2 Israelis walk into a bar (the Antarctica trip)

Sitting in Rio getting munched by mosquitoes and catching up with you. Missing SF and my friends there, especially the arseholes who just went to Portland to see our friend Travis' bar. You guys had a good time, I know, I know. March Madness and Tahoe came and went while I ate so much steak in Argentina that I can speak fluent cow. Mu. Its late here.

Can't stop listening to this song as I write. This guy, Seu Jorge, is one of the best artists in Brazil, maybe like Bruce Springsteen, but sings about the poetry of love and life like all Brazilians. Feel free to press play as you read.



My trip to Antactica from Ushuaia 6 weeks ago was a highlight for sure so far. I wasn't planning on going to Antarctica from Ushuaia - southernmost town in the world - but there´s a bar in Ushuaia called "the Dubliner", where it became so damn fun to drink beer. Having a beer down there was like looking forward to a hike and listening to a comedian at the same time. Nice when it touches the lips. They have microbrews in Ushuaia - maybe that was it. Anyway, I met some great people and was at the bar most nights of my 6 day stay, as was every traveler in town, sitting at the oak tables on oak benches which were packed. Smoky as hell.

Ushuaia is sweet – a little town with red and white houses surrounded by mountains, overlooking a harbor that leads out to lots of cold ocean and Antarctica. I had been planning on hitting Tierra Del Fuego and Ushuaia for a while - thought it´d be good to go far away during my sabbatical from work. I finally reached the bottom of the continent, though it wasn´t too difficult - a few flights. But I fell in love with the place when I got there. You can only go one direction from there - back up - so you might as well chill out for a bit.

On my fourth day there, I started looking out the harbor and the bay. It´s framed by mountains as far as the eye can see, but there´s an opening, the end of which you can´t see. This is the Beagle Channel. I had pictures which tell the story so much better than I can. Sadly, they're mostly gone now, but some are on facebook.

The bay is so cool – it leads out to an opening which looked like it led off the edge of the world. I started to think that´d it would be cool to go out that channel, beyond which lay Antarctica, but I had no idea how to approach it without paying a ton of money. I started talking with my friend Alex, great German guy, about it, floating it out there, trying to rally him to spring for a cabin on a boat, or cover me while I stowed away.

So funny how things happen. The next night in the Dubliner, two Israelis walked into the place looking for someone to go to Antarctica. They needed another person so they could round out a group of 5 and keep the price low. Alex somehow picked up the conversation as they rattled through the bar looking for anyone who might want to go, and directed me to them. We pulled up to a dark table over some beer and they told me the deal: 10 days, ship leaves tomorrow night, price is as reasonable as it gets. It was 1am, I had to decide basically in the next 12 hours, and I still had half a beer left. What to do? Finish the beer for starters, and sleep on it. Coolest Israelis I've ver met. They smiled and said, do it and have another beer while you think about it now. I did, slept well, and woke up leaning towards going. After doing some research about the boat and the company, it seemed like a good deal, and the Israelis had their 6th person. The others in the group were 2 americans and a French girl.

That day before the boat took off was full of preparations and laundry. At lunchtime, I went into a bar, and some folks came in just beaming. They had arrived that day back from their own trip to Antarctica. I overheard them talking and then asked them about it, and they said it was so worth it. One guy said, "One day, we were in little zodiacs, riding around some iceberge, and a Humpback surfaced a few feet from the zodiac. It spouted and we got covered in whale snot."

His friend then said, "It was fucking awesome. One piece of advice, stay outside as much as you can." Stay on the deck, look at the sights, soak in the world down there. Great advice.

Some highlights from the 10 day trip:
--the Drake Passage is the body of water outside the Beagle Channel. This body of water is considered the most turbulent on the planet and everyone says it´s"roiling" or rolling because it connects the Atlantic and Pacific so currents come from every which way. It took two days to cross the Passage and the boat lurched like a roller coaster back and forth the whole time. It was difficult to sleep and dramamine was being popped like Now and Laters. One of the Israelis came to our table for lunch and just sat there, and finally moaned, "I think I´m going to throw up." She was sitting right next to me while I was tentatively eating some salad, watching her. Someone suggested she go to her cabin, but it was difficult to even walk on the ship. She said she´d be alriiii, whulp!!! She whipped out a barf bag and let go a few dry (I hope) heaves under the table, right next to me. Next course please.

As I walked downstairs to my cabin after that lunch, I passed a man in the hallway holding a barf bag for his vomiting wife. I nodded my head as I passed. We all survived, and reached the Islands outside Antarctica.

If the above music has stopped playing, try this one. Its by Djavan, also Brazilian, and its about a girl who he loves. I sat in a car and a buddy translated, and its sad but untimately inspiring:




--In Antarctica, animals were everywhere, around the black water and white icebergs - not scared of humans since we aren't recognized as predatory there. Penguins, seals, huge albatrosses and cormorants, whales. And the landscape was just extreme - enormous. We were dwarfed by icebergs. It was difficult to guage scope and size, unless there was a point of reference in view. This one gorgeous morning, the ship was cruising in a bay which was flecked with ice floes, and surrounded by jagged black peaks that just jutted out of the water. Some of the mountains were covered with snow, and others were flat like black marble, ripped by glacial drift. These were reflected in the dark water. Everyone was on the bow, just leaning over the railing, looking out in the quiet. You could only hear breath and feel a soft snow. I didn't realize how big it was until someone pointed out a little dark speck on an ice floe. It was a seal, forever away, so tiny underneath the quiet enormity around us.

We saw lots of penguins. They're cute, but we are over them. If I never see another penguin as long as I live, I will still feel their presence in my dreams and smell their droppings which covered the beaches we landed on. We visited a few islands and they were everywhere, regurgitating into each others mouths and chasing each other around like little drunks at a tuxedo formal, flopping into the water, and then flying like birds and leaping out of the water's clear surface. One of them bit me.

We got so lucky one afternoon - we saw a pod of 5 humpback whales. They came to our ship and just played alongside if for an hour, while snow softly fell. The captain of the boat had addressed the ships passengers on the first day, saying, "Leave your camera in your room sometimes, and just enjoy, and take pictures with your mind." When the whales showed up, he was one the deck with one of the biggest cameras and longest lenses I've ever seen, saying, "This never happens!" The whales were amazing - humpbacks have these gnarly bumps all over their faces, and are huge dark masses of strong blubber, the size of a submarine. Another day, we went for an expedition in these small zodiacs which carry 10 people, and scooted around these small ice bergs. The water is strangely light blue under them, like the sky. A huge leapord seal, which eat big animals and even go after people when they're hungry, played around our zodiac for a half hour, moving like a muscular gust of wind under our zodiac in the clear blue water; She would disappear under the zodiac and freak us out, and then poke her head up and look at us. It was exhilerating.

--I was reading this great book - "Endurance" about Ernest Shackleton, an explorer who went to Antarctica before WWI, when the continent was not charted and the pole hadn't been reached. We were told that it was like someone today going to Mars. On his most famous voyage, chronicled in the book, his ship got beset by ice, trapped, and eventually sank. He and his crew had to survive for over a year in Antarctica, trying to make their way to a place where whalers might find them and pick them up. It was hellish, but not one member of the 27 person crew died, due to Shackleton's leadership and unwavering optimism. They were constantly joking, having dog races and hunting, consciously staying upbeat, even when they were hungry as hell and it was dark all day long. It was a cool thing to read on this trip. These guys had it incredibly rough, sleeping on small rowboats as freezing water sprayed them in choppy seas in the winter, or in sopping wet clothes in small tents on top of a floe of wet ice. They would hunt for penguins and seals, which became scarce in the winter. They even started looking at each other hungrily. But they never gave up, and all made it. Funny episode from the book - one guy on the ship was plumper than the others, and at the end of meals, two of his mates would give him the bones of whatever animal they found and were eating, often penguin bones, and ask him to eat the last bits in order to keep him plump in case they had to eat him. They would joke to him, they wanted him tender.

--One of the last days, we were taken to a hotspring which occured on a beach. TWo inches of tide right up near the sand. We were all going to go in, including the ship's crew, but when we got there, it was cold and only these crazy euros went in. I had made a pact with a ship's biologist to go in, but he wasn't around, so I was heading back to the zodiac with the other panzies who decided to bag it, when the biologist showed up. "Let's do this!" he said, and so I had to. I had a good video of it. Again, it was 2 inches of lapping water that was warm. Of course, the jerk biologist was like, "Lets jump in the cold water!" So we did, racing into the surf and diving in, and the racing back to the two inches of warmth. It was like the harshest ice cream headache you could ever have, but was a blast.

It was a great trip and ended with two days returning over the roiling Drake again. Lots of time in the cabin watching Friends reruns with my roomie, one of the Israelis, Ari - incredible guy who spent an extra year in the army and was traveling solo, having trekked in the Bolivian salt flats and heading to the Brazilian pantanal wetlands soon. I have never heard someone giggle at a Friends episode more than him. We both were, sitting in our cabin, rocking back and forth with the roiling ship, chortling at Friends on a 10 inch TV. If you ever go to Antactica, drink beer before you go, and watch Friends while you're there.

When we got back to land, it was pretty surreal. 10 days of no buildings, people, civilization or anything except huge, stark, extreme peace and quiet with bursts of life. I spent a few more nights at the Dubliner before flying back to Buenos Aires, having spent a total of 1 month in Patagonia, including Bariloche where I met up with an incredibly sunny friend from school, Jamie, who was traveling coincidentally, and made it so fun, as well as El Califate, Perdito Moreno glacier, and El Chalten, in addition to Ushuaia and Antarctica. So fun.

So, I grabbed a flight back to BA, and was lucky enough to have my main homies from the ship heading there at the same time. We made a reservation for this steakhouse which I had heard of called La Cabrera, in Palermo. Everyone who went had raved about it, including my friend Ronnie who lives in BA and works for Google. On the plane ride from Ushuaia, my mouth was already watering. A great dinner was waiting for me in Buenos Aires, as well as a thief who pinched a ton of my stuff from my room in the hostel, as well as a tango class, and some incredibley cool Argentinian friends I would meet. I stayed a month. More on that next time. Hope this was a fun read, and not too much or too stupid. =) Much love.