36 hours of travel...

Six down and 30 to go at the time I begin this post. I woke up at 4:45 this morning to begin the long trek from Cafayate in northern Argentina to Buenos Aires, where I will spend a couple of days before flying back home.

Cafayate was a gem. It's a shame I was only there for two days. I feel like I could have spent all four months there. It's supreme wine-growing country, sheltered from extreme weather by the Andes to the west and resplendent from the 320 days of sunshine beaming off the rainbow colored rocks and green vines that compose the landscape.

It's the type of place where you can bike three kilometers out to a vineyard, get a fantastic tour of a local bodega and try their signature wines, then hop on your bike to pedal back and discover a flat tire and somehow remain completely unfazed and perhaps a little delighted at the opportunity you've just been given to meander along a country road winding through fields of grapevines. I pulled out my iPod, selected the appropriate soundtrack, and sang at the top of my lungs to the vast audience of mountains and clouds peeking over the summits to see who could be so pleased by their situation in life at that moment.

And then there was the trip to Tucuman that began before sunrise today. I had heard rumors that the route is one of the prettiest in the country, and even with these elevated expectations, I was not disappointed. It was made all the more charming by the fact that the bus company that serves the only trip between Cafayate and Tucuman doubles as a school bus at that hour, and around sunrise, I woke from my head-lolling to discover the bus packed with children, sitting three to a seat, standing in the aisle, squeezing into the spaces between passengers legs and the seatbacks in front of them, sitting on the windowsill at the front -- all of them in the peculiar white lab coats nearly all school children wear in this country.

Parts of the road seemed impassable for a bus, riddled with potholes and washboard, and yet we passed. And then we climbed into the clouds, and the landscape went from dry brush and 20' tall cacti to a lush valley where the canopy of trees broke occasionally to reveal a river tumbling over rocks. This section of the road was equally precarious -- too narrow for two cars, no guardrail, and a precipitous drop into dark green velvet, but it looked soft enough to take away some of the fear of barely clearing the turns (and passing the overturned truck in the riverbed about halfway down). It was bliss. It's a rare thing for me to survive until noon without coffee, but the trip was a much better stimulant than caffeine.

The next 30 hours, however, probably won't be quite as nice. I have a 9-hour layover in Tucuman and it's raining too hard to go outside, so I will probably hang out in this little cafe until night and now drink my weight in coffee, catching up on the news, finally updating my blog after more than a month, virtually traveling the streets of my soon-to-be new neighborhood in Brooklyn via google maps... And then I'll get on the bus bound for Buenos Aires, 16 hours away from here. It is crazy to think it will take more time to get there then it will to fly back to the U.S. But the stark difference is that bus travel in Argentina is such a luxury compared to air travel. My seat will recline into a bed, and I'll be served whiskey, wine and champagne.

The only drawback is that whether I want to or not, I will have to watch the movie(s). Despite the plush seats and great service of these swank double-deckers, they have a rudimentary sound system that does not include individual ports for headphones and so the sound just blares throughout the entire bus. If my ears have to be subjected to this assault, I might as well watch what goes along with it. The plus is that it's good practice for my Spanish, which is starting to suffer from my head being back in the U.S. before my body is. Which is to say I look forward to getting back, but the landscape this morning has already made me nostalgic.