Ñandú

Several years ahead of time I knew what I was going to be doing on April 8th, 2024. My calendar had an entry that read “Eclipse!!!”. What was yet to be decided was where in the 3,000-mile-long path of totality we were going to be to experience it. After some research and deliberation, we settled for Texas. Not only it was the closest point from home, but also it had reasonably good chances, from historical weather data, to have clear skies in early spring.

So, nine days before the much-anticipated celestial event we boarded Ñu and started a road trip that, had we gone straight to Texas, would have taken a total of 50 hours of non-stop driving time, and 5,500 kilometers (3,400 miles) round trip. But us being us, we didn’t go straight. Nor to Texas.

The first mandatory stop was the Mojave Desert. The Kelso Dunes in the Mojave National Preserve were new to us, but they delighted us with the same magic and healing power that we’ve come to love of the Mojave.

Next up in our zig-zagging ways was the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, a desolate but mesmerizing place with its painted rocks and strangely sliced petrified trees, as if served in a charcuterie board.

Another state, another National Park: White Sands in New Mexico is called white sands for a good reason. It’s the largest gypsum dune field in the world. I wish I could have spent more time there, particularly not under the harsh and flat midday light.

As we were approaching Texas we kept an eye on the forecast for Monday, the eclipse day. It didn’t look good: seventy-something percent of cloud cover, more than twice the historical average. Even a significant chance of rain and thunderstorms. It was decision time: turn right to head to the area we originally chose in South Texas, or continue straight, across the Texas Panhandle for greener (or rather, cloudless) pastures. Since the eclipse was still more than three days away and cloud coverage forecast is notoriously difficult, it was all a gamble, but we chose not to bet on Texas. We decided to make our trip significantly longer and head to Arkansas instead, which had a better but still not ideal 30% cloud coverage forecast. We remained always ready to backtrack in case the forecast changed… but it didn’t. The round trip ended being a whopping 9,000 km (almost 6,000 miles).

Two nights before the eclipse we found ourselves a secluded spot on a forest road pullout in the beautiful Ozark-Saint Francis National Forest, with the required view to the South. We enjoyed the previous eclipse in an organized camp in Oregon, with a multitude of people, astronomy talks and live music. It was a wonderful experience, but this time we wanted to be by ourselves, and a National Forest was the best option because dispersed camping is allowed. The only problem was that our place had a little bit too much space: in a pinch another car could have parked beside us. The solution? Pile up a bunch of branches on that space to discourage those pesky eclipse chasers from ruining our experience. There was plenty of other spaces up and down the road, so we didn’t feel too bad about our unfriendly manners.

After setting up camp it was just a tense and expectant waiting game. Double checking our GPS coordinates after nightmares about traveling so far just to be on the wrong spot mere miles from totality. Checking the forecast too often and almost panicking when seeing that other places still reachable, such as Missouri, had better chances of clear skies — and making the hard decision to stay put because we had a great spot and didn’t want to get stuck in apocalyptic eclipse traffic. Making mental notes of everything that had to be ready for maximum enjoyment of those four minutes. Promising myself that this time I was not going to waste precious seconds taking pictures and instead would offer my self, mind, soul, body and spirit to the profound brevity of celestial alignment. (Spoiler: I broke that promise. And I partially regret it).

Until the long-awaited day arrived. The eerie midday calm was interrupted by the occasional car zipping by, jockeying for a place on a last-minute frantic effort. Then the moon playfully bit the sun, making us spectators of a teasing astral tango, while the clouds kept themselves at a respectful distance, like curtains that would only drop after the show is over. The in-crescendo foreplay continued until the two heavenly bodies became one, and everything changed. Darkness, silence, tears and awe came all at once. And then, just like that, after what felt like the shortest of cosmological instants, it came to an end, and it left me speechless, feeling both light and heavy, contracted and expansive, lonely and connected, overwhelmed by infinite joy and sadness.

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After eight years of travels by sea, air and land (and almost seven minutes worth of eclipses) this blog and other great things are coming to an end. I want to express my gratitude to the loyal followers that kept me going, as well as my deep and eternal love to the muse that inspired me: the best partner I could have had for a life of growth and adventures.

Yeah, six decades. The big day was approaching and I wasn’t looking forward to answering questions such as “how does it feel?” (How could it possibly feel, anyway, dude? Not any different than the a day earlier, right?) So, to minimize the fuzz around turning sixty, I set up a plan to be completely alone and offline from the day before to the day after. As it happened, my plan hit a couple of unexpected roadblocks. Not figurative ones, but literal ones: two of the roads I intended to use in Los Padres National Forest were closed due to recent storms, but that was not enough to derail my plan. I declare success: I got to spend the entirety of that special day all by myself!

Pinnacles National Park

Designated as a National Park just in 2013, Pinnacles is the newest of California National Parks. Most people rank it low when compared to other National Parks because they have all been spoiled by Yosemite, but it’s the closest one to home and it deserves our love all the same.

Laguna Mountain

Being mid-week and low season, at Laguna Mountain I had the entire campground to myself. As Charly Garcia said, “no necesito a nadie, nadie alrededor” (now, if someone could explain to me why that verse is preceded by “no voy en tren, voy en avión“, I’m all ears. My take: Charly García may be a great musician, but not a very sophisticated poet. Sorry, you probably have no idea what this old man is talking about.)

I hadn’t realized how much I like solitude. Absolute solitude. It feeds my soul. I’ll do this more often in my next sixty years. In fact, I’m doing it as I write this post. Stay tuned.

Bonus, previously unreleased material

In December, when I was still young, we drove to the Panamint Valley to experience the Geminids Meteor Shower. We had never prepared so well to maximize the count of shooting starts we’d see, setting up to spend the entire night under a moonless Milky Way, all warm and cozy in our sleeping bags. And we had never seen so few. (Okay, that’s not true in its literal sense, since, for instance, last night a saw zero, but I wasn’t trying and there was no shower; you know what I mean). Still, the trip and the scenery was well worth it.

Not much more than a year after my last visit I found myself — somewhat inexplicably — in Chile again. This is how things unfolded and ultimately made sense to me.

Valparaíso

Chile’s second largest port, Valparaíso, the Jewel of the Pacific, is known for its colorful hillside houses, steep funiculars, and vibrant art community. Sadly, it also counts several disasters in its history, including major earthquakes in 1822 and 1906, the Great Fire of Valparaiso in 2014, and a fire that erupted just a week after we left and killed more than a hundred people.

Because the rich architecture of its historic district, Unesco declared it a World Heritage Site.

Corrugated metal is everywhere

The best thing to do is to meander around its narrow and intricate cobblestone alleys admiring the street art that makes the city an open-air museum.

The former prison, or ex cárcel, is now a major cultural center, the Parque Cultural de Valparaíso, which preserves the memory of political prisoners who were confined within its walls, while fostering today’s artistic expression.

Santiago

For me, Santiago is synonym of errands, dirty air, hurried people and aggressive drivers. And because it’s my home town, it’s hard to engage the part of my brain that gets excited when visiting a new place. I promise I’ll make a conscious effort (and tame the fear of getting my camera stolen) next time, and play explorer to find the interesting spaces of Santiago’s beauty.

For now, however, I have only a cell phone picture to show. A significant one though, that evokes deep emotions and touches my wounds, our wounds.

The Museum of Memory and Human Rights commemorates the victims of human rights violations during the 17-year military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet. A sobering statement is a three-story wall with photos of the victims, which serves as an altar and poignant memorial. Facing this wall there’s a glass room with a screen and a keyboard where you can look up information about the victims and dedicate notes to them. I saw a young man in his late teens, accompanied by his mother and his sister. He typed a name, tapped on a picture, and started writing a note for someone he’d never met: “Querido abuelo”. Unable to hold my tears I left to give them privacy.

The museum is keeping our painful memories alive, but that’s essential, because we must not forget. We need to remember so that we never again live in a country where its citizens are burnt alive, where people are tortured and their mutilated bodies thrown from helicopters to the sea, where mothers don’t have a place to bring flowers to honor the courage of their disappeared sons.

Valle de Aguas Calientes

From Santiago, if you drive four hours south to Chillán (where our second mate lives), and then 90 minutes up the Andes to the Termas de Chillán ski and hot springs resort, and then hike six strenuous hours mostly uphill, you’ll reach the remote, breathtaking and aptly named Valle de Aguas Calientes. It’s a broad valley where a multitude of springs and rivers come down the mountain, spanning the whole temperature spectrum from boiling hot to freezing cold. I voluntarily and willingly submerged my body into a freezing cold one, a lukewarm one, and a goldilocks one; lied in the confluence of a very hot and a very cold one — so statistically speaking the average temperature was just perfect, only that the left half of my body was too cold and the right half too hot; and accidentally stepped with both my feet into an almost boiling one because that solid stepping stone was not that solid after all.

Carretera Austral

An overnight bus ride plus a rental car in Puerto Montt took us to Route 7, or Carretera Austral, a remote road that connects small towns in Chile’s Northern Patagonia. Well-known among adventure travelers, the Carretera Austral provides access to a plethora of pristine environments, including ancient forests, glistening fjords, and towering mountains, amidst a backdrop of exquisite natural beauty that is iconic to Patagonia. We only traveled a small portion of its 1,240 kilometers (the easy, mostly paved part), but that included enough places of sheer beauty.

At the Parque Nacional Alerce Andino we hiked deep into the Chilean native rainforest. It was a beautiful day with some dark clouds that brought an occasional shower. The wet soil aroma, the impenetrable surrounding greenery, the breeze making the treetops dance in unison, and the enthralling chucao’s song¹ brought my spirit back to my land. My homeland, the place where I grew up, the forest I craved and made part of me. I inhaled deeply, my eyes getting wet, trying to register that feeling because I finally understood why I was called to come to Chile. It was to remember the good parts of my childhood. It was to be again, after ten years, with those trees. Their names, some of them almost forgotten, speak to me: lenga, canelo, coigüe, luma, tepa, mañío, ulmo.

And the maqui, my goodness, the maqui. It’s not a particularly beautiful tree but it offers a gift in the form of pearl-sized, dark purple, almost black fruit. Long ago I was willing to climb the steepest hills to get to a maqui tree and spend hours picking and eating the fruit, never stuffing myself because it’s so tiny and requires so much patience. At the end of the day we had our hands and mouths dyed with that characteristic deep purple. So here I was, half a century later, reaching as fast as I could to get just a few of those magical pearls.

My soul needed what that forest provided; I just didn’t know that I needed it.

Huailahué

1. The chucao is an unassuming little bird that sings my favorite birdsong: a distinct pattern that reminds me of a stone skimming across water, and is so loud and clear that you’d think the source is a much larger critter.
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I was still in the Amazonia when I received a text from a childhood friend, Mister T. He was in Sweden and had just pushed back a few weeks his return flight from Frankfurt to Santiago. Mister T said “you should come to Europe so that we can celebrate fifty years of friendship.” To be precise, it hasn’t been fifty years of continuous friendship, as there’s been some interspersed enemyship, including a punch exchange the very first time we met, but what counts is a solid bond built throughout half a century of crazy adventures, wacky ideas, and some dangerous and not always lofty stunts (which I’m proud of, with a few exceptions).

As you probably know, I don’t need much of an incentive to go visit new places, so less than a month later I was landing in Amsterdam to start what ended up being a fabulous 11-day circuit across four countries.

The Hague

From Schipol, the Amsterdam airport, I went straight to The Hague to meet my friend, so Amsterdam remains in my bucket list. The Hague is described in a online guide written by a local (that is, a Hagenaar if you allow me to sound cultured) as a beautiful and somewhat strange or quirky city that people shun in favor of the bigger sisters Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

Brussels

Tiredness plus rainy weather conspired against a deeper exploration of Brussels, but we made sure to visit the most significant landmarks: the central square or Grand Place, and the Beer Capital Bar, which boasts over 2000 different beers.

Bruges

Bruges is famous for its well-preserved medieval architecture, cobblestone streets, Venice-like canals and numerous chocolate factories. Perhaps a tad too famous, because the train we took from Brussels was packed and the main square could not have held more people, and all this during what I thought was the low season. It was Sunday, though.

Lyon

Lyon was founded by the Romans, and since it never suffered from any devastating event, you can see signs of its 2000-year history in its diverse architecture and urban structure. It is also considered the gastronomic capital of France.

Annecy

Annecy is a small town 90 minutes east of Lyon, at the foot of the Alps and at the edge of Lake Annecy, which is known as “Europe’s cleanest lake”. The lake with the snowy mountains backdrop, the town’s old architecture and narrow winding streets, and the river and its many bridges make Annecy a jewel well worth a visit.

Chamonix

My friend was fixated with visiting Chamonix, but not for the reasons you might think. It turns out that Mister T has too many friends in the mountaineering community whose gloating about Chamonix rub him the wrong way. He just wanted to be able to say “I’ve been to Chamonix and you are wrong: it’s dreary!”. A noble goal that I was more than willing to share and help realize, particularly if it took only a 90 minute bus ride to get there. We naturally succeeded. The fact that it was winter and I’m not a fan of winter sports made it very easy.

Cologne

My flight back home was from Amsterdam and Mister T’s from Frankfurt, so we decided to spend the last two nights together in Cologne, which is in between.(The actual truth is more complicated than that, but as you know, I’m a minimalist and more keen on simplicity than accuracy).

I had heard that Cologne is a lovely city, but I have to confess that I got off the train without having the faintest idea about what to expect. Upon leaving the Hauptbahnhof or central station I looked around to get my bearings… and almost fell backwards when I saw the gargantuan and elaborate masterpiece of a monument I had right in front of me.

Cologne’s medieval cathedral is the tallest cathedral in the world and 800 years in the making. And there I was in sheer ignorance and awe, an insignificant soul among the 20,000 that visit the landmark daily. The cathedral was severly damaged during World War II but, amazingly, it remained standing in an otherwise flattened city.

The last night we went to Peters Brauhaus brewery, a lively pub in a beautiful old building, where we intended to try some local fare. Upon seating us, the waiter asked “Bier?”. Since I only saw dishes on the menu, I assumed that choosing a beer would require a conversation, so I asked him if he spoke English.

“Come on, bier, beer… it’s universal!”. I must have looked puzzled. He tried: “Do you want beer?”.

“Yes!”

And he brought us beer. It turns out it was just a yes/no question.