I'm sorry to announce that it's time to turn off the radar. It is due. But it is not due to any particular reason. I simply need to fall off the face of the planet for a while. You'll probably hear from me again once I reach the bibliothecas of Buenos Aires in mid-October.

Let's face it. An international flight seems like a departure to a place where every convenience and comfort is left behind. In this way, it's the verge of an adventure, as if we're about to rough it and follow in the footsteps of explorers from days long gone.

Of course, those days are long gone. The New New World is not just America, it is the whole world. When traveling, it is inevitable that we develop comforts and conveniences of a new nature. And these comforts are life perservers, that permit us to continue to be much of who we are. They are necessary for the more refined "me" to remain active. Por ejemplo, say the most basic needs are your only, when you're in the dark digging through your pack for your only remaining food, a can of tuna, you're probably not contemplating global politics or combinatorial theory.

But that is just the essence of it. There is value in returning to the core. So the question is, how deep do we let our roots grow? Do we dig in and become new rituals and habits or do we retract, take stock somewhat in what is at least 50% illusion: the mindset of the explorer of the 21st century, even though we must realize that there are no undiscovered places on this world.

Even the most seemingly remote of places has its niche in the world's culture and economy. When once I shared my music of Radiohead with someone from Bariloche, their first response was ¨My precious¨ (in english... mimicking Gollum from Lord of the Rings) ... at once confirming two external cultural influnces. Or, out here in the Patagonia, for instance, I had a chance to talk to a German about how the EU is limiting beef importation from Argentina in order to protect its farmers. Should a WTO decision change that, the impact even on even this vast and remote countryside will be dramatic.

And yet, if we follow in the footsteps of Charles Darwin, looking with new, halfway naive eyes, upon a land altogether new and strange... where even the condors sometimes behave like seagulls, something profound comes from the profundio (depth) of these considerations, anachronistic as they might be.

So then, if we shed even our newly made habits for the chance to continue to find the undiscovered country, something we know probably doesn't exist, and maybe never did -- ahh, the existence question once again on LMC.com -- who knows what we will find? After all, almost all countries are undiscovered because you haven't discovered them yourself.

That's much more than I wanted to say. The short stock is that the public online journals are going dormant for a while. I'm leaving Bariloche to the west, curling around the brazos in the opposite direction that the first Swiss settlers came through, running away to somewhere in Chile. You wont hear from me in a while. With luck I'll be cleanng fish I've never seen before, cutting my hands on their undiscovered spikes.

Hasta la luz.