fate.

Before I start this post let me say "knock on wood".

But I had an absoultely fantastic day at the end of the world today. Tierra del Fuego is amazing, as beautiful as anything I have seen in alaska and enough similar to seattle to make it seem like home. What I´ve been thinking about a lot today is traveler´s fate. Or I guess I don´t really know if "fate" is the right word.... luck? that doesn´t seem right either. It´s more just how things have a way of working themselves out, people appear when you need them most.

For example, we had a jam packed day today, the national park in the morning, and the penguins in the afternoon, it was planned to the minute. But when I asked the driver of the bus this morning what time it returned to the hostel the first bus was at three.... too late for us to make it back for our penguin tour. I was flustered and in my (very bad) spanish was trying to explain to the busdriver how we had to be back in the centro by 2:30. When from behind me, the spaniard who I had made a tortilla with the night before jumped in. He explained to the driver our situation and arranged for the van to make a special trip to pick us up at 1:30 and take us directly to the port for our boat. It was a godsend. And we were able to relax and enjoy an amazing hike in the park. And no sooner had we emerged from the trail, than up pulled our van, on the road, waiting for us especially and driving us back directly to the port so that we didn´t miss our boat. The kindness of an impromtu translator and the overtly ccomodating friendliness of the argentine people helped make this amazing day s really astounding. I don´t know if I have mentioned this but I have yet to meet an unfriendly or rude argentine. They are really really lovely people.

So we continued to the penguin tour, you recall our tour yesterday had been canceled because of bad weather? Well, because of that weather we had done some investigation of our own into the tours and thus ended up in a van of 10 people with a naturalist walking amoung 100s of magellenic penguins, and a few subartic thrown in. I couldn´t help thinking as I was sitting there, and we watched a boat like what we had been booked on the day before pull up and observe from a distance, that I was fortunate. Only 45 people are allowed on the island a day. And mary and I were two of them.

Which brings us to another sort of fate, our friend John was the third, we had met him as a dormmate in el calafate. He is a student, traveling on spring break. We have the same flights, so we had hiked together this morning and he came back with us to try to get on our tour and managed to squeeze on to the one before us. We run into each other all over town and then again on an island of penguins. We´ve also run into a myriad of other travelers. It´s really quite amazing.

Anyone who has traveled knows this fate, luck, godsend, well. But it´s still amazing when you get to experience it.