Not According To Plan

Punta Arenas, Chile

My surprise stay in Punta Arenas began with me bumming. (Editor's note: As blogged here previously, our hero had purchased a flight for the wrong date and found himself with a week to kill in Punta Arenas)

I was lying in bed thinking about how I had no friends. How my dad also had no friends and spent his life reminiscing about the times when he used to have friends. How I'd vowed I'd never to become that but probably would anyway.

I reflected on how I'd lost friends. Sometimes it had been my drunken rage and refusal to admit defeat. In situations where I thought I was right I had always been willing to be the one vote against and alienate everybody else.

More than that though I had just pushed people away.

So much of my life was tied up in the punk scene, and then I just gave it up. I decided I'd do union organizing instead.

So much of my life was tied up in union organizing, and then I just gave it up. I decided I'd do software instead.

After reflecting on how I was doomed to be friendless like my parents, I then started making a list of the friends I still had. After 20 or 30 names I started to feel better.

I ended up with a list of about 50 people, which is quite a few less than my 700 Facebook friends, but it's still a good amount of friends. I made a plan to start reaching out to a few people every day to see if they wanted to chat.

*

Besides catching up with friends, my other plan for Punta Arenas was to read and write. There's not a whole to do in Punta Arenas, so I achieved this goal with relative ease.

I fell into a routine of getting up and eating breakfast, spending some time on my computer blogging and whatnot, and then heading out into the city.

In the city I would eat an expensive lunch at some restaurant. Then I'd hunker down in a coffee shop reading El Caballero de los Siete Reinos and Station Eleven.

Back at the hostel I'd spend the evening watching sports and chatting with the guests. I'd make a cheap dinner of dehydrated soup and crackers, loading on tons of salt and cayenne pepper.

It was a solid routine. I was feeling quite a bit better.

*

One day I deviated from my routine and started playing online poker. I blew $100 playing online tournaments and was kind of down about it. So I bought a six-pack and started tooling around on Tinder. Then I went on a Tinder date.

Margarita turned out to be super cool. She was a Mexican chef from Cancún who had lived 3 years in Toronto and now 1 year in Chile. We met up for dinner at 8pm and stayed out talking until 3:30am.

We hung out another day and unwittingly wandered into a partial solar eclipse. We were walking along the shore and met a local news man who was looking for people to interview about the eclipse. Afterward we debated if it was a scam or he was crazy, because we didn't see any eclipse. Eventually we found the eclipse.

We also went on a date to the Sky Lounge, which is a bar on the 13th floor of a casino/hotel. The most blogworthy aspect of the Sky Lounge were the bathrooms, which had glass walls in the stalls. Meaning that while you were taking a crap you could look out on the street, and everybody on the street could watch you crapping. Brilliant!

Margarita also taught me a bit about the area. Apparently Punta Arenas used to be a hub for prostitution - the major port city on the Strait of Magellan. The tradition survived in that the city still had many houses that served as bar/brothels. Margarita said the prostitutes were all immigrants - Croatians, Colombians, and Venezuelans.

Margarita also explained to me the image of the stripey guy on the wall of my hostel and in various locations around town. Apparently it referred to a tribe that used to live on Tierra Del Fuego. They would paint stripes on their bodies when they performed their rituals. Also Europeans used to hunt them for sport, and eventually they hunted them out of existence.

*

My last attempted date with Margarita did not go as planned. I had just headed out the door to meet up with her when she texted me that her family had arrived and she had to stay in with them. So instead I bought a nasty hamburger and some beers to bring back to the hostel.

At the hostel though I met a cool American woman named Lilith who was taking a year off to travel the world, like me, but was doing it in a completely different manner.

Lilith had been working as a project manager or some such and spending her weekends going on random trips all over the world. I could relate to this, as I'd recently been working an office job and spending my weekends going on random trips around the United States.

Lilith had mastered the world of frequent flyer miles. She had the airline credit cards and knew how to use them. When she quit her job she had enough miles built up to subsidize a year of flying around the world for close to free.

Her situation was that she had little money in savings, but she could fly pretty much anywhere. So she was catching planes around the world and looking for the cheapest way to live there when she arrived. She planned her trips months in advance and was hitting places like Japan, Azerbaijan, and Colombia.

Meeting Lilith was a pleasant surprise. We traded contact info and have stayed in touch since. Someday when I am back working a desk job and desperate to get away from it, I will ask her to teach me about frequent flyer miles.