasn’t in vogue, he was very friendly and spoke perfect English. We spent at least five minutes insisting the other person should have the larger of the three beds in the room before agreeing to take the smaller ones and leave the bigger for whoever else was sharing with us.

The door opened and in walked the tall woman’s even taller boyfriend.

‘Where’s your girlfriend?’ the German and I asked almost simultaneously in Spanish, and I wondered if he of the bad dentistry had also shared rooms before with couples whose sense of discretion was no match for their randiness.

‘I don’t have a girlfriend,’ the newcomer replied, looking at us as if wondering why he had to share a room with two deranged midgets.

We quickly established that he was French, that our only common language was a smattering of Spanish, and that the woman he’d been sitting next to on the bus was unknown to him, and that they’d hardly exchanged a word all day. He didn’t know her name nor where she was from.

Interesting, I mused.

At six the next morning our three alarms rang, and six weary fists rubbed sleep from six eyes before we all politely argued over who should use the bathroom first. The Frenchman’s bladder won.

Soon we were outside waiting for the bus, then were told to wait some more. And some more, a wait of more than three hours, before our original bus was declared dead and we were herded onto two replacement buses that must have been there all along. I landed on the second, only to watch the first bus peel away before hearing ours splutter and fart, then gurgle so wretchedly it was clearly the sound of something breathing its last.