Last updated: October 2026
In December 2019 I arrived to work the ski season in Park City, Utah. This is the part nobody tells you: where the money came from, because I didn't have it.
My friend Paula, the first friend I made at university, went on Work and Travel before anyone else. When she came home she told the whole group we had to go. It never once crossed my mind: I didn't have the money, full stop.
The following year I ran into Paula, Flor and one more friend in Buenos Aires, all three together, and it struck me as very odd. They made something up. Only when I got back to Posadas did I find out they had gone to get their visas: all three were leaving. That was when I decided I was going the year after.
I contacted the agency while they were still over there, with a huge amount of lead time. They sent me a payment plan: about ten monthly instalments and a larger final payment, around four hundred dollars, which only came due once you already had a job offer.
I was working at an aparthotel in Posadas earning seventeen thousand pesos a month. It covered the instalment and almost nothing else. And I had a credit card I used badly: I'd meet my friends and pay for everyone, buy the food, buy the beer, and then have nothing to pay the card with because my salary was already committed to the programme.
So I was paying for the programme and nothing more. I had no ticket. I had no money to take with me. I had nothing.
I aimed at Deer Valley Resort in Park City, where the girls were working. It wasn't only to be with them: that job included housing. And it is worth understanding what included means, because it confuses a lot of people. It isn't free: it is deducted from your paycheck. But it is one less thing to worry about, and when you are arriving in a country with no money, not having to go out and find somewhere to live is worth an enormous amount.
I interviewed and was hired as a banquet server.
Later, over the years, I learned something I didn't know then and I assume nobody told you either: having the job does not guarantee you the hours. If the winter season is bad, they may not need you. And if your post is in a restaurant halfway up the mountain and it doesn't snow enough to reach it, that restaurant simply doesn't open. You need a cushion for the first two weeks at minimum, and that assumes you start work straight away.
I kept pushing my friend Selva to come. That same morning she phoned her parents to ask whether between them they could help with the programme, and they said yes.
When Selva confirmed, one more friend from the group said she was going back. And when she confirmed, Paula said that if everyone was going, so was she. The four of us ended up going: Paula's third time, our friend's second, mine and Selva's first.
It was June or July, months before the trip, and I still couldn't finish paying for the programme. And then the aparthotel fired me. Without cause and without notice.
In Argentina that has consequences. When you are dismissed without justification and without being given notice, the company must pay severance for your time worked, plus an additional amount for having no cause and another for the missing notice period. I went to the Ministry of Labour, went through mediation with the hotel's owner and was paid around a hundred thousand pesos. At the time that was a lot of money.
With it I finished paying for the entire programme and cleared my credit card. It sounds strange to put it this way, but it is the truth: if they hadn't fired me, I wouldn't have gone.
A few days after losing that job I got a call from a luxury lodge in the Iberá Wetlands, in Corrientes — one of the largest wetland systems in South America. I was out of work for a week or two and started on the first of October.
I had a very good time there. Good atmosphere, good pay, and we lived on site: on days off everyone travelled home to their own town, and mine was an hour away, so I had it easy. The general manager lived in Buenos Aires and came out every couple of weeks.
When I told her I was leaving, I didn't tell her the whole truth. I didn't say I had been paying for a programme for nearly a year to go on my own account: I said a job offer had come up in the United States. At a dinner with all the staff she congratulated me in front of everyone and told me there would always be a place for me there. I still remember that.
By then I had stopped attending classes. I sat several third-year subjects as an external candidate because I had given work more weight than university. I don't recommend it and I don't regret it: it was what I could do.
With what I earned in those two months I bought dollars. For the ticket I borrowed my uncle Sergio's credit card — he is my godfather — and he later split the charge into three payments so I could pay him back.
Searching for flights is a hobby of mine, so I searched a great deal. The cheapest left from São Paulo with three layovers: São Paulo, Lima, San Salvador and New York. I bought it after 20 November, to leave São Paulo on 5 December.
And why New York, when I had to get to Utah on the other side of the country? Because in first year I studied aircraft and came away with three ambitions: to land at Madrid-Barajas, to land at JFK in New York and to see Singapore's airport. I had a chance to tick one off and I took it. I had no idea what I was doing.
One detail remained: getting to São Paulo. I discovered that a coach company ran a Buenos Aires-Rio de Janeiro service that stopped in Posadas and at Iguazú Falls. I bought the leg to São Paulo — roughly 1,000 km, about 620 miles — and left on 4 December: twenty-three and a half hours in a sleeper coach, purely to reach the plane. It was, as it turned out, the most comfortable leg of the whole trip.
I left with four hundred dollars in total, plus a little local currency for expenses until I was out of the country.
I reached São Paulo on 5 December, crossed the city on two trains to the airport and waited eight or nine hours at the gate. On the Lima to San Salvador leg they served mushroom ravioli and it disagreed with me. In San Salvador airport I had forty minutes to connect; I bought a Sprite and drank water to see if it would pass. It didn't.
We took off for New York and the stomach pain built until it was unbearable. I called the flight attendant. They asked over the PA whether there was a doctor on board and nobody raised their hand. They asked again, this time for anyone with medical training. Nobody.
The attendant came back and told me they had reached a doctor at Buenos Aires airport by radio. I was crossing the Caribbean and being treated, over the radio, by a doctor in Argentina. The instruction was that I drink a litre and a half of water and that she stand beside me until I finished the bottle.
I drank the whole thing with her standing there. I unbuckled my seatbelt, ran to the lavatory and threw up everything. And I felt better almost at once. A while later we began the descent into New York; it was around eight or nine in the evening.
I landed at JFK on the night of 6 December, exactly as I had dreamed in first year: with four hundred dollars, no sleep and having just been sick on the plane. I had left Posadas two days earlier and passed through four countries. I still had the whole of the United States to cross to reach Utah.
Keep reading: two days in New York on two hundred dollars →
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