There are tourists, there are travelers, and then there are adventurers.
A guy who packs a knapsack with only his passport, a hammock, a change of underwear and a set of watercolors and a sketch pad before launching a three-year tour of South America ? much of it on foot ? is listed under the Call of the Wild.
That would be Ignacio Fernandez, a gentle, Cuban-born architect from Los Angeles, a man with a sinuous sense of wanderlust and the skill to illustrate his experiences.
“I’m zigging and zagging my way through life,” said Fernandez, 63. “I’m not good at the [establishment] game. I’m better on the periphery, where uncertainty is exhilarating.”
A teenage refugee from the Castro Revolution, Fernandez served in the American army during the Vietnam War, driving fuel trucks in Alaska. He began extensive traveling after college with train trips to Mexico.
“It was the early ?70s, the years of the Castaneda novels, which were as good as any physical journey,” said Fernandez. “I went up into the mountains of Oaxaca looking for Maria Sabina and the magic mushrooms. But I was too afraid to take any.”
Of the geographic trips he has taken ? from Yosemite National Park just a few weeks ago to driving from New Orleans to Oxford, Miss., to see a friend play baseball ? none come close to the years he explored South America.
It began in Los Angeles in 1990, headed south along the West Coast of Mexico, and lasted until 1993, when he flew out of Lima, Peru for Miami, keen to the luxury a full tub of hot water. Fernandez kept extensive journals, illustrated with watercolors of people, places and things, like the young French woman he befriended on the Inca Trail.
He was also bitten by a parasitic insect in the jungles of Guatemala and nearly lost a foot to infection.
His reward?
The possibility that his journals and illustrations may be published one day; and a story written on the inside.
“I discovered I could take more chances,” Fernandez said at Café Bolivar, a Santa Monica coffee shop displaying his watercolors. “The belief that somehow I will make it through, either on my own or by some greater power.
“I came back to [modern civilization] less worried about how I was going to make a living,” he said. “And more trusting of enjoying the things I really care about.”
