The Pampas

After a long bus ride, we crossed the border  (a tense affair, these neighbors don't like each other) into Chile. Then hours more, endless fences, and once, a gaucho herding his newly sheared sheep to another pasture. Here the land is flat, and stretches off into the horizon, punctuated by birds and framed by barbed wire at the bottom of the landscape, and endless white clouds above. Calafate bushes flash by, occasionally I sees dots of sheep way out on the rolling plains, and once in a while, another car passes, meaning, another human being. This land is big and empty, and feeling like our Great Plains without any people.