Winter is Coming

It’s hard to believe that only 3 months ago one of my favorite activities was sitting under a cold water shower for as long as I liked. Now I try to stay warm by eating hot food, drinking maté, wearing all of my clothes while curled up in my 15°F sleeping bag with a movie on my laptop. I hate to make it sound that bad because it is only getting as cold as the 40’s but when you are in an unheated, uninsulated house that has a metal roof, concrete floors, and half inch wooden planking for walls that don’t quite reach the ceiling that  40 degrees tends to infiltrate every part of your life. As the weather changes my daily routine changes. Waking up isn’t so hard but getting out of my nice cozy cocoon is terribly difficult especially knowing that I am only to go outside with the sun barely up and hop on a bicycle to ride about 3.5 miles through sand, uphill the entire way, to teach some 50 kids ranging from 4 to 14 year olds the basics of computers. Nobody said it would be easy. Luckily this scenario only happens two days a week. The other days can be a slower start, after staking the goat out to forage I can sit down with piping hot maté that gives me a little energy boost as well as warms me from the inside out. Then in the morning I generally walk around town to see what is happening whether it be in the school, my neighbor’s house, or how many fish ponds have been dug for my aquaculture project. Around lunchtime I get back home to move the goat and give her some food and then I have to decide if showering will be in my future because I know by afternoon it will be impossible to convince myself to stand under cold water for any amount of time and bucket bathing does not sound entirely appealing yet. The very short afternoon is much like the morning but recently has included a little bit of exercise to get the blood circulating. Then I bring the goat back close to the house and feed her again maybe make myself some dinner and get another pot of boiling water ready for maté and settle into my sleeping bag. Then I have time to plan activities for the next day, watch whatever movie strikes me on my laptop, listen to the rats crawling around my kitchen and hoping they finally eat the poison and not my soap and eventually I fall asleep resting to start another day.

Luckily, I took a vacation before this most recent cold snap and was able to escape to Uruguay for a week with my bestie, Josh. The whole point of the trip was to break up our service a little bit in order to see someplace new as well as spend some time in a bigger city and to lounge on the beach. So after a severely delayed hour and a half flight we landed in Montevideo, Uruguay, the third most southern capital city in the world, which is a decent sized modern city with a little over a million residents and sits on the River Plate where it enters the Southern Atlantic Ocean.  We stayed in a place called the Red Hostel right outside the Old City and right in the center of the city not far from a McDonalds. The very first night we were able to experience a lot of what Montevideo had to offer us. It started and ended with the Uruguayan variety of Pilsen and in between a great dinner of Seafood Paella (it had been a really long time since I had seafood) accompanied with Uruguayan Tannat wine. After this we were drawn in with some Brazilian tourists and some others staying in the hostel and went out to see what nightlife is like in the Uruguayan capital. To say the least it was not what we expected. Turns out that music circa the 1950’s US is the popular scene in the dance clubs. That the dance club scene isn’t really inside the dance club at all but instead out on the street outside the club where everyone is gathered drinking, smoking and being raucous. After an hour of this it was decided it would be a good idea to move on and try to find our way back which we eventually did but not before getting some good old South American street food, hamburgers and hotdogs. At about 5 am we were in bed. The next few days in Montevideo were spent walking around and seeing the sights that included the zoo where we discovered a giraffe and a housecat that had formed some sort of symbiotic relationship, the famous Port Market where every booth sells more cuts of meat than you could ever imagine, McDonalds where the Big Mac is the Big Mac no matter where you are, and the Old City where the streets are covered in dog poop. Then it was off the Punta del Diablo (the Devils Point, named for its trident shaped coastline) for some fun in the sun. Luckily it was sunny 80% of our time there which is unusual for low season and the temperatures were warm enough to go into the surf. As a result of it being the Low Season the whole town was empty. Normally, during high season, there are probably 50 or so hostels and hotels open, for low season only one, the Diablo Tranquilo Hostel. Lucky for us it is also the best hostel in Punta del Diablo and offers all sorts of excursions that include surfing, sand boarding and horseback riding. We didn’t participate in any of these excursions but still had a great time. The Diablo Tranquilo hostel was the first ever hostel in PDD (Punta Del Diablo) and was created by an American entrepreneur at the age of 25. After several years of managing this hostel and opening up an associated restaurant and suites he has decided to get out and sell especially since PDD has blown up with hotels and luxury suites as a result of it being listed as one of the 10 Places in the World to see in 2008 by Lonely Planet. I imagine that low season in PDD is not much different than the early years as far as the crowds go and I was happy to get into the ocean every day and even get a little bit of sun. Aside from that we did a lot of walking and saw a lot of the coastline that included dead sea turtles and sea lions as well as live dolphins and many beautiful vistas and opportunities for beach jumping and planking. After a few days at the beach, barely avoiding ammonia poisoning, we had to get back to Montevideo in order to fly back to Paraguay and then of course to get back to our cold countryside reality.