You might think getting stuck in Liberia because of a combination of Tropical Storm Alma and Nicaraguan Mother's Day is a one-in-a-lifetime occurrence. But no. There was another time when we were stymied by an unlikely confluence of two entirely unrelated events.
It was January 2006, and we were heading out of Argentina's Mendoza wine region to Santiago, Chile, a trip that took us over the mighty Andes. The halfway point was the town of Uspallata, at the foot of Cerro Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas. The guidebook warned us that accommodations could become scarce during the climbing season, which it was. So we called a hotel while still in Mendoza and told them we'd be arriving at eight. No problem, they said.
Except that by the time we arrived in Uspallata at seven, our hotel had already given our room to someone else. Our disbelief quickly approached panic. We knocked on the doors of every other hotel on the town's one street, and found nothing available.
It was getting dark, the wind was picking up, and visions of sleeping on a sidewalk were dancing in our heads. To give you an idea of what we were facing, Uspallata stood in for Tibet in the movie Seven Years in Tibet. It's a high-ish, cold-ish, desolate-ish, don't-want-to-sleep-on-the-ground-under-any-circumstances-ish kind of place.
By this time, we had figured out what was wrong. Not only was it climbing season, but we had also arrived just before a massive festival celebrating a particular kind of Argentine folk music. Uspallata was bursting at the seams with intrepid, sunburned mountaineers and thousands of people who had come from all over the world (see below) to listen to Pablo Somebody-or-other strum his ukulele.
Argentina, by the way, is a sophisticated country filled with open air cafes and tango music. I'd never suspected it of harboring folk music, let alone some vibrant folk festival popular with the bead-wearing hordes.
Eventually, we poured out our sorrows to a bus station attendant, who directed us to a family that offered 4-wheel drive tours of the mountain. They called every hotel in the area. Luckily, a youth hostel two kilometers outside of town had room, and they loaded us in their car and drove us there.
We found ourselves in a hostel filled with a curious mix of folk music aficionados and mountain climbers. And no food. Not a scrap of bread or even a candy machine, which will always do in a pinch. Luckily we had two bottles of wine leftover from Mendoza, and immediately came to the same conclusion: That would be dinner.
We went outside, sat on stumps, and began to plow violently through the Malbec. By and by, the hotel owner came out and invited us to a bonfire, where he gathered his guests and handed around bottles of homemade hooch. We were an unlikely group of friends: grim mountain climbers, bizarre international folk music fanatics, and us. The climbers were a particularly subhuman lot. It apparently takes all of your mental and physical resources to get up 20,000 foot peaks, because unless you wanted to talk about the finer points of pitons, cutoffs, rappelling harnesses, alternative routes, and oxygen tanks, their store of conversation ran dry fairly quickly.
The folk music fans were a different matter. The most memorable among them was a tall, blond 23 year old from the Netherlands, who had—in only two weeks in Argentina—already pushed through an intensive Spanish class and managed to shack up with a good-looking Argentine bravo who spoke no English. Since she spoke no Spanish, for a moment, I wondered what they talked about. Then I realized they were probably just bouncing the hammock every spare moment they had. Besides if the male half of the equation actually understood what was coming out of her mouth, it would have been all the worse for him.
We spent a merry hour listening to her babble on about the music of the great Pablo (god knows where she discovered it) and how she had come especially to see him. Then, we watched the Southern Cross rise, and turned in.
The next morning we woke up to bright sunlight, a hangover, and the strange sight of the Dutch woman following the hostel owner's pet goose around with a camera. Once we got to town, we learned that we wouldn't be able to get a bus to Santiago for two days. We also found that Uspallata was deserted. Even the small supermarket, which in no way adhered to its posted business hours, was shut (presumably to avoid the after-concert riots which are endemic to the folk music circuit). There was, however, a gas station with a small store. Over the course of the next two days we relied on its limited supplies for food.
Needless to say, we eventually did make it to Santiago. There, we went out and had a great pasta dinner kicked off by two pisco sours. We thought we had died and gone to heaven.
