There are trips and trips

Patagonia Diaries #3

Picture from Punta Tombo, in Argentina

This piece is part of my Patagonia Diaries series about repeating a 16,000km roadtrip my parents did with me as a one year-old, where I share my reflections about myself and what I saw throughout the trip, covering a wide range of topics.

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Towards the end of a dinner I had with a friend on my last visit to Finland, his girlfriend (who I hadn’t met before) came by, and we embarked on a long conversation about a wide variety of deeply intimate topics.

One thing she said which really stuck with me was about her experience going back to Kosovo on a trip. Her family is originally from there, but she was born in Finland and lived there for her entire life.

She mentioned that while she does fit in in Finland, visiting Kosovo made her go: “Oh, these people actually look just like me.”

That’s kinda what happened to me in El Chaltén.

Now, I don’t want to diminish the complex feelings and dynamics associated with “individual multiculturalism”, which is also something I deeply identify with, being a Brazilian-Finn that’s lived in six different countries.

But in El Chaltén I also had a strong sense of “these people are like me”, albeit not in a physical appearance sense.

Arriving in town, you see hitchhikers on the side of the road, and in town you have a bunch of people in colored jackets going back and forth carrying heavy equipment on their backs, be it for hiking or climbing. Definitely my type of stuff.

Having briefly stopped in El Calafate just before, I pointed out to my family how you can tell the visitors in both towns are generally of a different type by the color of their jackets.

Walking through El Calafate one day I had a realization that I stuck out like a sore thumb because of my bright yellow jacket, given that looking around all I saw were dark-colored outer layers.

This tells me these people are more like “city people” than “mountain people”. Or at least they are here on “city mode”.

If you don’t get what I mean, I’ll quickly explain: people that practice outdoor sports in the mountains, like climbing, hiking, skiing, and the like, will generally wear bright colors, as it makes them easier to find in case of an emergency.

Either way, with the mountains around me and the streets filled with people that share the same hobbies as me, I felt right at home at El Chaltén.

The problem with that is, were I traveling alone, I’d probably stay there for a longer period and try to tackle as many hikes and climbs (not in the massif, by the way — yet) as I could, but as a group, we’d settled on two full days in El Chaltén, no more.

While I was a bit sad to not have more time there, by the time we’d gotten to El Chaltén, I had already come to terms with the fact that this wasn’t going to be my “perfect Patagonia trip”, and that’s okay.

After all, our objectives were very different, and this was above all a family trip with members that have different hobbies and interests, and range from a nineteen year-old (my brother) to a sixty-one year-old (my father).

I’d be lying if I said the desire to break away and do my own trip didn’t pop up at times, but this internal struggle taught me many things.

Mainly, it drilled down in me more deeply the idea that “there are trips and trips”, and that you can’t expect trips to live up to everything you want them to be. Rationally, this is an easy thing to accept, but emotionally it is easier said than done.

There’s also a point about opportunities. I was “saving” a Patagonia trip for when I’d be “ready”, and intended it to be a period where I’d have longer stays in each place and have done all the prep to tackle challenging things in the mountains. But the opportunity appeared to head there without either of those things being true, and of course it would make no sense to reject it.

Plus, for someone that almost always travels solo, it was important to get better at dealing with group dynamics, and seeing that it can be just as (or even more) fulfilling than traveling solo, even though you give up control and need to make sacrifices to make it work.

Over time, the negotiations with the voice in my head that was struggling to accept not doing certain things became much easier, and I happily accepted this as a “reconnaissance” trip. Provided it is still as important to me in the future to do these things I want to do now, I’ll find a way to be back, and, having been there, it’ll be easier to plan as I’m a lot more informed now.

But finally, I think this also calls for a shoutout to my parents and my brother. Because ultimately it’s not like I had to come to terms with a trip that was wildly different from my preferences. It isn’t as if everyone wanted to shop and drink and I wanted to do adventurous things.

In fact, I just wanted to have had time to do more of what we were doing. We went climbing outside twice (even if it wasn’t easy), camped in the middle of nowhere, and did numerous hikes (two of which were strenuous full-day affairs). All while sleeping little and driving a whole fucking lot.

So a big thank you to my family for being cool. It made it a lot easier to tell the selfish voice in my head to shut up.