The Return

It's been a long, unannounced hiatus for Type and Tonic, a fact due to my week and a half trip to the South, my final weeks at the Argentimes, and, most importantly, my mind being occupied with the big queston of what next.

First off, a brief and incomplete recap of what's gone on.

My good friend (and guest blogger) Adam Bloch and I spend a week in the spectacular lake district of Argentina around Bariloche and El Bolsón. Longtime readers of Type and Tonic will be familiar with El Bolsón as the place where I both made my fateful Piltriquitron hike and where attended the El Bolsón Jazz Festival.

On my second visit, the town didn't disappoint. In late summer, it was a little more lively than it had been in early December and its laid-back hippie spirit was fully on display—most colorfully when a Carnaval parade of school kids and eccentric old men made its way through the town plaza.

Blocho's and my consensus from our time in the region was that the two highlights were our trip to Cajón del Azul and our brief achievement of human flight. I wrote an article on Cajón, which will be coming out in the next issue of the Argentimes. The place was as idyllic a spot as you could dream of—a quaint mountain cottage set between two mountains and above a river canyon. The proprietor was a wizened mountain sage named Atilio Csik who drove a tractor around the premises and declined to sell Adam a t-shirt, because he "didn't believe in that sort of commerce."

Human flight took the form of paragliding off my old friend Piltriquitron. If you ever have the opportunity to go paragliding, do it. You stand on a steep slope on the mountain looking down at El Bolsón's bucolic valley when, suddenly, you're told to start running and soon after find yourself taking steps in thin air as you rise up on the thermal drafts. Flying a hundred feet or so above the the trees and following the contour of the mountain as it descended toward the valley floor, I got as close as I ever think I will to being a bird.

Other highlights of the last month include the discovery of an underground, Friday-night only jazz club where Adam and I attended two jam sessions. The first featuring the powerful bebop quartet of my friend, the saxophonist Leonardo Paganini, the second showcasing an precise sax trio that played a faithful Ornette Coleman tribute set.

I have also recently ended my tenure on the editorial team at the Argentimes. An excellent experience, and a great place to start my Argentine odyssey, but I'm now ready to try my hand at more freelance journalism and, while nothing is set, there have been some rumblings from promising corners.

Tomorrow, I'll be setting off on yet another journey, this one back to US shores for the first time since October. It should be a very full slate with the Winnebago alumni reunion scheduled to bring a motley crew to New York in time for my return, and a trip out west to the mountain home of Paul "The Dude" Friedman for some early spring skiing.

When I return in April, I'll be moving in with two Argentine friends, hoping that some of the freelance leads will pan out, and attempting to get a job at a Spanish-language publication. A lot of uncertainties, but a lot of possibilities, which is why in the end it seems like an adventure worth taking.

Not sure how much blogging there will be from the States, but will certainly return to Type and Tonic in April...