How quickly we forget the difficulty of a moment when a better one comes along and completely overshadows the former. How easy it is to dismiss a challenge once it is complete, fin.
The Journey is the Destination
I hiked 16.5 miles over an 8-hour span to get to the base of the towers (torres) at Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia, Chile. That sentence alone still surprises me, and I’ll be the first to admit that there were a few moments where I truly wasn’t sure if I’d be making it to the top of the hike. But I did. Everyone told us that the last part up was the hardest, more akin to rock climbing and a much slower process. The words, “I thought I was going to die” were involved. It was my favourite part. I liked the slowness and taking it all in, it was difficult but I felt like I had time to breathe. I knew that the goal was close and it was worth it more than ever, like trying to hit a number on the treadmill. The first part sucks but halfway is significant, then 3/4 of the way you can’t possibly let yourself stop.
On the way back down we followed the same path that we had taken to get there. I was a bit behind the front section of our group but got ahead of the slower ones when someone got an injury behind me. Suddenly I found myself completely alone on top of the mountain. My first reaction was a twinge of fear, I was alone and I knew it. My second was that there is only one real path and it’s marked for a reason, I was fine. I ran into lots of people but I was going down alone for about 20 minutes and it gave me this insane renewal of energy that I had not expected. When I met back up with everyone waiting at the bottom of the ‘final part’ my mindset was much better to be going the rest of the 3.something hours back to where we started from.
The moments that push you are the ones you need most, I know that and I probably said the same thing when I was talking about the hike in Pucón. This, though, hiking in Patagonia surrounded by glaciers on one side and a lake with rolling hills on the other was something that will be one of my top experiences ever.
It was really hard, I was on my last day of medicine for an ongoing asthma attack that I’d apparently been having, according to the doctor in the clinic I visited in Santiago. (That’s what I get for moving somewhere with smog and visiting deserts as a person with asthma, I guess.) That meant I was unable to take aleve like my doctor at home had recommended I do for my still-injured knee a few days ‘before and during’ any difficult hiking.
I didn’t take the medicine because it interacts poorly with steroids and I didn’t even have to use my inhaler (probably because I was on steroids). But my point is that this was the hardest hike I’ve ever done and I didn’t let myself get too overwhelmed or feel like a failure and in hindsight, I did it with just myself and no real aid. My knee braces saved me, but I did it and it made me realize I can keep doing things as long as I really try.
That was our first full day in one of the regions farthest south on the planet. In the days following we explored more of the Chilean side of the park, made brunch, ate lots of pasta and took in the beauty of everything surrounding us.
We saw the namesake of Chile’s Patagonian national park, the three towers that could not have been a more motivating destination on that hike that started the trip.
We booked a tour that allowed us to see all of the best parts of the park in one day to give our bodies a bit of a break, and we learned so much more than we expected about one of the many contenders for the 8th wonder of the world.
We made dinner at our hostel, we grocery shopped at local produce markets, we packed lunches, and we made dinner some more.
We took a bus ride that lasted 11 hours and involved a ferry, a country change, and 2 customs checkpoints to get to a place known as ‘El Fin del Mundo.’ The end of the world.
The End of the World- El Fin del Mundo
Ushuaia, Argentina is the southernmost city in the world, offering a point of embarkation for the scientists (and regular people with a whole lot of money to spend) that cruise down through the Drake Passage to get to Antartica.
There, in the Tierra del Fuego region of the country, we took a day-long Catamaran ride hours south of ‘the end of the world’, suspended in a space between every place to ever exist and this continent that seems so intangible. We were so close, truly in-between two different worlds and getting to experience things that I would have never even known to dream of a year ago.
We ended at Isla Martillo, a mere 393 miles from the Drake Passage and under 700 miles to Anvers, Antartica, to see a penguin colony. We did not leave the boat, obviously in the best interest of the penguins, but we got as close as one can to docking a boat while we observed them for what felt like just moments but must have been about 45 minutes.
Think of Columbus to Tuscaloosa, or (for a more well-known reference) Chicago to D.C., that’s how far I was from Antartica. Being about the same distance from there as my hometown is in relation to my college town was incomprehensible. It still is.
I wasn’t actually there, not yet, but being in a part of the world so truly untouched, unseen, it was like a dream. And not in the way that one might imagine a ‘dream vacation’ in paradise or even something they’d worked for ages to achieve. It was just so far out of anything I’d ever thought I would be able to do that I still have trouble really understanding that I was there and the farthest away I’d ever been from every single thing else in the entire world.
Visiting ‘the South’ as my friends from Santiago call it, was one of the coolest trips. Following our first few days in Puerto Natales and Torres del Paine we all headed separate directions and it ended up being 3 of us together for the remainder of the trip. I’d forgotten what it was like to spend a full week with only 2 friends constantly being with me. Our group is so small compared to regular USAC sessions that most of us were able to go on trips and do things together. There isn’t much divide other than if half of the group goes somewhere and the rest take a different weekend trip. It was really cool getting to connect more through crazy traveling and new experiences that pushed our limits and brought us even closer than before.
This really is about the beauty of these moments and that is something I want to emphasize as I talk about the end of our spring break trip. The ending was rough, but that does not in any way take away from the wonder of each moment we got to be a part of during that week and a half.
This wasn’t the plan- El fin de la experiencia
On our bus ride back to Punta Arenas, Chile on March 14 after our time in Ushuaia was through, I got cell service again as my chilean sim card picked up signal. I was welcomed with a text from my dad, who was supposed to be meeting me in Santiago in two days time, that he had made the difficult decision to stay put. Coronavirus was beginning to spread more rapidly and, in hindsight, we barely made it back to Chile before Argentina decided to shut its borders down completely.
I was disappointed, and more sad than I had expected that our trip to Easter Island, another unreal destination that I’d never even considered being able to visit, would be something I’d have to do alone and that, now, I wouldn’t be able to show him around the city I’d grown to love so much.
Fast forward about 5 hours to our Airbnb for the night, a Saturday, before we headed back home the next day. I was face timing my parents and talking about how difficult the decision had been for my dad not to come down, when my parents received an email.
As my dad read it over the phone I kept asking if he was kidding. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Kaila and Kendall until confirming at least 3 more times that it wasn’t a joke. In that moment it felt like everything I had worked for, everything we all had done to prepare for this experience, came crashing down around me.
Walking out the door to tell two of my closest friends from the program that we had to leave within the week felt like a dream. But not the kind where you’re on vacation or experiencing new highs or conquering things previously out of your reach. No, this was a nightmare. We had no choice, no way to decide what we had to do or where we had to go. This wasn’t like a last-minute decision to go to the mountains for the weekend or to maybe still buy the tickets to Lollapalooza.
It wasn’t our choice and this wasn’t the plan.
All of this being said, I realized in that moment how important it had truly been to cherish the ones that had come before. To cherish the friendships and connections that don’t just go away because of geography or time or circumstance.
Going ‘home’ before heading back
As we got ready for our last flight back to Santiago, meeting the rest of our friends who had done full treks in Torres del Paine, I knew that it couldn’t just be over. As we all cried and hugged and lamented the fact that this was, this is, happening to the world right now, I knew that I had people that would not just be gone after we returned to the states.
We all returned to our chilean homes more emotionally than we were supposed to. Hugging our host parents to greet them was replaced by standing just a bit farther apart than usual, ‘lávate los manos’ replaced ‘cómo te fue’ as the initial greeting and we made sure to appreciate those family dinners and quick interactions more than ever.
Patagonia was the perfect ending to a perfect, honestly it was, semester. No matter how short it may have been cut. It was such a bucket list thing for so many of my friends to complete the trek and they did. I got closer than I knew was possible to a continent that had seemed inaccessible, otherworldly almost, to me. We strengthened our connections and grew more than ever and spent a week and a half meeting new people and hearing stories and practicing our Spanish all the same.
If we’d had to leave before getting to touch the intangible, I can’t imagine how much harder saying goodbye to South America would have been.
Cherish every moment.
The good, the bad, the one where Kevin and Lukas show up at the door of your Airbnb and are willing to wash all your dishes in order to hang out away from their crappy hostel. The one where you all make brunch the morning after completing one of the hardest hikes you’ve ever done. The one where you see penguins a few hours away from Antartica and then, almost like an afterthought, get to cruise around all day seeing nothing but beauty. The one where you go back to a place that, even after 65 days, you call home. The one full of friends that enrich you and the one where you find some solitude to reflect on whatever journey you’re on at that time.
Every single one.
Cherish the time that you have in a place and with the people that make it what it is, because anything can happen that will take you away from it all in a second. Take the trip, do the trek, see the nature and the city and don’t let anything stop you. Because plans can always change.
Fin.
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