Suerte, Amor y Radio Prisma

This isn’t as easy as it looks.

For some reason, the server in the Hotel Colonial keeps timing out before my photos are uploaded to BLOGGER. . . Firewalls? Proxies? Fascist conspiracies? Anyone who can offer some tech support (in English) will be generously rewarded.

I wrote this for you all a few days ago – now it feels a bit outdated, as I have since ridden up and down the winding hills of the traveler’s vicissitudes. I have slayed cockroaches, I have sought relief from my own company, I have tired of ham sandwiches. We should all have such problems. I’m back on top of the world again, and the story will continue as the firewalls permit.

***

Some people say that solitude is a fearsome freedom. Maybe they’re right, but I reckon those people haven’t sat under the night sky in Barreal – so vast and clear and full of stars, it makes you want to stay awake so as to not miss even a moment of its grandeur or the perspective it offers.

There’s a radio playing softly in the distance, and the cool Andean air embraces this stark adobe ranch house in the cradle of the Cordillera. I fished a tumbleweed out of the swimming pool this afternoon – errant plant life in otherwise unpopulated waters. I made friends with gigantic spiders – are there tarantulas in South America? – who found their way out of the grass and into the blue.

The distance one can travel in a week is significant – and I’m not talking about miles or kilometers, endless winding roads and boundless stretches of pampa. Last week around this time, I had an appointment with a locally famous radio personality – Omar ‘Potro’ Galvan, who, the residents of Choele Choel (pop. 4000) told me, was most likely able to help me in my search for the long-lost relatives of a friend in New York. Due to name changes, deaths, geographical distance, language barriers and other circumstantial misfortune, my friend had been estranged from his family for close to 15 years. Given my proximity to his late mother’s hometown – about 500 miles, -- and my desire to help find a missing peace in this man’s heart, I sallied forth with my cowboy boots and bad Spanish. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed woman is queen.

The scene that one 17-minute radio broadcast yielded can scarcely be done justice in the space of a blog entry. Suffice it to say, the family has been reunited, and my belief in the profound connection we can experience when we are open to it has been confirmed.