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Being a Watson fellow, so I've come to learn, is all about making decisions. I decide where to go, where to stay, where to eat, who to talk to, what to see, when to see it, and everything in between.
So when a friend of mine from a hostel in Salta e-mailed me and told me he had a spot on the sailboat he was working on for a trip to Easter Island, I had some pretty serious thinking to do. Easter Island. The ass-end of the middle of nowhere, and a place whose very name evokes images of exoticism and otherworldliness. It is the most isolated inhabited point in the world, and I was going to sail there, of all things, aboard a 40-foot sailboat with three Aussies for a month. The idea of such an adventure thrilled me to no end, but what killed the dream were the pictures of the boat itself. It actually was a sailboat. It wasn't a yacht. It wasn't a barge or a tanker. It was like the thing that you play with in your bathtub and watch it pop around for awhile.
At any rate, no more Easter Island. As my friend James told me, "If it's really that important to me later in life, I can fly there like a normal human being." I arrived in Bariloche a few days ago, and it's a good thing it's such a nice little town to help ease the sting of the Easter Island let-down. Bariloche's a miniature Switzerland, and if there's anything I love, it's Switzerland. Went hiking yesterday on something called the Cerro Lopez, which was a really nice hike, and who did I run into on the trail but a Chabad rabbi. Back in the parking lot, he had me meet his family (and plural kids), and then of course asked me if I had laid tefillin that day.
Now picture this: wizened, bearded, bespectacled rabbi and backpacker reformed New Yorker Jew laying tefillin in the heart of the Andes Mountains with other hikers looking on perplexed. The picture says it all, I think. It was one of those, "How did I get here?" moments that I have every now and again, and after it was over, the rabbi told me how to get to the synagogue in Bariloche for services that night.
Services turned out to be one of the weirder experiences I've spent on this trip. The room was packed, literally packed, with three or four Hassidic leaders and droves of Israeli backpackers in jeans and t-shirts. They crammed them into every corner, and after services were over, there was an immense meal for everyone in attendance, set across two tables that stretched across three rooms. The Israelis were cool... nice guys and girls, but you got the sense that they were sort of "putting on" the Chabad guys. There was a little mockery, a lot of immaturity... It was like being back in Hebrew school with Jeremy and Cary, to be honest, and I was sort of disappointed.
At any rate, probably a few more days in Bariloche, then heading south to do the rest of Patagonia. I never thought I'd reach a point in my life where I thought that I was "just" doing Patagonia, but that's sort of what it feels like at the moment. Eh... Easter Island isn't going anywhere.
previous travel blog entry
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