The first time I drank the Argentine tea called “mate” was in Boulder, Colorado.  

Mate is simple to prepare.  You pour some herbs into a gourd, add hot water and drink the bitter brew through a metal straw.  

There was always a mate gourd in Jon’s kitchen.  Jon is a law student whose Boulder apartment I crashed in last summer when I wasn’t camping in the high peaks.  Jon had been to Argentina the previous year, and brought the mate gourd home with him as a souvenir.  

“I bought this gourd in the most beautiful mountain valley,” he told me.  “A place called El Bolson.”

Mountain Sun

One afternoon in Boulder I met up with Matador Editor David Miller for burgers and beer at the Mountain Sun pub.  David told me about Argentina, the country where his wife is from.  

“We bought some land in Patagonia,” he said.  “Near a river, in the mountains.  Someday I’ll build a cabin there.”

After Mountain Sun, David and I walked back to Jon’s apartment.  The mate gourd was sitting on the counter, and when David saw it his eyes lit up:

“El Bolson!  That mate gourd is from El Bolson!  That’s the valley where I bought land.  That’s the most beautiful place in South America.”

Right there and then, I bought a cheap ticket to Buenos Aires.  My departure date was in November.  The return was in May.  I was bound for El Bolson.

One Bleak Month

But I didn’t get to go right away.  With David’s help I landed an assignment writing for Fodor’s Travel Guides in the extreme south of Patagonia.  The far south is harsh country, and it was a difficult time alone, traversing the barren steppe with no knowledge of Argentine culture and a vocabulary of precisely 14 Spanish words.  

After a month of glacier treks, penguin colonies and ice-climbing, I couldn’t wait to go north to milder climes, to get out of the wind and see green leaves again.  El Bolson began to seem like the Promised Land.  When my guidebook work was done, I endured a 32 hour bus ride that ended at 5 am at a gas station in the pouring rain.  The next afternoon I woke up groggy in my stuffy pup-tent, unzipped the door flap, took a breath of cold, clean air and saw jagged mountain peaks rising into the bluest of skies.  

El Bolson.  I was finally there.

The Promised Land

Jon’s favorite campground in El Bolson is a patch of grassy hillside called Camping Mario.  After one night in the municipal campground downtown, I bought an old mountain bike, rode down a dirt road, over a bridge, up a hill and finally arrived in the Promised Land.  

I should probably say that every guidebook description of El Bolson has the word “hippy” in the first paragraph.  I don’t like the word hippy, because it has derogatory and dismissive connotations.  The truth is that El Bolson is a forward thinking ecological municipality.  The surrounding peaks are a central release point for the Earth’s sacred energies.  Farmland is protected from development, and the air and rivers are clean and pure.  

But however enlightened the citizens of El Bolson may be, there’s still only one way to describe Camping Mario: Argentine Hippy Paradise.

Hippy Paradise

It was noon when I pitched my tent at the very top of the Camping Mario meadow, in a spot with sweeping views across the valley to the Piltriquitron massif.  Feeling totally free of responsibility for the first time in a month, I lay back in the grass and surveyed my new surroundings.

About a dozen tents were scattered across the meadow among fruit and pine trees.  A girl with a red headband danced barefoot in the grass while others lay sleeping on blankets in the shade.  A solitary lamb wagged its tail while grazing on shrubbery.  Sweet reggae music rolled on the breeze – “We don’t want no nuclear war…With nuclear war we won’t get far…”

An incredible realization arose as I watched the scene below.  Impossible.  It couldn’t be true.  But it was.  Undeniably so.  

Every single one of the Argentine hippy girls lounging in the meadow was more attractive than every single one of the girls with whom I went to college.  I’m not saying Williams College girls are unattractive.  But these Argentine girls were simply in another league.

I put on my sunglasses.

All of a sudden a skinny guy with a sunburn sat down next to me and unleashed a flood of Spanish.  When he released that I understood nada he shook my hand and smiled and kept right on talking, rolling a fat joint at the same time.  I could only understand two things he said:

1) His name was Chispa

2) In ten minutes we were going to the mountains

In a flash, Chispa jumped up and left as quickly as he had appeared.  When he was gone a young, serious-faced man with a dark complexion came over to say hello.  

“I am Alvaro,” he said in careful, quiet English.  “I am from Colombia.  I rode my bicycle from Colombia to Patagonia.  It has been a long journey.  Many hardships.  Many…how do you say…exaltations of the spirit.  Now, I have no money.  I wish…I wish desperately to go home.”  

Chispa honked the horn of a car in the driveway and waved in my direction.  “Hasta luego,” I said to Alvaro.  

As I grabbed my daypack and ran after Chispa a burly man with long curly hair and puffy eyes emerged from the tent next to mine.  

“Free Bird,” he said, extending his hand for a soul-shake.  “Lynrd Skynrd, man.”

Chispa honked the horn again.  Mr. Free Bird muttered something about loco boludo - crazy idiot - shuffled over to the car and took a seat shotgun.  I slid into the back and found myself sitting next to a dark-haired girl with a body like an overripe mango.  Chispa passed me the joint and popped a Manu Chao CD into the player.  

We were off to the mountains.

La Mendocina and the Mountains

The girl in the back of Chispa’s car simply dripped of sex.  She was from Mendoza, the province of wine, and her body was all softness and curves and when she laughed I could see a pink stud in her tongue, like a chunk of candy-cane.  As we rolled up a fire road past organic farms and log cabins enveloped with roses I resolved to just roll with this experience, and see where the flow would take me.  

La Mendocina, I discovered, was an aerobics instructor.  

We hiked to a hut high in the mountains, the valley spread out below, high peaks on three sides like the turrets of a divine fortress, blue lakes and thin strings of silver streams.  

Outside of Bhutan, El Bolson is the most beautiful valley I’ve ever seen.  

That night we drank and smoked around a campfire until 5 am.  Somewhere near dawn La Mendocina put her hand on my knee and stared into my eyes with a look of blissful incomprehension.

Fishing With Free Bird

The next day I went fishing with Chispa and Free Bird, promising La Mendocina a trout-fry later that night around the campfire.  I caught one big brown trout early, on a little Rapala plug, but that was the only decent sized fish of the day, and after a few hours we just lounged on the riverbank, drinking wine and playing guitar.  

It was dark when we started home, and, full of wine, we got lost.  I felt totally accepted in that moment of starry, buzzed uncertainty.  We were all lost, together, none of us had a clue, and it didn’t matter where we were from or what language we spoke or how much money we had – we were three guys with one trout, lost in Patagonia.  Eventually we found our way back to the fire – and 23 hungry hippies.

Chispa cleaned our trout and lay it on the grill as a drum circle broke out.  A few minutes later one of the campground dogs trotted off into the shadows of the meadow with a full mouth and a wagging tail.  The trout was gone.  Free Bird thought it was hilarious.  

“Perro Vivo, Hippies No,” he said.  The dog lives, the hippies – no.

A Controlled Explosion

That night we made do with wine alone, and I seem to remember a great conversation with a tall, skinny, bearded Frenchman named Pierre, who was carving Celtic symbols into a wooden staff and spoke English with the accent of an Indian shopkeeper (he had lived for two years on the Ganges).

At about 2 am Pierre began twirling fire-sticks in the meadow and Alvaro, the Colombian, sat next to me, intense and hollow-eyed.  

“The United States takes everything,” he said.  “Takes oil.  Takes land.  You are from the United States, but you are a good person.  I am surprised to meet a good person from the United States.”  

La Mendocina was sitting opposite us, across the fire-pit.  We caught eyes, she opened her mouth and the pink tongue stud shone in the fire-light.  

“A body like a goddess,” Alvaro said.  “I must tell you, I like her so much.  Too much.  Sometimes I feel…I feel a connection between us.  She likes you also, I can tell, but…will you give me a chance to see if the connection between her and I is real?”  

“Sure,” I told Alvaro.  “Sure.”

Truth be told, it was a relief to take myself out of the game.  That tongue stud intimidated me, and besides, there’s someone a continent away who I’m thinking of.  

At that moment La Mendocina took a swig of wine, walked unsteadily around the fire and sat down between me and Alvaro.  Alvaro said something to her, she laughed and said Colombiano boludo - Colombian Idiot.

“Gringo boludo,” I said, pointing to myself, trying to deflect the insult.

“No,” said La Mendocina.  “Colombiano, boludo.  You, no.”  

Alvaro stood up and walked away into the darkness.  I stared at the fire.  La Mendocina stared at me.  After a few minutes, I got up and went to find Alvaro.  He was over by the toilets, scribbling on a pad by moonlight.

“I write a poem,” he said.  “For her.  It is…how do you say…a controlled explosion.”  

We both gazed over to the campfire.  As we watched, Pierre appeared like a gangly marionette, sat down next to La Mendocina and began to massage her shoulders.  She lay her head in his lap.  

The muscles in Alvaro’s cheeks tightened and he dropped pen and paper to the ground.  

I went to my tent, burrowed into my sleeping bag, and wrote this story.