Let me tell you a tale of a lazy Sunday that turned out to be not lazy at all.
I’ve always been a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-Hosen traveler. I show up in a place with absolutely no plan and just kind of wing it, occasionally pausing for a second to take stock of my surroundings before bolting off in the direction of something interesting. But then some days it seems like the universe just takes care of the decision-making process for me, and things just happen, with little to no conscious input from me.
I started the day with a half-baked idea to hop on a local bus (for the first time) and try to find a beach somewhere west along the coast of the local lake, called Nahuel Huapi (“Nah-well-a-wah-pee”). I slipped on my hip but not particularly supportive Vans, packed a single orange and a bottle of water, found the bus stop, and waited. Bus schedules literally do not exist here – you kind of just wait for the next one to come along. I missed the first two buses that came along because I had no idea you were supposed to flag them down in order to make them stop, but this turned out to be the first happy accident of the day – the bus I chose ended up having a completely different route from the first two I could have taken.
I hopped aboard bus 20 and immediately proceeded to do almost everything wrong. It turns out you’re first supposed to tell the driver where you’re going, then he punches in the amount you owe, then you wave a pre-loaded card in front of a very specific spot on a keypad. Being an idiot foreigner, I completely skipped steps one and two. After lots of angry meaningless Spanish from the bus driver and helpful but equally meaningless Spanish from saintly passengers who took pity on me, I was securely plonked in a seat and headed in what I figured was my intended direction.
Approximately 100 more people swarmed onto the bus (and I creepily watched every single one of them to learn the correct procedure for boarding a bus), and I overheard some of the passengers mentioning”Shaow Shaow” as their destination. My second happy accident of the day was realizing I’d already heard this name the night before, when an acquaintance in my hostel mentioned it. Much curious Googling later, I found a place 25 kilometers down the road called Llao Llao and made a WILD guess that it was the same place, just with a weird pronunciation.
So there I was on a bus serendipitously headed for a place that sounded vaguely familiar and had been recommended by a passing stranger. The third happy accident was realizing I’d already paid enough bus fare to get there, since the driver apparently just charged me the max amount after I failed to give him destination. The third-and-a-half happy accident was when I concluded that I had no idea how to make the bus stop, and that the bus was so crowded anyways that I didn’t think I could reach either the driver or the door to get off the bus. So I stayed put, leaving my fate in the hands of the gods and one testy bus driver.
And then I was in Llao Llao, and it was the right place, and I was floating in a bowl of flawless mountains, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing there.
I perched on a chunk of basalt next to the lake and contemplated my options. After some more curious Googling (are you sensing a pattern here?), I learned the main draw of the Llao Llao area is an ecological park with some hiking trails, and I found an absolutely terrible and not-really-to-scale map that promised to lead me to a lookout point on a trail that was “easy and well-suited for children.” Thanks for the advice, Internet stranger! I loaded up on tiny croissant-sandwiches at a nearby visitor center and wandered off into the woods.
I don’t know what kind of superhuman children they breed in Argentina, but me and my rubber-soled kicks sweated all the way up that “easy” trail. It didn’t help that it was a bluebird 90-degree day in the middle of the Andean dry season, the kind of day that sucks every available ounce of moisture from your body even when you’re not toiling up switchbacks. Every step I took pushed a noiseless puff of fine ocher dust from the ground, swirling around me in a cloud that wormed its way into my every pore. But despite the physical discomfort and the uncertain cosmic chaos that had led me to that point, I felt deeply at peace. The calm of the foreign forest was cut every now and then by unfamiliar birdsong, and tiny brown lizards scurried through the dry undergrowth. Peruvian lilies winked up at me through their brilliant golden eyes.
As I climbed higher, the endless curtain of cypress trees finally pulled back, and I came face-to-mountain-face for the first time with the Andes. I swam in an 180-degree view of teal lakes, wetlands, and forests topped by a jaunty crown of craggy peaks. I perched on a boulder high above it all, resting my dusty and aching feet, and thanked the universe for the accidentally glorious day.
Window Seat Odyssey 
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