The Final Stages of the Sabwavique

During the holidays, this blog fell off it’s rhythm at the cost of a few choice stories, like our return through the “storm of the century” in Rosario, Argentina, the subsequent flooding of the rental car, and our miraculous recovery in repairing and/or hiding all the damage.

One thing I’ve learned, however, is that as the blogger I’ve had to choose each story with a purpose.  It must impart something exotic to the reader, have something to do with the original themes of the blog, and have pictures to illustrate.  In the process, even the most avid follower of our journey has missed out on some of the liveliest yarns, the juiciest details, and the minor miracles that seemed to constantly grace our path over the course of the last 10 months.  My main hope, however, has been to provide some context to where we’ve been and what we’ve been up to, so that anyone who really is interested can stay in touch with what Cris and I have considered to be an intensely important detour in our lives.

So, my most recent post chronicled our aimless December wanderings around northwest Argentina in a rental car (called “oba oba” style travel).  The end of that stage was no letdown and, as mentioned above, had an epic ending that included a little hitchhiking and a lot of flooding.  That left us in Buenos Aires for Christmas, where we met up with Cris’s mom, Fatima, and brother, Pedro, for a wonderfully relaxed holiday.

After Christmas, we spent the new year in Uruguay, near the town of Piriapolis, where we were hosted with enormous generosity by the Cordeiro family, who have turned their 220 hectare property into an indigenous wildlife preserve.  It was a relaxing piece of heaven after running around staying in hostels, guest houses, and the like for quite some time.

The nature preserve with capibaras on the grass.

Great times with Nate, Lucia, and the whole Cordeiro clan.

Finally, we returned to Buenos Aires and met up with my parents, Tom and Kit, where we hung out for a day before heading to the Bariloche region of Patagonia for a fly fishing trip.  The trip was sort of a grand finale to our sabbatical, and involved a whole lot of time in rivers and lakes, sitting on porches at cocktail hour, and an enormous amount of exaggeration.  Now we’re spending a couple days in Rio collecting all the things we left at Fatima’s apartment.  That means I get one more shot at Ipanema beach, probably the coolest beach in the world.  It’s a great way to finish it all off.

What’s next for us?  We head back to LA, where we begin the process of resuming our lives.  That means, first of all, finding a place to live and a couple of cars.  In February, I’ll go back to Ervin Cohen & Jessup, and Cris will return to Clearview.  And that, minus innumerable adventures, drama, victories and failures, expectations met and missed, goals set and completed or completely forgotten, spiritual journeys and gluttonous revelry, is the story of the Sabwavique.  For those of you interested in the rest, please stay in touch and come visit us in LA when you can.  We’ll probably be around for a while.

P.S.  Obviously, we haven’t fully processed it yet, but I’ll be posting one last time with our thoughts and reflections, of which there are many.

Check out some great fishing pictures below.