10 - The Statue

If you’ve ever been to a Jimmy John’s sub, you walk out with a tasty sandwich and a new piece of wit posted on their wall. One of the ones I remember is ‘Some days you’re the pigeon, some days you’re the statue’. Well, yesterday was one of those statue days.

Anytime you travel, you can expect to have a least a day or two ruined by food. The problem in Argentina is this – Argentines get their fruit by drinking wine and their vegetables by eating beef, which, sometime in a past life, used to eat grass. Other than that, they just don’t exist. This country has the worst eating habits I have ever seen. Sweets, more sweets, then red meat every single day. Naturally, it was bound to catch up to me. What started as throwing up all over the main chalet at the Perito Moreno glacier ended a full eight hours later after uncontrollable spasms, chills, fever, cramps, a permanently clenched jaw, and more bathroom issues than you can imagine. Two hours of that came on the floor of a bus too, when the chalet closed and I had no choice. I cannot remember ever having that level of sustained full body pain. In the end, I was so sore and exhausted that I fell asleep in my boxers on the community bathroom floor.

Yesterday, I also learned that southern Chile is on strike over natural resource wealth sharing, meaning all roads and borders are closed. El Calafate is now a dead end. I was lucky to sneak on a reasonably priced flight back to Buenos Aires on Friday. I’ll have about a week left, with which I might bump up to Uruguay, or maybe Iguazu falls.

Anyways, watching the quality of my blog posts go down the tubes is painful too, so we’ll move on.

I was lucky enough to be able to see most of the Glacier National Park before the nuke in my gut went off, which was worth the trip. There’s something about seeing that much mass flow and breathe and live that is just incredible. When 30 some kilometers of ice moves, it doesn’t tip-toe around. It goes off like a cannon, over and over. There’s an overhead lookout point where you can get a view of most of the glacier and just listen to the thunder roll. I also got to take a boat ride to the front of the glacier, and we saw some fair size chunks fall off.

On the lookout point, there’s a bronze sign that reads something along the lines of ‘This glacier is a relic of the past, a reminder of a time when the world was covered in ice and humanity rose up to the challenge and got its start. You and your world are here because of them, so let this glacier forever stand to remind us of our past and where we came from.’ It was a powerful message. To use another popular quote from business ‘Every generation stands on the shoulders of the giants who came before them’. If there’s one thing that differentiates humans from other species, it’s that constant building of progress over time that is kind of amazing. You have to wonder if sometime in the distant future, somebody will cast a sign in our honor as well, or conversely, if we’ll finally fall off the tower of giants.

Quote of the day: ‘They had Fijian Idol in the same way we had American Idol, but it was never quite the same because there are so few people in Fiji. You can’t mock the contestants, because that’s someone you know’s sister or uncle or friend up there.’