The Most Beautiful thing I've ever seen

San Juan and La Rioja

            I am surrounded by a soothing silence. There is a light breeze, blowing warm air on my face as I lie on a bed of tiny rocks. My shoes are covered with a dark red dirt and a layer of fresh salt. I peacefully lay down, looking off at the mountains that are in front of me. A wide lake circles around me, passively drifting as the wind pushes it towards the coasts of the ice-filled mountains in the distance.

            I take a deep breath, and feel the air fill my lungs. I am 3000 meters (just under 2 miles) above sea level, and so the oxygen is sparse. After looking around at the beautiful view that surrounds me, I close my eyes. I don’t hear a sound.

***

            This was the scene as I sat on the top of the Reserva de Vicuñas in La Rioja, Argentina. It was truly the most beautiful view I’ve seen in my entire life. It was just two days earlier that I left the hustle and bustle of Buenos Aires for a plane at 5:00 in the morning.

            Two hours and a whole lot of exhaustion later, I was at the San Juan airport. San Juan is a region in Northwest Argentina that is just north of Mendoza. The first thing I noticed when I walked out of the airport doors was that there was a wall of mountains in every single direction I looked.

            After a few photos, I then joined the rest of my program in a van to head to our next location. After a three-hour car ride, full of talk about the NBA Finals and The Wire, we reached Valle de La Luna. This beautiful valley had towering red rocks that pointed in peculiar shapes and sizes. It had momentous boulders stacked in inexplicably random ways. It had remarkable spherical balls of pressurized minerals that formed naturally below the surface of the earth before popping up above ground and prints of leaves from hundreds of thousands of years in the past. And most importantly, it had cactuses, one of which I hugged for the first time. As we drove away from the valley, and headed for our hotel in La Rioja, I found myself waiting for a road-runner to come by.

            It was a long and tiring day, and so after eating, we all ventured back to our rooms. The Heat won the championship that night, and although it was depressing, the great experience of San Juan almost blocked it out… Almost.

            The next morning, I was up, and was already late for breakfast. Luckily we were running on the exceptionally tardy Argentine time, so it didn’t really matter. Just as the day before, we all piled into the van, before driving an hour to the Talampaya Cannon.  For five hours, we trekked through the beautiful wilderness, full of towering red walls of rock, and miles of large hills of sediment. I’ve been using one word to describe this cannon when my friends have been asking: Unreal. I have never seen anything like it in my life.

            At one point, after marching for a couple of hours, our tour leader, Fabian stopped us and we all sat down at the end of the large valley. We looked across the wide landscape, and I realized that I might be one of 30 people in miles of where I was sitting. We were in the center of a valley, disconnected from society and anything associated to it. We all yelled “Che” at the same time, and it bounced from wall to wall, for a good 4 seconds, before coming to a stop and filling our ears with silence.

            Four hours later, we were back at the hotel, eating empanadas and talking basketball. After breaking into a wild argument about which gangster was better in “the Wire” and watching “Live Free or Die Hard” in Spanish, my room once again went silent and I drifted off to sleep.

            For the record, Marlo Stanfield is a better crime boss than Avon Barksdale, Kieran.

            I woke up late, and I was last shower just like the day before. Luckily, we were still in Argentina, so timeliness was more of an idealistic impossibility than a real expectation. I ate some medialunas and then jumped back into the van to go on our biggest and most exciting voyage.

            And that brings me back to where I started with this blog. I sat on top of this mountain, thousands of meters above ground, and felt at peace like I hadn’t felt in a long time. As I lied down on this sliver of land, overlooking the beautiful scenery of mountains and ice, I thought of a quote a great hero of mine, once said. It was none other than Forest Gump.

            “There was always a million sparkles on the water,” he said to Jenny as she sat on her deathbed. “Like that mountain lake. It was so clear… it looked like there were two skies one on top of the other. And then in the desert, when the sun comes up, I couldn’t tell where heaven stopped and the earth began. It’s so beautiful.” 

            I honestly did think of Forest Gump. I love that movie.

            As I sat there, I wanted to somehow capture the moment so I could return to it when I was back home. Without moving from my position, I pulled my camera out, and snapped a photo. My feet, crossed with a layer of salt and dirt on the soles, calmly pierced the sky ahead. The ice-filled mountains reflected off the lake and the sky was as clear as I’ve ever seen it. Forest Gump was right. It was beautiful.