The Trials of Life, and Sugar

---

Well gosh me what a lot of blogging we have to do today. We've been down and up and cold and hot and walking and sitting...all in great big proportions. Are you sitting comfortably? I am...for the first time in a while (certainly with no chance of a strange flea nipping me on the undercarriage).

We left you in a foggy port before boarding the good ship Navimag, bound for the cold and icy waters of Patagonia. Little did we know that the journey that awaited us would reap new friendships that would last weeks, not just days, and more new experiences than you might expect when cooped up on a confined space for 5 days. The ferry is a popular way of getting in amongst the icy waters of southern Patagonia, and while it´s due to take 4 days, it actually took 5. For some passengers this would mean a flurry of problems, missed connections, cancelled bookings, changed schedules and untold pains in the ass. But for us it equated to 3 more meals and one more night of free and fairly comfortable accommodation. Marvellous.

We were in the cheap seats. If this was Titanic, we were the rowdy, bawdy Irish lot below deck, a-drinking and a-singing and a-sleeping 10 to a bed. Ok, so it wasn´t quite that much fun. But we didn´t have a private cabin or anything which meant we were in bunks in corridors with little curtains so you could slip in and out of your sailor suit without anyone seeing your bell bottom. It was great, actually. We had a little window so we could see dolphins from the comfort of our own beds when we slipped below decks for a nap. Naps were an integral part of life on the boat. Most people would have a nap post breakfast, with a siesta after lunch and perhaps a small doze before dinner. There wasn´t much else to do, other than eat. And what a joy it was to be fed in a school canteen where no decisive input had to go into the preparation or selection. I know this won´t garner much sympathy, but when every meal up to this point had involved awkward and usually mistake-littered purchases in shops with funny money, or random selections from a menu which required a dictionary to decipher, it was a joy to be given no choice at all in the matter. And so for 5 days, we ate, we slept and we watched as the sea outside got colder and rougher. The slightly surreal lifestyle may well have been a window into what it must be like to live in an old folks home; eating, sleeping, walking gingerly on floors which posed more danger than they used to, and sailing somewhat blindly towards an unknown and certainly colder, oblivion. Short of having a nurse scream into our ears ´HAVE YOU HAD YOUR PINK PILLS YET MR CARR?´, we could have easily been led to believe that we were indeed making that final voyage towards the good lord´s pearly port. Come to think of it, there were moments when we felt we might just have arrived in heaven already. Every morning we were awoken by the ethereal pluckings of a harp as the ferry´s speakers transmitted a kind of floaty music that is favoured by women with floral kaftans and too many cats. I think I had an album when I was going through a hippy phase called ´Forest Dreams´ or some such rubbish, and it seems that so too did the ferry. It had the effect of making everyone wander about the ferry in some trancelike state, not a bad one I must add, simply the kind of cosy, floppy state when you know there is nothing much to do other than eat, sleep or watch the wildlife and mountains sail slowly by. The scenery became more beautiful and dramatic by the day and everyone at one time or another spent a few lazy hours watching albatrosses swooping behind the boat or condors circling above. Dolphins followed us too and as every amazing creature came and went, people´s expectations rose. First there was a stampede atmosphere when someone shouted ´dolphin´ and you could have cleared one side of the boat by shouting from the other side that you´d spotted another dolphin. But then dolphins became old hat and everyone wanted whales. Soon it was ´not another fucking dolphin´, I want a killer whale. I could have sworn there was a little Veruca Salt in all of us (´I want a whaaaaaaaaaale, I want a whole whaaaaaaaale...´).

Of course, it wasn´t all pure and sane, we didn´t all suddenly drop our instincts and morph into a boat load of Alan Titshmarshes, booze free but drunk on nature´s blossom. We were a boat load of travellers, some young, some old, with not much else to do, so of course, we drank too. There was ´Pisco Hour´, the moment when all of sudden everyone would converge in the bar and drink Pisco Sour, leading to the inevitable sea sickness and absences from breakfast the following morning. There were films, meaning that you could ignore all that tedious wildlife and watch ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ (Jenny), we sailed all the way up to South America´s biggest glacier and we stopped at tiny fishing village in the arse end of the arse end of nowhere where they put the web into webbed feet. And then, eventually, we reached Puerto Natalis, our final destination.

Everybody says it, but it´s true; what sets Patagonia apart from anywhere else are the skies and the colours. The mountains and the wildlife are incredible too, but the sky is just so huge it has to be seen to be believed. Puerto Natalis is a small town on a flat and windy plain, meaning that 90% of your vision is filled with sky. The colours change all the time and no view looks the same for more than a few minutes. Most people come to this part of the world to walk in the Torres Del Paine national park, and ´do the W´ or ´do the circuit´, which are a couple of big walks around the area´s stand out cliffs. However, time and money were against us, so rather than do the W we did the / which is one branch of the W. The / is a rather convenient name for it when typed, but as far as I know would be difficult to name in person. I suppose it might be called the slash, or the forward slash, but that would sound very confusing and wouldn´t convey the fact that we did one arm, the final swoop if you like, of the W. And calling it the slash would infer that we just went and pissed on the mountain, which we did, but that´s beside the point. So we did the /, which meant a walk up a very steep hill very early in the morning, then back down again in time for a bus to take us back to town. The walk was great blah blah blah, the end point (Las Torres) spectacular blah blah blah, but the abiding memory of the walk was returning to our bus where we witnessed a lesson in how not to speak Spanish by an American woman who should be very ashamed of herself. But she won´t be because she obviously has no self awareness whatsoever or she wouldn´t have done what it is I´m about to describe. It became clear to this woman (let´s call her Priscilla) that her bags might travel a short distance on a separate bus to herself. Blind panic befell Priscilla, even though the rest of us were in the same situation and had complete faith in the bus drivers that we would be reunited with our bags in due course. Priscilla obviously didn´t trust the likes of bus drivers though, so she shouted in the worst pigeon Spanish ´Mi ummmm, erm, mi mochilla est ON THE BUS. Mi needo mi mochilla pork-hay I´LL MISS MY GODDAM BUS´. If it wasn´t so crinchworthy, it would have been even funnier than it already was. She went on like this for a good 3 minutes, long enough for those of us with little Spanish to realise how utterly retarded we would sound if we reverted to shouting in English the bit that we didn´t know in Spanish. Bless her, she was a thoroughly repugnant. For the record, she was reunited with her mochilla (rucksack) and made her connection, and we had a funny feeling this would not be the last time we would see Priscilla.

Instead of one massive hike in Torres Del Paine, our plan was to do some more walking over the border in Argentina, so after another night in Puerto Natalis, we crossed the border, heading for El Calafate, a stop on the way to El Chalten in the Park Nacional Los Glaciers (which is a national park full of glaciers for those of you with the translation skills of Priscilla). We visited a glacier which advances 2 meters every day, where everyone who sees it witnesses giant slabs of ice creak and smash into the lake below, apart from us. And after a day of watching ice fail to melt in the sun, we journeyed to El Chalten. El Chalten isn´t quite the arse end of nowhere (we´d already been there), but ít´s certainly nearby...probably the upper thigh of nowhere. It´s a strange town which used to be a strange village and at the rate of development should be a strange city by 2009, but it´s home to some spiffing walks. The biggest and most gruelling (only for it´s monster ascent at the end) delivers you to a lake just below the Fitz Roy peak, a hellishly scary looking shard of rock that madmen with ropes occasionally attempt and often fail to ascend. We were far less bold, of course, and admired from below as the murky weather allowed us occasional glimpses of the hair raising peak above us. It was enough to stretch our legs and lungs in readiness for the impending bus journey ahead of us, to Buenos Aires, 50 hours north (well, 10 hours south and east, then 40 north). The need for exercise was suitably fulfilled, coming after 5 days of slobbishly living on board a boat, and before 50 hours of arse numbing bus rides back north.

So, 5am bus. 10am arrive back in El Calafate and bump into some people off the ferry. 12 midday, bus to Rio Gallegos. 5pm, arrive in Rio Gallegos, get bus ticket to Puerto Madryn leaving in 1 hour (result!). 6pm, board bus, 2pm the next day, arrive in Puerto Madryn. NO MORE! We stopped in Puerto Madryn, partly to regain some sanity and partly because it´s a bit of a wildlife mecca. Now then, you know that Attemborough series ‘The Trials of Life’, the one where the killer whales came onto the beach to grab poor defenceless seals and fling them round in the air before rolling back into the sea to eat them? Yes? Well this is where that was filmed. And in spite of those letters to ‘Points of View’, they still do it. (Killer whales just won´t be told). And by golly we were determined to see it happen for ourselves. So the four of us (us and Mike and Leigh from the ferry) hired a car and headed off, desperately hoping to witness this remarkable act of nature. And did we see it? Did we buggery. Of course not, we always miss these things. If we didn´t see ice fall off the glacier, we weren´t likely to see this happen. We did see an armadillo, and some penguins, but it´s just not the same is it?

But we can´t control nature and disappointed though we were, there was time for Ant to witness one other remarkable reminder that nature is a wondrous force. Some way into our final 20 hour epic bus journey, we tucked into our hearty breakfast of boiled sweets, biscuits and cakes, courtesy of the bus company. 20 minutes later Jenny announced she felt a sugar crash coming on and immediately fell into a coma, while the 2 kids on the seats in front who had devoured the same nutritious breakfast embarked on a 3 hour rampage, running, falling, climbing and shouting with all the brief energy that such a diet delivers. They too then collapsed, while Ant marvelled at the dramatic force of sugar. Stick that in your pipe and film it, Attenborough.

---

Photos

Sunrise over Patagonia
An average morning changed dramatically when God lit a fart

Top of theTorres
Us and Stephan after a mighty rapid walk up a very steep hill

Sunset at Puerto Montt
It looks a bit like Ullswater, but bigger

Glacier
Big boat, very big glacier

Good ship Navimag
Home for 5 days

Llama
It´s not stricktly a Llama but a relative of one. Either way, it did very well not to eat any of the cakes which were at nose level

Fitz Roy
The clouds barely lifted off it when we were up there, then cleared perfetly after we got back down. Bugger.

Orca
Ok, so I took a picture of a poster. This is what we should have seen...

Armadillo
This Armadillo kept on trying to nibble Jen´s feet. It was a braver man than I.