The Curious Frenchman
And in the morning, I felt fine. I had expected the Fitz Roy hike to leave me sore. But after the steak frites the night before, I slept hard and woke up ready for another adventure. I grabbed the last breakfast bars I had been surviving on (other than steak, of course), and sipped on a cup of coffee in the hostel’s dining area. The room was lit with sun and most of the wooden picnic-like tables were empty. Only a Frenchman who we’ve been crossing paths with here and there was scarfing down a plate of eggs and toast while flipping through Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia.
In a country where maté was king, the coffee had generally not been great. I had failed to develop a taste for the local morning beverage of choice, so I dealt with my American drug addiction. But the coffee at Rancho Grande was surprisingly good. Justin, who had been traveling a lot longer than me, later confirmed that it was the best coffee he had in Argentina. I was waiting for Kelly and the other two Americans, Alex and Allison, so we could embark on the Cerro Terre trail. But at the moment, I felt content to be enjoying the morning quiet with my hot beverage.
The Europeans had already left. Last night, we made drunken, half-assed plans to meet at 9 A.M. sharp but when they knocked on our door this morning, we told them to go ahead without us.
“We’ll see you on your way back,” I mumbled, with somber still clinging to my eyelids.
Now, it was almost 10 and I was anxious to get going if we were to make it back in time for the only bus back to El Calafate at 5 P.M.
I watched the Frenchman eating his eggs and wondered if I should’ve ordered breakfast after all. (I apparently had the time.) He was a curious looking fellow, wearing John Lennon glasses and short, curly hair. He had a tall, skinny frame reminiscent of Danny Tanner. Up until now we had always seen him wearing his large backpack, which seemed half his body weight, wandering around town. He was always on foot. At the hostel in El Calafate, while the rest of us were waiting for cabs to take us to the bus station (which set us back all of 40 cents), we watched him strap on his pack and step out into the moonlight.
“Why is he walking?” Allison asked.
Yet, as the cab wound through the lifeless streets of El Calafate and approached the bus station, we saw the silhouette of his backpack climbing up a hill, trailing a mere few feet. He waved, smiling. I held up a hand, expressionless.
“Weirdo.” Allison said.
“Hey,” I said, approaching his table at the dining room.
“Hey,” he said.
He gave one of those small nods we had been exchanging all week. At ATM machines, at supermarkets, at camera stores. This was common occurrence at offseason tourist towns, where the simple acknowledgment of another human being was comforting. You didn’t have to stop and become best friends, but a small nod or a smile was enough to let someone know, “Hey, I’m here too! If you happen to witness me falling off of a glacier or getting mugged by a gang of Argentine high school thugs, then you have my back, right?”
“How’s the breakfast?” I asked.
“Good.” He paused midway through lifting a forkful of eggs into his mouth at the fear that I might want to try a bite or something.
I waved him off and told him I was thinking about ordering a plate myself while I waited for my friends.
“Okay, but it took 20 minutes for mine to come out,” he shrugged.
“I guess I’ll pass then,” I said.
I felt compelled to talk to him not because I felt sorry for his loneliness — in fact, I was pretty sure he was not lonely at all, but because I was fascinated by him. One of the unfortunate conditions of hostel life is that at times it can be a bit like high school. The dining area can mimic the school cafeteria where the outgoing and popular sat on the Cool Kids table, while the loners and alternatives ate invisibly next to strangers. The bigger the city, the more this is usually evident, where travelers are less experienced and feel more inclined to “fit in.” The two hostels we had stayed in Patagonia so far were not nearly that bad. Sometimes, as was probably the case with the Frenchman, you just have “weirdos” who want to exist as weirdos.
But I had nothing better to do, so I went into an unofficial “questionnaire” all travelers are doomed to endure at some point of their extended travel. At first, it’s harmless. But after you find yourself repeating the same answers and you wonder, “Does it really matter?” “Do you really care?” — then it starts to become annoying. To the expert backpacker, launching into this questionnaire without seamlessness is highly inappropriate and a dead giveaway to the amatureness of the casual traveler.
A brief example of what the questionnaire often entails:
- “What have you done so far?” “Done” in this case doesn’t actually refer to anyone accomplishing any feats. The interviewer simply wants to know how many cities and countries you’ve checked off, in the same vein that sleazy Italian men “bag” defeated foreign women. A typical answer might be, “Well, I flew into Paris, then bought a Eurorail pass and took the overnight AVE to Barcelona, then met up with some friends in Bilbao, then bummed around some beaches in San Sebastian — the water is bluer than heaven! — and after a few days, got bored and hitchhiked it to Madrid, ate a shitload of oysters at this bar where Hemingway used to write at, and then took a ferry it all the way to Morocco… You wouldn’t believe how many monkeys we saw… ” This response, depending on who you’ve asked, can go on forever.
- “How long have you been traveling?” The expert traveler will sigh, stoke the scruff on his chin, shove aside the leatherbound journal with “scribbles” and “sketches” and look auspiciously into the heavens before replying. “About a year… maybe fourteen months… who can really tell. You stop counting the days after a while, you know?”
- “When are you going back home?” The answer tends to range in the following three choices: 1) “Who knows? Hopefully never;” 2) “When the money runs out;” or 3) “Home?”
There are many more questions to the survey, and it depends on the level of douchebagness that arises from the initial set to determine how long it will continue. Often, it’s harmless and the questions are asked with good intentions. The answers can be very helpful when you’re looking for a good hostel or restaurant recommendation or a good place to drink and dance with the locals. But other times, it’s tainted with competitiveness and a desire to impress.
Through my conversation with the Frenchman I got to know that he grew up near the France/Switzerland border, close to the famous skiing town of Chamonix, where I had to traveled to a couple of years ago. “Really, do you ski?” he asked. “No,” I said.
He had a job waiting for him in New York City after his South American travels were over. When I asked when the job was, he dismissed the question, saying it was some nonsense gig for a small French company. He was headed to Peru next, to hike the Inca trail to Maccu Piccu, but wasn’t sure if he would go through with it. “I made up a fake name and didn’t leave a deposit, so I’m not committed to it.”
Pretty soon, Kelly and the others showed up. Before parting ways, I asked the Frenchman if he would like to hike with us. I regretted the words before they were even out of my mouth.
“Well,” he said, looking at his unfinished breakfast plate.
“Yeah, never mind,” I said. “We’ll see you out there.”
And sure enough, we did. Hours into our hike — which we thought we were making good time on — we would hear footsteps in the quiet wilderness. When we turned it was him, strolling with his large backpack at a casual pace, free of sweat or expression. He would not only lap us, but also the Europeans who started way before any of us (and who, again, had wandered off the trail and had to be rerouted by the Frenchman). We would see him around a couple more times in Patagonia but we never made conversation again.
“What were you talking to him about?” Allison asked as we stepped outside the hostel.
“Nothing, really,” I replied.
Normally, I would trade contact information with someone like the Frenchman, especially in light of the news that he would be moving to my city, but we didn’t, and that was fine. There was not even a moment where we felt it would be customary to do so. In fact, most of the email addresses you collect in your travel journal are all formality nonsense anyway. You feel like it’s the right thing to do after sharing an extraordinary experience, even if it was only for a couple of hours or days, and that you owe it to that experience to “keep in touch.” But I think it’s more genuine to let it go, and cherish the experience for what it was.
- Next: The Dutch Girls
