Smithsonian Journeys tour guide Gabi Mlcek sips maté during a hike to Mount Fitz Roy. Pam LeBlanc photo

Here in Texas, we drink a lot of sweet tea and Dr Pepper. In Patagonia, the locals drink maté.

While traipsing through South America this month, I saw people sipping the infused herbal drink while chatting at cafes, sitting on street benches, and even while driving their cars.

“For us, maté is not just a drink,” says Gabi Mlcek, the leader of the Smithsonian Journeys trip through Argentina and Chile that I took. “For us, it’s an excuse – a moment to share with people we love, to see your friends and family, and talk with them.”

The drink is considered the national beverage of Argentina, and serving it is a lot more complicated than popping open a can of Coke. But that’s what makes it special.

How to prepare maté

Mlcek demonstrated the process one day, filling a special cup, also called a maté, three fourths full of dried yerba maté leaves, then pouring hot water over them. Traditional matés are made of dried gourds; today you can also buy wooden or metal matés.

The national drink of Argentina is maté, a type of infused herbal tea. It’s served in a special cup like this one, and sipped through a metal straw. Pam LeBlanc photo

To prepare the beverage correctly, you have to follow two rules, Mlcek told us. One, the water must be hot but not boiling. Electric kettles in South America have a “maté mode,” which heats the water to exactly 85 degrees Celsius. Second, don’t touch or move the straw once it’s placed in the vessel.

The person who prepares the maté is first to try it, sipping the liquid through a special metal straw called a bomba with a sieve at the bottom. Once the person preparing the drink has taken the first sip, he or she adds more hot water and passes the maté to the next person. In this way the drink makes its way around the circle, returning after each person drinks it to the preparer, who adds more hot water.

“It’s an acquired taste,” Mlcek says. “It’s really strong and bitter.”

Maté is considered the national beverage of Argentina, and just about everybody drinks it. Cell phones are even equipped with a mate emoji – a pumpkin with a straw in it.

“The rich people drink maté and the poor people drink maté,” Mlcek says. “And we drink a lot of maté.”

With that, she passed the maté to me.

I took a sip. It tasted bitter and earthy, with a hint of dried grass clippings. Not exactly bad, but I’m not ready to exchange it for my morning tea quite yet.

Pam LeBlanc had her passport stolen while visiting Santiago this month. Pam LeBlanc photo

My husband and I were sitting at a table outside a fast-food restaurant in a bustling Santiago neighborhood recently, exhausted after a nine-hour international flight, when someone dropped a few coins at my feet.

I bent over to help him scoop them up. They must have spilled out of a hole in his pocket, I figured. Then a few more trickled onto the sidewalk. My husband leaned in to help.

Suddenly, something felt weird. I bolted upright and yelled at Chris, “Where’s your bag?”

He grabbed for his backpack, which he’d set on the chair next to him, but it was gone – along with our passports, his wallet and driver’s license, a wad of cash, his prescription eyeglasses, ear buds, and a library book. A man at a nearby table pointed down one street, and we gave chase.

It was pointless. We realized quickly that a group of thieves had targeted us. One man distracted us by dropping the coins, another grabbed the backpack, and a third pointed us in the wrong direction to chase the thief down.

Thank goodness Chris still had his cellphone, and I had my backpack, along with my own wallet and valuable camera gear. But we lost $400 in cash – especially frustrating since we rarely carry cash when we travel. (Our tour group advised us to bring it this time because we’d be visiting areas that might not take credit cards.)

Luckily, some quick action kept a bad situation from getting worse.

Make a plan if your passport gets stolen

After we gave up chasing the thieves, who had scattered in all directions, we made a hasty game plan. Chris would cancel the credit cards that were in his wallet while I called the U.S. Embassy to find out what we needed to do to get emergency passport replacements. We also asked workers at the restaurant to call the police.

Chris has an online ap that tracks his credit card purchases. He cancelled two of his cards but forgot about a third. Fifteen minutes later, the thieves used that one to place a charge for $2,100. Chris contacted the credit card company, which froze the payment.

Meanwhile, I reached the U.S. Embassy, which told me we’d need to apply for emergency passports. I made an appointment to go in the next morning to fill out the necessary paperwork. We needed the passports quickly, because we were flying to southern Chile in two days, then crossing into Argentina after that.

We tracked down a place that took passport photos and set off to get that done. We also reached out to the leader of our group tour, whom we hadn’t even met yet.

We got lucky

Then, a miracle. After getting new mugs made for the passports, I got a call and a text from the Embassy. Someone, an official told me, had called in to report finding our passports (but not the rest of our belongings) in a trashcan. The official gave me the woman’s contact information.

Since we’re not fluent Spanish speakers, we enlisted the help of our tour group leader (what an introduction!), who contacted the woman, then called an Uber and went with us to retrieve them.

The woman who found the passports worked at a bank. She’d gone out to take a smoke break and noticed a couple of passports in a small trashcan on the sidewalk. She pulled them out and – here’s the lucky part – decided to call her son, who works in customs at the Santiago airport. He advised her to call the U.S. Embassy. If she’d called the police, it may have taken days to reunited us with the passports. We’d have missed part (or all) of our trip.

We thanked the woman, hugged her, gave her a reward (which she tried to refuse), and made our way back to the hotel.

We’d lost some cash and a few odd items, but with our passports in hand, we could get on with our trip. A couple of things had conspired to make us victims of petty theft.

First, we’d just arrived in Chile, and our hotel room wasn’t yet ready. We left our suitcases at the hotel desk, but took our passports with us because we didn’t want to leave them unattended. Second, we were jet lagged and not thinking clearly. Third, we didn’t pay attention to the warning signs – nearby buildings had burglar bars and we’d been told thieves sometimes grab cell phones from the hands of unsuspecting walkers in the area. When someone dropped money on the ground right next to us, we didn’t realize at first what was happening.

Tips in case your passport gets stolen

Here are some things you can do to avoid becoming a victim yourself…

1. First, carry your passport in a zipped interior pocket or in a cross-body bag. Or leave it in a safe in your hotel room, if you’ve got one.
2. Second, be aware of your surroundings. Buildings in the neighborhood where we were walking had metal security bars, and we’d been told that thieves sometimes grab cell phones out of the hands of unsuspecting pedestrians. Still, we weren’t on high alert.
3. Never set your bag on a chair next to you – especially if you’re outside. Keep the strap looped over your shoulder or in your lap.
4. Know exactly what’s in your wallet, and immediately cancel all your credit cards. Keep a list so you don’t forget one, like we did.
5. Use your cellphone to take a photo of your passport and keep it on your phone.
6. Report the theft to police (we waited an hour at our restaurant, but they never arrived) so you can get a theft report for insurance purposes.
7. Contact the U.S. Embassy to report the incident and find out what to do next.

The Banff Film Festival returns to Austin – as a one day event on March 22. Photo courtesy Banff Film Festival 2025

The Banff Mountain Film Festival returns to Austin next month – as a one-day event instead of the two days it has covered in past years.

But if you’re up for a day of binge-watching cool outdoor and adventure movies, you can still get your fill. The festival will still feature two collections of films – one at 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 22, and a completely different one at 7 p.m. the same day.

Read more: No matter the season, Banff serves up adventure

I go every year and consider the festival one of the best annual events in Austin for folks who prefer hiking and pitching tents to glitzier pastimes. Our city historically draws some of the largest audiences for the traveling show, which stops in more than 500 communities and 40 countries each year.

Read more: I rented an old-timey swimsuit and soaked in Banff Hot Springs

Whole Earth Provision Co. again hosts the Banff Film Festival 2025, and donates proceeds from the event, along with funds raised during its State Parks Month event in their stores where customers can make donations for parks. In all, the two events have raised more than $317,800.

Tickets are $35 for the matinee and $40 for the evening show (prices include service fees.) Tickets are available online at the Paramount Theatre website.

Jon Waterman’s book, ‘Into the Thaw,’ documents the impact of climate change on the Arctic.

When Jon Waterman made his first of many forays into the Arctic more than four decades ago, he saw massive herds of caribou, vast expanses of sea ice, and a hypnotic, glowing light he couldn’t forget.

Drawn by the remoteness of the place and the people who lived there, he headed north dozens of times, exploring large swathes of the Arctic. But what he saw recently at the site of the first trip shocked him. The former-ranger-turned-writer recounts that most recent expedition, along with some of his earlier trips, in his latest book, “Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder Amid the Arctic Climate Crisis (Patagonia, $35).”

Waterman and professional kayaker and photographer Chris Korbulic traveled more than 500 miles by foot and raft down the Noatak River and along the shore of the Chukchi Sea in 2022 to document the greening of the Arctic for the book. (You may recognize Korbulic’s name – he was paddling a river in the Congo in 2010 when his guide, Hendri Coetzee, was killed by a huge crocodile.) They saw melting permafrost, far less ice, encroaching brush and eroding shorelines.

Into the Thaw

The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, and Waterman compares the melting permafrost to frozen spinach left out on the kitchen counter – soggy, mushy and unpleasant to walk on. Fires are more common, floods are more frequent, and warmer temperatures are allowing plants and animals that once couldn’t survive in the frigid environment to spread into the region. And the changes are happening with meteoric speed.

About 50,000 people live north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska and another 150,000 live north of the Arctic Circle in Canada.

“These are the people who are paying the price of these radical changes,” Waterman says. “These indigenous people who have done the least to cause it are going to suffer the most – whether it’s the people of the far north or low-lying islands.”

That means something to me. In 2023 I traveled to the Marshall Islands, where sea levels are rising and residents are being forced to make decisions about which islands to try to save and which to let the sea take.

Into the Thaw is a bittersweet read for anyone who cares about the future of the planet, but Waterman manages to lighten things up with a swish of humor. Want to know what moose tastes like? Or how it feels like to accidently spray yourself with bear spray? But beyond the humorous misadventures lies a darker truth.

“What’s going on on planet earth is a crisis and I think we’ve understated the crisis,” Waterman said in a phone interview this week. “Our children or our children’s children are going to be suffering the consequences of what we have done to the planet.”

Read more: Waterman’s essay about the 2022 expedition, “My 500-mile Journey Across Alaska’s Thawing Arctic,” appeared in the New York Times in December.

As Waterman and Korbulic made their way, they met with experts like Gary Kofinas, who points out that we should call the heating of our planet a climate crisis or climate emergency instead of global warming, and refer to those who don’t believe in it as climate science deniers instead of sceptics.

But Waterman’s interviews with people who live in small villages throughout the region make the most impact. They talk frankly about how rain now falls in December, cold snaps are shorter, and temperatures soar to 100 in the summer.

“Maybe people down south could reduce their emissions,” one local suggests.

Read more: Waterman’s Atlas of National Parks Might Inspire Your Next Trip

Hope for the future

“This is not a bummer book. I’ve been going to the Arctic because I’m kind of doe-eyed with wonder about the place, its animals and the people,” he says. “It’s changing, yes, but it’s not necessarily all catastrophic.”

The book wraps with an appendix of things humans can do to help – everything from voting for candidates who push for climate action to riding bicycles instead of driving, avoiding air travel when possible, and reusing and recycling instead of buying new things.

“I’d like to believe that as soon as we get past inauguration and accept this bitter pill we have to swallow the next four years, people will be empowered and find ways to take action,” he says.

Waterman’s work isn’t done. Because he worries that his message isn’t reaching a wide enough audience, he plans next to focus on how climate change is impacting our national parks.

“If people can understand what’s happening to these places that are so universally treasured, maybe we can bring more attention to reducing emissions and solving these problems,” he says.

Every December, I shake the dirty socks out of my suitcase, crumple up the last airline ticket, and think back on the places I visited over the previous 12 months.

This year, I traveled above the Arctic Circle and sank beneath the waves in the Indian Ocean. In all, I booked 15 round-trip flights. I stepped foot in six different states besides Texas and seven foreign countries. I zoomed around Texas in my camper van, too, exploring more of this beautiful state I call home.

I did things I’ve never done before, like drive a sled pulled by dogs across the frozen tundra, and a few I’d rather not repeat, like get intravenous fluids at a small clinic on a remote island.

It sure beats sitting at a desk in an office building. I’m flat-out, can’t-believe-this-is-my-life grateful for what I get to do for a living. And next year’s shaping up to be a doozy, too.

Without further ado, here are my top 10 travel experiences of 2024…

1. Snowshoeing to Skokie Lodge in Banff National Park. Because I was recovering from ACL surgery, I couldn’t snow ski last season. But I could strap on snowshoes for an all-day snowshoe trip across two mountain passes and a frozen lake to historic Skokie Lodge during a cold snap. Skokie Lodge doesn’t have running water or electricity, but it has a gourmet chef on site, a pot-bellied stove, and cozy rooms. (That midnight dash to the outhouse in minus 25-degree temperatures was memorable…)
2. Highlights of a village-to-village hiking trip through the Val d’Anniviers region of Switzerland? Incredible mountain scenery, wild blueberries, an elf-like chamois that popped out of the woods to watch us hike past, and a backyard party where everyone wore cowboy hats and we became celebrities since we were from Texas. And did I mention the cheese?

Sun rises at Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. Pam LeBlanc photo

3. I’ve wanted to visit Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior, home to a long-running wildlife study about the resident population of wolves and moose, for decades. I finally climbed aboard a float plane and made the trip to the islands, where I stayed in a cabin, canoed, hiked, and jumped off a dock into ice-cold water.

4. An hour after my plane landed above the Arctic Circle in Sweden, I was driving a sled pulled by dogs through the snow and ice. It didn’t feel real. I camped in the snow, took a cold plunge in a hole cut into the ice, and ate a reindeer sandwich, too.

Pam LeBlanc recommends the Maldives for scuba diving. Chris LeBlanc photo

5. If you travel all the way to the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean, spend as much time as possible under water. I loved the beachside bungalows at the Sun Siyam Resorts we visited but was even more interested in the marine life – and the Maldives have sharks, spotted eagle rays and eels galore.

6. Big ship cruises aren’t my thing – but put me on a smaller vessel and send it along the coast of Italy, Spain and France, and I’m all in. My favorite stop on a week-long Windstar cruise through the Mediterranean was Nice, where we roamed narrow streets, visited museums, and went for a dip in the ocean.

The Devils River is one of the most pristine rivers in Texas. Pam LeBlanc photo

7. As much as I love traveling around the globe, some of my favorite places are right here in Texas. That’s why I spent my 60^th birthday canoe camping along the Devils River in West Texas. The water is clear, the rapids are just challenging enough, and the landscape reminds me that wild places do still exist.

8. As a kid, I always associated Idaho with potatoes. I’ve since learned it’s much more than that – and this year’s rafting trip down through Hells Canyon on the Snake River combined outdoor adventure and pampering (a black bear chased our raft down the river, but someone cooked and set up my tent every night.)

9. I’ve made more than 30 trips to Big Bend in my life, and every time I go, I discover something new to love. This year’s trip included stops to swim in Balmorhea, camp in the Davis Mountains, and hikes a few new-to-me trails at the national park – Pine Canyon and Blue Creek.

10. A few years have passed since I took horseback riding lessons, but instinct took over during the Great American Horse Drive, when I helped drive a herd of 300 horses 60 miles across Colorado. I even earned a buckle for my efforts. Yeehaw!

The cabins, pavilion and campground on the south side of Garner State Park will close for repairs starting Dec. 1, 2024. Pam LeBlanc photo

Heads up, campers. The old side of Garner State Park – including the pavilion, the Pecan Grove and Oakmont camping loops and cabins, park store, day-use picnic area and main swimming area near the dam – will close starting Dec. 1 for road construction and facility repairs.

All trails, except the Nature Trail and Frio Canyon Trail, will close too, so you’ll have to skip your climb up Mount Baldy.

Construction is expected to last until summer 2025, with a limited reopening in March.

The main swimming area near the dam will close as part of the repairs. Pam LeBlanc photo

The north side of the park, including more than 200 campsites at the River Crossing, Shady Meadows, Rio Frio, Live Oak and Persimmon Hill campgrounds, will remain open during construction.

That’s where I stayed during a recent overnight at the park. Even from those sites, you can access the river upstream of the main swimming area.

In all, Garner has 2.9 miles of Frio riverfront. The park consistently ranks as one of the most popular in Texas. In 2023, it saw 475,898 visitors.

Read more: Prepare for a new detour on the Butler Trail around Lady Bird Lake

The high visitation makes it difficult to do large-scale maintenance projects in the park’s most popular areas, according to Jaime Creacy, regional director for Texas State Parks.

“It is our hope that by completing these necessary construction projects during the slower winter months, we will be able to better serve our visitors in time for their upcoming spring and summer vacations,” Creacy said in a press release.

Among the planned repairs is the scenic overlook on Park Road 29 along the Madone Trail. The overlook has been closed for three years.

Interpretive programming and activities will continue during the closure. For more information, go  the Garner State Park webpage.