Dawns Early Light

Puerto Iguazu, Argentina

My eyes open… mmmm, it's still dark. I look at my watch. Cool, it's only 3:45am, I've got another hour to sleep. As I roll over my alarm goes off. Shit, I think, I must have set wrong. I look at the clock: 4:45am. Desperately, I look at my watch: 4:45am. I groan and stand up. I put on my stiff frosty pants, lift the flap of my wagon and stumble out. Yes, that's right, wagon. Most nights I camp with the 22 passengers I have, but the night before I forgot to put my tent up. Luckily, I was able to convince the manager to let me sleep in one of their old-western covered wagons that they try to pass off as cabanas.

I walk over to the cook tent, start the gas oven and put some water on. Most of my people are either English or Aussie (pronounced Ozzy) and they like their tea in the morning. After the water gets going, I walk from tent to tent try to sound as cheerful as possible. "Wake up, wake up." I say, "It might be dark out, but at least its freezing." They stir surprisingly quickly. I appears that my screechy rendition of the star spangled banner the morning before had the intended effect.

My pax groggily eat their cereal and drink their tea, as the Southern Cross dangles above them. Eventually, they finish, start to take down their tents and load them on to Jack. We’re up so early because we have a long way to go. We’re in Bariloche, Argentina and we have two days of driving in front of us to make it down to Glaciers national park deep in heart of Patagonia about 1500 kilometers away. Argentina is the land of fat steaks, beautiful women and where a mullet hairstyle is not only socially acceptable, but encouraged.

Finally, we’re ready to go and everybody loads up on to our big yellow truck. I go through the motions of directing my Kiwi driver, Dave, as he backs Jack out of the campsite. It mainly consists of me giving hand signs like I know what I’m doing and Dave backing out on his own. He makes it out without scratching up the truck too badly, I hop up into the passenger seat next to him and we’re on the road. As we wind our way through the trees and around the lakes, dawns early light starts to illuminate the beautiful landscape around us. Arrogant glacier draped peaks stare vainly down at their reflection in the hundreds of crystal mirrors lakes below. As the sun gets stronger, I put on some music and some sunglasses and start to drift back to sleep.

“Oi! Look at that.” Exclaims Dave, just as the dreams start to take over. “Hmm?” I mumble. “Crikey, that’s a big cow.” He says, pointing at an impossibly green pasture. I look over, see a cow looking back at me and curse. He hates it when I sleep while he’s driving and will point out the most inane objects possible just to wake me up. Son of a bitch.

After an hour or so we come into a small town and pull into a gas station. As Dave gasses up, everybody else staggers out of the truck and uses the bathroom or grabs a coffee. One of the girls come out with her hair-a-tangle, bags under her eyes and starts to paw her pockets for a cigarette. I smile and say “I tell you what Julia, you look like a million pesos.” She smiles and grumbles something unintelligible.

We get under way and soon the countryside becomes drier and the lines of the land start to become smoother and rounder. Though the granite peaks still glare at us from afar, it seems that somebody has pulled the sheet of the land slightly back. After another half an hour, they’ve finished the job, the land is completely flat and I’m pretty sure that I could bounce a dime off of it. I start to go back to sleep, but just as I do, I hear a knock on the small door between the cab and the pax area. One of the girls sticks her head through the opening and says “Mike, can we stop for a pee break?” I nod and she closes the door. “Fuckinhell, we just left the servo an hour ago.” Dave also calls a convenience store a dairy (pronounced deery) and calls every local either Trevor or Doris. It’s amusing. I look out and see nothing that might serve as protection for them, but Dave downshifts and the truck slowly growls to a stop. I hop out, open up the passenger door and carefully latch it as the wind has kicked up and I don’t want the door to slam. Most of the girls and a couple of the guys pile out of the truck. Girls go to the back guys to the front. There’s generally not much traffic in this area, but when a car passes the faces of the driver is pure entertainment. As they drive up upon what seems to be a fairly good sized army transport vehicle, if you were fighting a war in a field of marigolds, their face shifts from bewilderment to shock as they see the white ass of one of our more brazen girls hanging out behind it, and then back to bewilderment as they try to process what they’ve just seen. Yes, pure entertainment.

We take off again down Route 40, the same road on which Che Guevara rode his motorcycle when his heart was still full of hope and innocence. The horizon lies flat underneath clouds that form an unfinished puzzle piece of a sky. However, no matter how far we go, like tomorrow, the horizon never comes… it only changes.

Finally, we stop for lunch behind a gas station. We work like a well oiled machine. Everybody has their job and they do it. Some people unload the truck and put up the table and then others start to make what they confusingly call dinner. Once everything is done we munch on our sandwiches and a couple of us toss a rugby ball around for a bit. Eventually we pack everything up and are on the road again.

Here the land is fairly brown and dry with enough shrubbery to appease the even the most insatiable of the Monty Python villains. Bright pink flamingos stare intently into small ponds while standing on one stilt and contrast nicely with the flat brown land, white peaks and blue sky. Here and there it seems that some hippy has dropped bombs of dandelions which also help stir up the lands palette.

The sky starts to turn the color of flamingo wings and we pull into the next town looking for a place to camp. It surprising the amount of control we have over where we stop. This is not the standardized tourism that I’m used to. I dig it. It usually works out in the end, but sometimes not. Later on, in Tierra del Fuego, I’ll be woken up at 3 am to peel our cook tent out of a tree where the wind had hurled it. We find a spot and set up for the night. We’re tired, but excited that half of our journey to the land of glaciers and granite is almost over.

Okey dokey. That’s enough for now. Again, I’m sorry that I haven’t been writing at my usual fervent pace, but I will try to do better. Right now, I’m in Puerto Iguaçu, Argentina. Manana we’ll be heading into Brazil and soon we’ll be on to Rio. I’ll write again soon, Moe