Killing Batteries

“Welcome to Patagonia!” our guide said with a huge grin that was partly genuine partly affected. The other guests and I were definitely affecting ours – to the point of clenched teeth.

Having just hopped off a powerful jetboat, our group stood on a haunting black beach in five layers of warm and water resistant clothing, suffering wind gusts powerful enough to stagger a food critic and driving rain that impacted like BBs. Admittedly this wretched ‘beach walk’ was entirely our fault. The guides repeatedly warned us that the weather would be iffy and their invitations to bow out of the beach walk (in retrospect they might have been pleas) continued all the way up until we were getting ready to leap off the boat into the soft, sticky sand that clumped on our shoes like wet cement. By this point the wind and rain implications of pressing on were apparent, but our group was still bizarrely gung-ho for the experience – though in our defense some of us were still punchy from 20-something hours of flying in from the US the previous day.

Why we were so resolute to submit to the suckiest of Patagonia’s chilly late-spring elements rather than chilling in an entirely more pleasant way in the finely appointed, four star environs of our ship, ‘Atmosphere’, with its comfortable rooms, open bar, platters of tasty snacks and complimentary spa is still hard explain. But our Chilean hosts were protégées of the “School of Never Say ‘No’ to the Guest”, so per our expressed wishes we were now being deservedly pulverized by Patagonia’s sucky elements, collective enthusiasm spiraling away like an untied balloon.

The black beach was certainly intriguingly stark and other-worldly, and if the rain on my face didn’t feel like I had an anti-riot water cannon trained on me it might have even been breathtaking. But even Michelle Hunkier, Natalie Portman and Rosario Dawson doing a choreographed, all-Jell-O, nude yoga recital couldn’t have been properly appreciated under those conditions. A half hour of staggering through that meteorological punishment was all we could stand. We hailed the jet boat and raced back to Atmosphere.

Shedding my clothing and gear on the run, I clamored for the warmth of the outdoor Jacuzzi where I sat submerged from the nose down, my back being buffeted by a dozen tiny jets. A Pisco Sour was offered to me for the 17th time in 24 hours, while I stared transfixed at a distant backdrop of mountains and temperate rain forest drifting languidly by.
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Now before I blow your tutti-frutti minds with the singular ass kicking that was my trip to Chile, let me state this disclaimer: I’m well aware that my smug bragging of enviable trips lately has far outweighed the usual abject misery for which I’m known and admired and perhaps this is becoming a little tiresome for you, my loving readers. It’s a proven fact, for whatever perverse reason, that people vastly prefer to read hilarious tales of someone else’s travel despair over reading hilarious tales of wine baths in five star hotels.

Well, you know what I say to that? You’re all sick, sadistic crapheads. After over four years of nearly uninterrupted negative 10 star travel, I think I’ve earned every wine bath and relaxation massage from unusually large, masculine women that I can get. Also, I’m still quietly trying to push the “Stupefying Envy” literary genre to the forefront of travel writing so I can finally score a deal for my Lambo book. Meanwhile, if you absolutely need to read about sustained suffering and corresponding losses of dignity, click on the “Romania” category to the left, read just about any post and you should get all the personal anguish you can handle.

So! Chile! Good times. And the good times started a full month before I even left. Usually when I travel for this magazine I spend weeks composing emails, sleuthing the email addresses of select marketing people, sending emails, waiting, re-sending, being ignored, drinking/sobbing/cursing, finally hearing back, replying and finalizing just to score a comped room for a few nights and maybe a comped flight. Not this time. The ‘adventure cruise’ line that invited me arranged everything. All I had to do was show up at the airport in Minneapolis, produce a passport and look cute, all of which I accomplished effortlessly, as always.
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You know what really pisses me off? Idiots. We’ll get to that in a second.

Meanwhile, you know what pisses me off slightly less? Total ass-spanking humiliation.

I was duly informed this week via the South by Southwest Interactive Festival discussion panel selection committee that I am officially less interesting than pet bloggers.

Pet f*cking bloggers.

How’s that for a kill-shot to the self-esteem? Right in the eyeball.

The SXSWi committee could have had me and several other distinguished travel bloggers come and hold court at the festival in March, sign innumerable autographs, kiss babies and add a desperately needed sex-factor to the proceedings, but they decided, unimaginably, that a pet blogging discussion panel would be more stimulating.

So, let me get this straight… Aunt Tippy’s pictures of her cat “Mr. Droopy Pants” wearing a Garfield sweater vest that says “Where’s the lasagna?” is better blog material than me single handedly stranding a dangerously drunk hitchhiker and an asshole gas station attendant together for (at least) eight hours in the middle of nowhere during a Romanian winter? Did I somehow cross over into the Bizarro Internet?
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Folks, I’m just a few hours away from wrapping up my four and five star trip through Chile. But am I sitting back and letting these final hours wind down unproductively? Perish the thought. I’m a professional. When I’m on the road, I work like a miserable dog right down to the final buzzer. That’s what makes an outstanding travel writer people.

As such I am writing to you now with only my left hand. My right hand is holding a generous pour of Carménère, a French wine grape thought to be lost forever until it was re-discovered in Chile in 1994. The rest of me, from the tits on down, is immersed in a Ritz Carlton Hotel signature wine bath. Don’t talk to me about dedication. I am Mr. Dedication. Where’s my goddamn Nobel Peace Prize?

I caved to the wine bath idea after repeated insistence by the hotel’s public relations manager. Strangely, I thought it was just a bit over the top after the one hour relaxation massage, swanky lunch, repeated trips to the whirlpool and three indulgent nights in one of his Club Level Rooms. But I am nothing if not cooperative, so I relented.

Though I secretly hoped they’d wheel an oak barrel of wine into my room and upend it into my bathtub, in fact, two very nervous maids – nervous probably because I was observing their actions intently, taking notes and wearing a lazily fastened hotel robe – poured two tiny bottles of bath foam oil and an entire jar of what appeared to be dried flower parts into my tub, then filled it to 3/4 full with water. They then carefully emptied about 500cl (2/3 of a bottle) of red wine into the mix, lit a candle, placed the aforementioned glass of Carménère on the edge of the tub and hastily took their leave.

I quickly submerged myself in the mixture and that pretty much brings us up to date.

The scent is glorious. How bad would it be if I took a little sip of the bath water? Is bath oil poisonous? And why didn’t they leave a three foot long bendy straw so I could sip wine without having to reach for the glass? I’m full of brilliant hospitality ideas like that.

The water is surprisingly red considering the modest wine content. Can you get drunk by absorbing alcohol through the pores? If so, how much alcohol would you need?

I reek of wine now. I’ve decided to not wash it off. I’m flying home like this. If I had enough time to let them dry, I’d probably dunk my plane clothes in here too. Why not? It smells divine, though my neighbor on the plane may not agree.

In truth, with the sheer volume of wine I’ve consumed in the past week, I doubt this bath is going to make much of a difference in my general odor. All I need to do is eat a clove of raw garlic and I’d smell exactly like my downstairs neighbor from Lake Trasimeno in Italy last spring.

Alas, the time has come to extract myself. I have to find food. A car is taking me to the airport in just over an hour.

Oh here’s a bonus What I’ve Learned for you:

Never get on an airplane hungry.

I have 16 hours of flying ahead of me and then serious work to do for the next few days, but regular posting will resume shortly with a full account of the surprisingly strenuous, seven night Patagonia adventure cruise I just concluded.

Check to make sure that your very expensive digital camera with numerous delicate moving parts is not in your day-bag before you go to the beach.

[See the full "What I've Learned" list here. Start at the bottom and read up.]

[The last in the "Don't Go There" series (so far), is my physically sickening October 2003 visit to the capital city of the tiny nation of Andorra.]

Being the typical uninformed American, I hadn’t known that the country of Andorra even existed until I got my hands on a large, detailed map of Europe near the beginning of my tour. Like a caraway seed stuck in the gums of Europe, Andorra is landlocked and sunk deep in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. According to the online CIA World Factbook, the entire country is only “2 and ½ times the size of Washington D.C.” My curiosity ran wild. I wanted to unlock the secrets of this obscure country and report on it while pretending like I knew it was there all along. (editor note: oops)

To say that Andorra la Vella, the capital city of Andorra, was a huge let down would be a disservice to all of the other things that I’ve called a “huge letdown.” In fact, it was a monstrous, stunning, flabbergasting letdown of biblical proportions. To the max. That about sums it up.

This scorching downer didn’t start immediately. In fact, my first impression of the city had considerable potential. As you descend into Andorra la Vella, population 32,000 – the entire country has just under 66,000 residents, only a quarter of which are actual Andorran citizens with the remainder comprised mostly of Spanish ex-pats – you can see the entire city in all its claustrophobic glory. The city is nestled in a gorge between two gigantic mountain ranges. From the bottom, picturesque peaks and landscape can be seen from any point in the city simply by looking above the rooftops of the shoulder-to-shoulder apartment buildings. The sprawl of the city has required that new apartment buildings be built up, seemingly hanging off the valley walls with narrow streets separating the buildings, planed crosswise into the mountain. You don’t walk up the streets in this part of town so much as scale them.
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I’ve just finished reading and reviewing a new travel book for Gadling by first time author Eric Weiner called “The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World” (see the review here).

Great read, but more importantly, it made me reflect on my own Bliss Factor which clocked in unexpectedly high. I know that sounds improbable coming from a guy who’s blog posts in the past month have focused mainly on places that he hates and how pissed off he is, but there you have it.

I’m like an enigma wrapped inside an onion, baked inside a five-tiered wedding cake. Peel away all the layers and you still have no f*cking clue what going on.

So, why am I happy? Well, for starters I have the fourth greatest job in the history of the universe (for the record, it goes: 1. rock star, 2. movie star, 3. Playboy Playmate talent scout, 4. adorable travel writer), I’ve had the best year of my freelancing career, I’ve just moved back to my beloved Minneapolis, I got my mojo workin’ and as you read this I am very likely soaking in a Jacuzzi on an adventure cruise ship, meandering up and down Chile’s Patagonia coast, having just returned from a helicopter day trip to a prime fly fishing locale, drinking a variety of Chilean wine and eating three gourmet meals a day, prepared exhibition style so I can take mental notes on cooking tips. In a couple days I’ll be checking into the Ritz Carlton in downtown Santiago (where it’s in the low 80s, in case those of you in MN were wondering) for three punishing nights of discovering the city’s food and drink offerings.

Can you blame me?
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