11/13/05
MAR DEL PLATA, ARG.

A British backpacker tipped me off to volunteer work at a Bolivian wildlife refuge. She says she got parasites there (¨One of the spider monkeys likes to give kisses¨) and that you pretty much walk around with mosquitoes in your skin, but one of the duties is to walk the puma. This is why it´s nice to have an open agenda. Walk the puma, good lord.

I left Buenos Aires knowing that I´ll be back in six months with better Spanish. The bus toiled through an hour of sprawl and slum before coming out in green ranchland so vast that you could just about see the curvature of the Earth. Aside from a wetland or two, the view didn´t change for hours. Argentine cows have it good.

The only animals I saw in Buenos Aires were stray dogs, pigeons, and the rat in the hostel kitchen. Outside the city, it hits you that you´re in a different hemisphere. Trees are different. Grasses are different, the sky is different. Birds are weirdly different. You recognize their ecological niches-- leggy marsh bird, raptor, scavenger-- but the birds themselves are bizarre in shape and color. There´s a screechy green bird whose nest looks like flood debris stuck in a tree. There are gaggles of bulbous waders, seemingly half heron and half goose. From the bus I saw some hulking vulture thing that could barely take off. Also: rheas. These are the ostrich-like birds that the locals used to hunt with bolas, weighted ropes flung at the legs. Hard to picture that actually working.

Mar Del Plata is a beach resort town gearing up for summer, and my second-to-last stop before heading inland. Sunburn makes the backpack a painful thing.