We like to think that we choose our vacation destinations freely, but in fact, most of the time the choice is made for us by the elusive, fickle finger of fashion. Countries, like children’s names, go in and out of fashion: Tiffany gives way to Nicole; Matthew to Jason. Suddenly it’s time to talk Turkey, rent a villa in Tuscany or an apartment in London, cruise to Alaska, or visit Belize, a country we hadn’t even heard of. At the turn of this new century, travelers, lemminglike, were converging en masse on Antarctica. We haven’t yet visited Antarctica, or the North Pole, Australia, New Zealand, or China. Larry, of course, is raring to go, but I resist. As I get older, these places seem to be moving farther away. They have come to constitute their own special category on my list of future trips: too far to go, but not too far to have been.
If there’s any criterion by which one might predict America’s next popular vacation spot, it may be our enthusiasm for visiting countries with which we’ve recently been at war or which have otherwise been brought to their knees—Russia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and, any minute now, Afghanistan. If Hilton builds in Tora Bora, will they come?
When we decided to go to Chile a few years ago, we found ourselves ahead of the fashion curve. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were the trend-setters, the Joneses up with whom others would soon have to keep. We were surprised that the consistent response to our choice of that particular destination was, “What made you go there?”
Nobody ever asks, “Why France?” “Why Italy?” or “Why England?” Visiting England is like visiting your mom. She’s old and has nice manners, cheap theater tickets, and lots of curious old relics in her attic that are fun to look at over and over again, like Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, and Buckingham Palace. Best of all, she speaks English, she loves us, and she’s finally learned how to cook. Chile, apparently, is a different story.
Everybody knows why Ferdinand Magellan went to Chile. For him, it was a natural: he was looking for the Strait of Magellan. Nazi-hunters were looking for Martin Bormann. Drug runners go to Chile looking for dope. But why did we go? I blame it on the laundry and my lifelong tendency to get carried away.
I am a romantic. I’m a pushover for a good-looking landscape—a craggy peak, an arid desert, or a frozen tundra. Just whisper “Tierra del Fuego” in my ear and I am instantly aroused and unable to resist the call of the wild or pay attention to the voice of reason saying, “You hate cold, you hate windy, you hate uninhabited.”
It is my practice to unload the contents of the dryer onto our king-size bed and fold the darks and lights neatly into piles of his and hers, all the while distracting myself from the tedium of the chore by watching television.
This particular afternoon, I viewed a travel documentary on Chile. There, before my marveling eyes, I saw people who could have been me or Larry sand-boarding down the sand dunes in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. It looked like such fun!
By the time I had matched all the socks, I was transported to the center of Chile, where the same happy people were poised at the edge of the volcanorimmed waters of Chile’s stunning Lake District. Just one commercial later, they were in Patagonia, and it was there that I became one with them, galloping through the rugged wilderness. In the background were the mountain peaks I would climb the next morning, after I got off my horse.
This was the most extraordinarily gorgeous country I’d ever seen! I had to go! So intense was my desire that it honestly didn’t cross my mind until we got to Chile six months later that I was now sixty-three years old and I had never ridden a horse. Nor, for that matter, had I ever gone surfboarding on water, never mind sand, or climbed a mountain. And, by the way, Larry, who knew how to do all three, hadn’t bothered to remind me of this, which is another reason that he had a very good time in Chile and I did not.
Larry doesn’t care where he goes on vacation; for him, go and vacation are the operative words. Larry will travel anywhere to do anything, and no matter what happens, he’ll have a wonderful time. I tend to think this is because he is basically much less sensitive and discriminating than I am, although, to be fair, he might say it’s because he is essentially a much happier, more open-minded, and less demanding and judgmental person.
Given our division of labor—he does nothing, I do everything—I was the one who spent hours on the phone with my on-line travel agent, insisting that there was too such a thing as sand-boarding in the Atacama Desert, that I had seen it on a TV documentary, that it was practically my main reason for spending a small fortune to go to Chile, and that I would cancel the trip if she couldn’t locate someone to rent us sand boards, whatever they were, and find us a suitable dune.
However, when we actually got there, it was Larry who was able, in spite of the high altitude, to drag himself and his sand board up a two-hundred-foot sand dune, strap his feet sideways, one in front of the other, onto a narrow strip of wood, keep his balance while keeping his knees bent, and slide smartly down the sandy incline. I was the one who stood at the bottom taking pictures of his many descents. (It wasn’t as if I didn’t try to sand-board. Stopping to take a rest and a swig from my water bottle at six-inch intervals, I made it halfway up the dune. I even strapped my feet onto the board at an angle and succeeding in assuming an upright position before I realized that I had already had arthroscopic surgery in one knee and it would make a lot more sense if I just sat down and pretended I was on a toboggan. This proved humiliatingly ineffective since sand is not like snow, my behind is several inches wider than the board, and even after giddy-apping my heels vigorously and repeatedly into the dune, nothing budged.)
Larry and I love to swim. It seemed only natural that I make careful arrangements with our travel agent to make sure we had an opportunity to go swimming during our two-day visit to the Lake District in central Chile.
It had not escaped my notice that the lakes might be fed by runoff from the surrounding snow-covered volcanoes and therefore might be prohibitively cold. After all, no one was swimming in the documentary. “What,” I asked my beleaguered agent, “is the average temperature of the water in February?” After making a number of contacts with her people in Chile, the word came back: somewhere between fifty-five and sixty-two degrees.
“Is that Fahrenheit?” I pressed, just to be sure. (Large issues, such as “Do I really want to go to Chile, or is viewing the documentary enough?” tend to escape my notice, but when it comes to the details, I’m a terrier.)
We would need wet suits. The research for the perfect suits began in the yellow pages and quickly moved on-line, where I located two at $375 apiece and had them mailed on approval. Assisted by each other and a spray can of PAM, Larry and I were able to struggle into ours in under a half hour, which is OK if you’re not competing in a triathlon. The wet suits took up so much space in our luggage that we had to ditch our foul-weather gear, which, it turned out, we could have used in the third and last part of the trip, while mountain climbing in the freezing-cold, wind-driven rainstorms in Patagonia.
Unfortunately, by the time we got to the Lake District, I was already suffering from insomnia, which can be brought on by changing time zones, being at high altitudes, and having a bad time. I was spending my days yawning and watching Larry have fun, and my nights sitting up in bed, watching him sleep. It is not easy maintaining good sportsmanship, never mind a marriage, under these conditions.
Meanwhile Larry, who insists upon preserving all of his bodily functions no matter where he is or how hostile or disruptive the circumstances might be, especially for others whom he is supposed to care about, remained oblivious to my condition.
“Did you have a good night’s sleep?” he’d ask each morning.
“I was up all night,” I’d say—not to make him feel bad or guilty, but just because it was true. After all, if you’re not going to be honest with the person you love, especially when you’re on vacation together, well, then, what’s the point?
“Funny, you were snoring at five A.M. when I got up to pee,” he’d say, planting a little kiss on my cheek, throwing back the covers, and leaping out of bed.
What would this vacation have been like, I wondered, if I were on my own? I might have met someone who enjoyed planning vacations, so that I could have just relaxed and had a good time. I might have met a guy who didn’t spy on me at night and didn’t know how to sand-board, someone with whom I might have had something in common, like insomnia.
I was too tired to swim that day; I stayed in the hotel, which I had specifically selected because it was located on the best lake, and watched Larry. The water temperature was sixty-five. He didn’t wear his wet suit. He swam two miles. I didn’t take any pictures.
Our next and final stop was Patagonia. Although Patagonia is located in el sud, it is nevertheless the coldest part of Chile. It is almost in Antarctica. This counterintuitive situation is caused by the equator, which has a way of disorienting people who live above it into thinking that south means hot and north means cold.
Nor had I fully absorbed the idea that when you are ineluctably drawn to words like remote outpost, you have to figure that there are no commercial landing fields nearby. The item on our itinerary that read “Fly to Punta Arenas, transfer by van (six hours) to your hotel” had escaped my notice. Romantics tend to skip over parenthetical information.
Although I had made all the arrangements to stay in a hotel that had a stable, it was Larry who went galloping off into the Patagonian pampas on his silver steed, leaving me slumped on the beginner’s nag, led around on a string by a grouchy gaucho who apparently wasn’t being paid enough to kick my horse in the flanks from time to time, just to keep him walking.
I had reached my limit. Larry was having fun on purpose. He obviously didn’t give a damn what happened to me. Larry, who would be spending his vacation at home doing crossword puzzles if it weren’t for me, had abandoned me. After all I’d done, he could have stayed by my side and kept me company.
Or at the very least he could have had the decency to remind me that I don’t know how to ride a horse.