Travel broadens the mind...

Leaving El Chaltén, I am making my way back up to Bariloche, Argentina via a 32 hour bus ride along Ruta (Highway) 40, a sometimes paved highway that runs the length of Argentina parallel to the Andes Mountains. My expectations were of little more than a day and a half of near barren, wind-swept nothingness, a wasteland. This part of Patgonia, reaching from the northern lakes to the southern lakes of the Andes, stretches on kilometer after kilometer, hour after hour bleeding together, with little more than earthen-yellow and green shrub-grass and occasional wildlife (or domesticated livestock) dotting the landscape. In a word: there is little out here. But in the vast expanse with its enormous sky there is a beauty and allure all its own. As the sun sinks through a sky painted by Renoir, for a brief while the barren plane is transformed into something completely different, for an instant a world wholly apart from its desolate other existence. But the sun soon sinks too far below the horizon and this fleeting world disappears, and you are again left with the road, waiting for another moment to stand out in the merging hours.