Without a Traceroute

A great man once wrote,

“There is an art, it says, or rather a knack to flying.

The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Pick a nice day, it suggests, and try it.

The first part is easy.”

On Monday, I decided to take that advice to heart. I’d been looking for something big I could do to cap off my travels, and jumping out of an airplane seemed to qualify. What follows is a collection of photographs and observations from that experience.

(more…)

Yeah, that’s pretty sweet.

(more…)

Here’s some photos from Cerro Santa Lucía, a park on a hill in central Santiago. It’s a really interesting place, with dozens of different levels, narrow passageways, crumbling stone stairways, fountains, statues, a cannon, a church, and lots of secluded corners where Chilean couples go to make out (PDA is huge in this country). The whole place has kind of a Love in the Time of Cholera feel, there’s lots of shady courtyards with ice cream stands, and it’s probably my favorite place in Santiago to hang out and read a book.
(more…)

Sorry for the delay, the internet was down all across El Calafate yesterday. I finally have a lot of photos to share from the glacier hiking trip. I almost didn’t go. I woke up on Thursday morning with a really awful headache; then the medicine I took for my head upset my stomach without fixing my head. For the first 20 minutes or so of the bus ride out to the national park, I felt completely terrible. However, I managed to fall asleep on the bus, and by the time I woke up at the park, I felt much better. My headache had vanished and my stomach had settled down, so I decided to follow through on the hike.

The trip was much less strenuous than I had expected. People had told me that walking with the crampons was really tiring. It was harder than regular walking, but the seven hours of hiking included one hour walking through the woods to get out to the glacier, and one hour coming back, so we were actually only hiking on the ice for about five hours. The crampons did add a bit of weight to your feet, and every step you took, the teeth would bite into the ice and require a little extra exertion to extract them, but it wasn’t that draining once you got used to it. At the end, I came away from the trip quite tired, but not absolutely exhausted like I expected to be.

(more…)

Yesterday I flew down to El Calafate in Patagonia. The flight (on LAN airlines, who, unlike Aerolineas Argentina, will actually accept a credit card on their website) only cost slightly more than a bus ride, and took 3 hours instead of 50+ hours. God bless Orville and Wilbur.

Sunset over Lago Argentino in El Calafate

(more…)