Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

Montevideo, Uruguay On the banks of the Rio de la Plata, overlooking the Atlantic to the East

Travel brings the unexpected. A primary purpose, of course, but after tours with guides, I had become a bit dulled to the canned formula of the best this and the most that and the very special music. Not saying it was all boring, far from it, but too predictable.

Not today. In Montevideo, a city of which I had no expectations, Kate and I had a wonderful day. After being pressed sideways into the dock, we ended up within walking distance of the old part of Montevideo. At about 10:30 I suggested to Kate that we walk into town, something we could do in only a handful of ports. She agreed.

Our way took us first past two warehouses, both as I described earlier, three stories high with iron doors spaced about 50 feet apart on each story, brick with chipped and rusted concrete outlining the doors and interior bays. The iron doors, once gray now have rust blooms, some just a few, others with the gray vanishingly small.

When we got past these, a painted walkway led us through a port welcome area with guides hawking city tours and a free shuttle to a leather factory. Beyond them a memorial to the sinking of the Graf Spee shared a park-like space with painted anchors and their chains, or sheckles, as we learned from our Captain. Policia Turistica sported chartreuse fluorescent vests and stared off, wherever people stare who face an entire day of standing in roughly the same spot.

Across an intersection a sign said, “Tourists Follow Green Sidewalk.” Guess what that made me want to do? Kate said, “We’re following the green sidewalk.” Oh, ok.

A large boulevard with some cobblestone lanes opened in front of us. The buildings were somewhat dilapidated, like the warehouses, concrete and brick that had seen better days. Or, maybe not. There was a shabby chic to it that appealed to me.

A wandering fellow tourist told us about a market up ahead, hidden by buildings ahead. We walked over that way. Sure enough there was a large open air market with many different things for sale, many of them tourist oriented, but just as many artisans selling their products.

Off the market area, pedestrian only somewhat like Florida Street in Buenos Aires, a large building held more shops and a number of restaurants each of which featured huge fires and metal grills filled with roasting meat: chicken, sausage, beef tenderloin, pork, lamb. Each restaurant had an awning with its name around four sides of an island that contained the fire, the roasting meat, a bar and an area for washing dishes. Tables and chairs flanked the islands in the open area created by the building, fans turning, cooling the diners.

When we firsts went through, tables were set and glasses sparkled. The smells of roasting meat had only begun to fill the room.

We looked in several shops, but continued up another, older pedestrian way with a slight incline. This had a few tourists shops, too, but began to sport a carneteria here, a fruit and vegetable market with their wares colorfully displayed in wooden crates on the sidewalk there, a bar named “Los Beatles” and a petfood store.

The buildings have a colonial look, similar to the older part of Panama City that we saw well over a month ago, balconies, molded cornices, plaster decorations. A few of the buildings had pastel colors, recently added.

Like the warehouses and the building across from the green tourist sidewalk these buildings had a shabby but not run down look to them, more like a neighborhood in which people really lived. As the mid-day heat had begun to settle on us, Kate started talking about air conditioning. About 45 minutes before that, I told her I’d give my 12:30 tour a pass to meander around Montevideo with her.

We walked back down the hill toward the large building with the restaurants.

Inside we walked past several folks hawking their restaurants, “Sir, a refreshing drink?” “Some lunch, mister?” and found a table underneath a fan at the Cafe Veronica.

The waiter welcomed us to Montevideo and to Uruguay with a genuine and warm greeting. When Kate got up to take a quick picture of the fire, another waiter came up and encourage her to go inside the kitchen to take her picture. After some insisting, she did. We had a meal that exceeded our expectations and a dessert, pancakes con leche that would bring me back to Cafe Veronica in a hurry if it weren’t so damned far away.

This was the kind of day I’d been missing, a day of just poking around, meeting some folks, sticking our heads into various places, seeing the layout for ourselves, discovering rather than being led.

We had a great day together then came back and took a nap.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

Montevideo, Uruguay 141 nautical miles east of Buenos Aires

Due to high winds the Captain hired a second tug and has pushed us into the dock sideways. Standing on deck as the ship moved straight in tbe direction I faced from my spot midway on the starboard side disoriented me. As if the earth had moved.

The dock here presents an old warehouse to our window, three stories high with metal doors stacked atop each other on each story. In the days before container shipping metal gangways must have been laid down between ship and warehouse, perhaps offloading by forklift.

Uruguay is the second smallest country in Latin America, about the size of North Dakota, with 3 million citizens.

At 12:30 pm I’m going on a walking tour of old Montevideo. It will be good to be on foot in a city though the back continues to complain. I remind my back that it just has to take it since we likely will never see Montevideo again.

It now seems the anti-gastro-intestinal illness protocols will not lift. We were fine from New York City through Valparaiso where we took on passengers booked only on the second segment of the cruise. Since then we have been exhorted frequently to wash our hands, wash our hands, WASH OUR HANDS. We can no longer serve ourselves on the Lido cafeteria either.

The protocols, designed by the CDC and mandated by the company at a certain illness threshold make sense, but they are a nuisance. Still, better than getting sick.

Six days from now we’ll be home so the trip has gotten down to days from a month, then weeks. Two days at sea remain and two days in Rio.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

Buenos Aires, second night

We were up and out early today, headed for the famed Argentine pampas and watching gauchos gaucho. Boy, what a let down. Turns out the pampas looks just like rural Minnesota, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and so on. By just like I mean they grow beans (soybeans) and corn, raise cattle and do all this on fenced, flat land—the pampas.

In my mind the pampas have open lands, filled with gently swaying grass, gauchos with sort of flat hats twirling their boleros and bringing down cattle for branding and other matters necessary for rearing livestock.

Instead, the gauchos wear plump hats, scarves and a belt with coins. The more coins, the more gaucho. They also have ponchos. (I did see ponchos in my pampas.) Turns out gaucho means a mestizo, a blend of native South American and Spanish, who lives on the pampas. A country guy as opposed to an urban guy. The gaucho knows how to work the land and ended up managing the estancia’s for the European landowners or serving as ranch hands.

They also take small silver implements about the size of a large fountain pen, ride their horse very fast and insert the implement through a ring hanging from a piece of leather by a cotter pin. The ring is slightly larger than a finger ring so this is a feat of dexterity and good horsemanship. I don’t know what part of cattle rearing it relates to however.

It does relate to the gaucho coming over to the crowd, handing the ring to a lady and taking a kiss in return. Kate was the first woman chosen for a ring and a kiss. She was happy.

A dog, a very happy, tail in the air, prancing dog helped the head gaucho herd his group of ten geldings. This dog worked hard, running, nipping, barking and occasionally jumping up to bite a horse on the nose. He kept them in line.

After the horse wrangling, the ring spearing (penning?) and the women kissing, Kate took the opportunity to ride on a horse. She’s trained in dressage so this was a return to an old love. She looked great heading out to the large riding area. A good seat.

My back, still very painful from yesterday’s tweaking, made jumping into the saddle unappealing.

I took the time to take photographs of the barbecue. This was some barbecue. Low grills were on two foot high legs and extended over some 40 feet long and about three to four feet wide. On them were row after row of chorizo, dead, splayed chickens and several tenderloins of beef, by several I mean thirty or forty. We’re not talking briquets but burning logs. I have pictures.

Lunch involved, as you might imagine, the meat, potatoes, boiled beets, onions and carrots. Very good. All of it. Plus, for the bulk who drank, a lot of vino tinto and vino blanco. As for me, aqua sin gas.

A fokloric show followed. I’ll not tell you my opinion of this because Kate will read this entry.

Oh, ok. I’ll tell. I don’t like these deals where people barter their culture for money in a cheap, sensationalist and mostly bad way. This was one of those in my opinion. So there.

We got back and Kate took a nap. I turned around and went into Buenos Aires on the shuttle, which took me to Florida Street, a pedestrian only shopping area near a large city park.

My purpose in going back was to see the city for a bit at least (I barely left the room yesterday) and to buy some yerba matte. Matte is the national drink of Argentina, a blend of herbs that has a smoky tea-like flavor. I bought a small matte recepeinte, a cup of sorts and a straw. I’ll post a picture when I get b back.

While I waited for the shuttle back to the terminal, I took the yerba out and read (tried to read) the ingredients and directions. The shuttle driver smiled and reaching into the van pulled out a leather pouch with two cup holders. In the main body of the leather pouch he had a hot water bottle and a plastic container of yerba. In the cup holders he had a recepiente and a straw.

He didn’t speak English and I speak very little Spanish, but we looked at each other’s kit and smiled. It was one of those moments.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

Outside our room and down at the deck just above the waterlines, refueling is again underway. The promenade deck in front of our room and for about a hundred feet toward the stern of the ship has red cloth barriers over it, preventing other passengers from getting close to the refueling. We, however, can just open our door and go see. Which we did. Then, being the good northern European adults we are we turned around and came back inside. After all.

Way back in Santa Marta, after paying for our lunch at a bayside restaurant, I turned to go next door and follow Kate into the souvenir shop. When I put my foot out, only open air was available. There was a step, in the same white tile as the floor, and I didn’t notice it.

At the time I was proud of my ability to react quickly, turning back and onto the upper floor where my other foot already resided.

However. In so doing I wrenched my back. That’s how I got the foot back on the same surface as my other one, whipping my back around while my planted foot remained steady.

Since that afternoon, our first port in South America and our first one of this trip, I’ve had a sore back. It’s gone up and down in inflammation, mostly background noise, but today I torqued it again. This time I can’t move easily, even with some significant pain meds Kate has along. That means that, though Buenos Aires is within walking distance, I can’t walk the distance. So. No wandering around here, which I had very much wanted to do. Mark O. gave me a neighborhood, San Telmo, and it sounds wonderful. Maybe next circumnavigation of South America.

As Evita said, don’t cry for me, Argentina.

Tomorrow we head out onto to the pampas by bus so I’ll see some of it on the way there. Also, we’re here overnight again tomorrow night, so perhaps I’ll have a shot then. Gauchos and boleros.

Even so, the travel malaise I spoke about in recent blogs has abated and I’m eager to get outside.

We watched cormorants or grebes today, flying between our ship and the Log-In Pantanal, a cargo ship being loaded just across the way. These birds are fish eaters, with the ability, like loons, to turn and suddenly disappear under the water. When one comes up with a silvery, squiggly catch, the race is on to get it eaten. The others flock to the successful bird, flail around, trying to knock the fish out and eat it themselves. In one scrum I watched the fish passed among five different birds until one of them got that long neck pointed skyward and let the fish slide in.

We are in shirt sleeve weather here, perhaps 80-82 and sunny, a change from the cloudy jacket weather of the Chilean fjords and Ushuaia.

Got good news today. We discovered that our checked bags going home have a 70 pound weight limit. That means we should be able to check bags without penalties and carry our fragile treasures on board.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

34 degrees 43 minutes S 57 degrees 48 minutes W course 300 WNW Rio de Plata estuary

Threw out my back this morning. Gonna curb sightseeing here. Damn.

Our journey up the Rio de Plata to Buenos Aires moves forward at 12 knots, a stately pace, occasioned in part at least depth, I’m sure, and other traffic.

A cargo ship of some kind just passed us headed east toward the Atlantic. It had storage containers of a kind I saw in Ushuaia and couldn’t suss out. They were flat, about 2.5 feet deep and maybe 30×30, made of metal.

The water in the estuary is no longer ocean blue, but top soil brown. Rivers have many functions, but one of them deposits wind blown and erosion carried soil out first to deltas and then to sea.

It made me wonder if a time will come when we mine estuary bottoms and the fanned out oceanic streams of soil to replenish our ruined agricultural lands. A problem with that, of course, lies in the concentration of pesticides, fertilizers and toxic metals held in the soil. In the great fan of soil in the Gulf of Mexico, carried down by the Mississippi, the same phenomenon has created a great dead zone that no longer supports either plant or animal.

Today we return to Latin America though I learned last night from Table 31 dining partner Jerry that Argentina has a largely Italian heritage population, something in the range of 50%. Why not speak Italian?

The law of first impact. That’s why. This law of immigration studies says the first ethnic communities to settle (or seize) a new land have a disproportionate effect on later culture. This explains why Minnesota seems to have a largely Scandinavian heritage when in fact the dominant country of origin is Germany.

Caveat. We’ve seen port cities and then through a glass darkly. Still. The cultures of Latin America, at least the dominant European influenced cultures, those with Spanish or Portuguese first impact, seem thin to me. That is, the distinctions among them so far seem minor, the cultural equivalent of dialects, not different languages.

Also, the histories seem, as the United States must seem to Europeans, Asians and Africans, shallow. Long ago historical events happen in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, like the coming of the Conquistadors and the gradual settlement of South America by Spain and Portugal.

In the Andes or in the jungle there are cultures with deep histories, hundreds and thousands of years stretching away from the present, but this immersion in coastal South America has given me no opportunity to experience them.

From the top of our Arctic head to the tip of our Tierra del Fuegan toes, the dominant political cultures of the Americas are new. We are, in that sense, still very much the New World. Of course, for thousands of years there have been indigenous people here though even they crossed over from Asia.

Jumped up nouveau riche. Johnny come latelies to the human sport of culture creation.

The rise of China has put forward a civilization that is the exact opposite. It has known only internal struggle and change for most of the last 5,000 years and even has a dominant ethnic group, the Han, who have been present and in power, again, for much of those 5,000 years.

This means that the world will now have a hegemon as much civilization as state (one analyst calls China a civilization-state) and a second hegemon barely 400 years old, one with no dominant ethnic group and a changing, swirling ethnic mix. As they say, interesting times.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

38 degrees 1 minute S 55 degrees 26 minutes W

Nearing Buenos Aires, off the coast near Mar del Plata, a family resort area for South Americans

Over a month now we’ve been onboard the Veendam. Going to sleep with the gentle rocking of the ocean and waking up to its expanse has become common place.

Breakfast and lunch happen on the Lido deck while dinner comes to us on white linen tablecloths at our table 31 in the Rotterdam dining room. Since it overlooks the stern, we watch sunset each day over dinner, perhaps catch a cargo ship or another cruise ship in the distance.

If we need something else, we show our room key and it goes on the tab.

Kate seems ready to sail on beyond Rio, the absence of domestic and medical duty allows her to relax in a way she find impossible at home.

I’m finding the lack of stress a bit dull, wanting to gain some traction in the day-to-day. The shore excursion gambit has grown stale and I’ve read through 6 or 7 novels now.

Cruise ships try to account for this kind of drift toward home by having different kinds of things to do: movies, cooking lessons, the casino, shopping, trivia contests, the spa, swimming pools and basketball courts. Neither Kate nor I warm up to these kind of things much.

We’re both introverts and the constant presence of other people drains our energy, requiring time in the cabin or on the deck in our deck chairs away from other passengers.

This is not by way of complaining, just being descriptive.

If we had another month to go, I would start writing stories, perhaps doing some more research into oceanography. I knew this last topic would fascinate me while we were on the ship, but I failed to find a reasonable cost general introduction with good maps of the ocean floor and of the many currents.

Anyhow we’re now three ports from the end of the cruise: Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Rio.

At Rio we will disembark and take a taxi to our Tulip hotel a block from the Ipanema Beach and two nights later board a flight for home.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

42 degrees 47 minutes S 56 degrees 8 minutes W 10:30 pm course 006

At last! A clear night. I went upstairs, first to the sky deck, the highest deck on the ship, trying to see the southern sky but the ship’s stacks were in the way. After some shielding with my arm, I could make out a few stars in the south, but only well above the horizon.

I did see Eriadnus, new to me, and Orion. It took me a bit of looking at Orion to notice that it was my old friend, but upside down. Yes, his sword pointed toward the celestial dome rather than the celestial equator. A strange and somewhat disorienting view of him, but also appropriate to the southern hemisphere.

I wandered toward the back of the ship, crossing the empty basketball court and pushing through netting at its rear. There was an area of the ship I had not explored on the next deck below, deck 11. It was an area called the Retreat where outdoor movies get shown on Thursday nights.

It’s big advantage in this instance was a rail at the stern beyond the light pollution of the ship and below and behind the stacks that were in the way up above on the sky deck.

Sure enough, right where my star map said it would be was the southern cross, hung upside down, looking more like a kite than a cross, but clearly there. It thrilled me to see it. This is one of those physical experiences you can have only in the Southern Hemisphere. I’ve read about the Southern Cross all my life and now I’ve seen it.

That was not the only unusual event tonight. Kate’s Uncle Ollie liked the occasional trip to the casino, so she gave me a $20 bill and told me to gamble it in Uncle Ollie’s memory. My thought was to go put it on red on the roulette wheel, one bet, then the ritual is over. But the roulette wheel had not yet started up, so I headed for a game I knew. Blackjack.

In the long ago far away I used to play blackjack every night, five nights a week while waiting to pick up my papers and deliver them on my route. This went on for 8 years. I’ve played a lot of blackjack.

Turns out the casino version is a little different, but not much. I sat down, passed the dealer my $20 and took four five dollar chips from him.

Uncle Ollie rode on my shoulder this evening. I long ago learned the basic rules of blackjack. First rule is, be the dealer. Well, the house has that covered and it’s a big advantage.

Second rule, 17 or more stay. 16 or less, take a hit.

Third rule. Follow rule 2.

If you’re a real whiz with memory and can count cards, you can always beat the house. I’m not a memory whiz, so I stuck to the basics.

About ten minutes into the play I had the guy next to me rubbing my shoulder for a little luck. Twenty minutes later I cashed, went to the pay window and collected $100. We’ll put the money toward some memorial for Uncle Ollie.

Winning at blackjack and seeing the southern cross, a good night.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

44 degrees 35 minutes S 56 degrees 24 minutes W heading 009

Back at our own latitude and beyond it a bit, perhaps down by the Iowa border, headed south toward warmer climes; though here, of course, instead we go north. This happened sometime around 3:30 pm Santiago time while Kate and I napped.

We went down close to 56 degrees south, the furthest point being Cape Horn, just 34 degrees from the South Pole. Now, oddly, I’ve been closer to the South Pole than the North.

About five weeks ago I observed that the world ocean is big. Turns out its bigger than that. It is huge and we will sail over a 1,000 nautical miles toward Buenos Aires with no sight of land whatever. No land.

We do this on a bit of artificial land. This ship. We need, absolutely have to have, something to stand on, a place to get upright, without it, we might swim a ways or hang from a long rope dangling, we might float in space, but we will not be human. We will be a weak fish or bird or sloth, not strong enough to save ourselves.

Sometimes, when you least expect it, your ship disappears and leaves you stranded in the deeper ocean of our short lives. That happened to Kate today. An e-mail reached out through satellite and digits, made its way on board here and informed that her Uncle Ollie had died. He was the last of her mother and father’s generation, his death a shock because his illness had come up suddenly.

Since my Aunt Roberta’s death some years ago, I, too, have stood as the older generation in my family and now she does, too. It’s a sobering place to be and takes some time to absorb.

This trip has become a marker not only of Kate’s retirement from medicine, but, too, as her change in the generational order. Eventful for either reason, for both, it becomes a true phase change, from gas to plasma, say.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

46 degrees 28 minutes S 56 degrees 42 minutes W course heading 004

Sun light on the ocean gives a brief brilliance to a bit of wave, water lifted up higher than the main body. Quick as a blink or quicker the dash of bright flares, then disappears as wave and ocean become one again.

This is life as I now understand it. We rise up for a moment, a second in the grand clock that ticks away in the heart of the universe, shine with the vitality of consciousness, then subside, absorbed back into the universe which accreted in that one instance to form our distinct, unique Self.

Does this have meaning? Damned if I know.

My guess is that it does, in one sense at least. Our moment affords the vast project that is the movement of matter from creation to eventual extinction or reprocessing (whatever cosmology soothes you most) a chance to reflect, to notice, to be aware of itself. Our brief sunlit moments then may be to the universe as mind is to our body, an epiphenomena unsuspected, unpredicted, but nonetheless appreciated. That may well be all ye need to know.

When we float on the vast world ocean between ports, over deep water, water now 13,500 feet deep, my Self dips down into the collective unconscious with great ease. It may be the womb like sloshing of the ship or it may be deep calling unto deep. Whatever it is, I dream and dream and remember.

Last night my dreams all had a common theme. There were three, one in which I was a new teacher, another in which I developed a vast foundation and a third with knowledge spread out in a quasi-religious setting. The common theme lay in crossing from one domain of knowledge to another, knitting disparate disciplines together, finding the filaments that underlay them all.

In the first, as a new teacher, my principle, an African American woman, looked me over and put me in a building devoted to concrete teaching. Students learned gardening by building tools, sowing and harvesting. They learned mathematics and science by building machines, language by engaging in trade with others who spoke a different language.

In the second I had convinced Mark Dayton to put together a foundation that knitted together philosophy, literature, politics, science and painting, all represented by different patterns of tile on the floor of its huge lobby.

Finally, in the third, Glass Bead Game-like, I was part of a group that had assembled various distinct disciplines in different liturgical styles. One had an emphasis on textiles, colorful and large, hanging from stone walls. Another had altars of stone. Yet another gathered its disciplines and represented them through music. Another through painting.

In this last dream a fire caught the textile chapel on fire and threatened the whole cathedral though it eventually burned itself out since the whole structure was stone.

Today we’re between the Falklands and Buenos Aires, Atlantic as far as the eye can register light on any side, the water deep and the sunlight bright. A good day to relax and read.

We will pass the 45^th degree of longitude today, headed to Buenos Aires’s 38^th. That means we will move out of the Canadian equivalent longitudes and into our own. From that point on we will be heading into warmer and warmer climes.

On Thanksgiving eve we will board a plane in Rio headed for Atlanta, Georgia, then the cold, cold grass of home.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

51 degrees 00 minutes S 57 degrees 27 minutes W course 000 degrees, due north

The Falklands are in our rearview and we’re headed due north to Buenos Aires. The next two days are at sea.

Have you ever seen a rockhopper penguin? They’re pretty damned cute. Long feathers, light colored, jut out from over their bright red eyes and, darned if they don’t, they hop from rock to rock. They’re shorter than the Magellanic penguins we saw in Otway Bay, Chile, but their markings are black and white, too.

When they move between rocks in rockhopper mode, they hunch their shoulders forward and look like Dickensian accountants, shoulders stooped by many years working for Scrooge and wild eyebrows to shield their eyes from candle flame too close. Their manner as they hop seems very serious, as if hopping required all their avian skill, as it well might for all I know.

Getting to see them found Kate and me in a Land Rover, well used, with the exhaust pipe up and curved away from the driver’s side window, accompanied by two Albertans and driven by Rod, a twenty-five year resident of the islands.

Rod has done a lot of tour guide type work, but has a certain flexibility that accounts for his residence in these islands. He spent several years in Cairo where he said, “The working Egyptian is just like anybody else. And, if they have just enough money in their pocket for a Coke, they’ll give it you.”

A twelve month contract brought him to the Falklands and he’s never left.

He did clean up work following the Falklands war and, demonstrating flexibility again, met a guy in the Globe Tavern, the local pub, on his way to Antarctica. “I need somebody to cook for my crew,” the guy told Rod. “What kind of cooking?” “Regular stuff.” “I can do that.” Rod ended up in Antarctica for 8 weeks, paid to be there as a cook. When he got back, the guy put a 10,000 pound check in his hand.

Rod drives for Murrell Farms, the owner of the land on which the rockhopper’s nest. A small farm by Falkland standards Rod estimated it at 9,000 acres. They raise sheep for the most part though they have a few head of cattle, too.

The sheepherding occurs on motorbike or 4X4. On the latter they have a small shelf on which sit two cattle dogs. They drive out to the herd, let the dogs out and the dogs return the herd to the shearing spot. “This is,” Rod said, “A lot less work for the dogs than when they used horses. Then, the dogs had to run out and back.”

As you might imagine, a sheep farm does not have well traveled roads, especially since they use 4X4’s and motorbikes, so the one hour ride back to the rookery took us over up and down terrain, some muddy spots and a land filled with small holes and sudden drop offs. Rod and the others in our little safari, three LandRovers, a Mitsubishi SUV and a Ford pickup with the large cab, knew the trail well and we had as comfortable a ride as the conditions permitted.

The rockhopper location itself was not very large, perhaps 300 feet long and thirty feet wide on top of a rocky promontory that overlooked the Atlantic below where the penguin’s mortal enemies, the sealions, live.

Digital cameras along as many photos as you want, so I took a lot. Penguins on eggs. Penguins hugging. Penguins directing traffic. Penguins hunched over, rockhopping. Penguins crying in alarm as juveniles prowled around looking for mates. Penguins standing alone looking out to sea. Penguins watching us watch them.

Oh, and a local note. When I visited the port-a-potty for a quick break, I proudly noted the Made in Minneapolis, Minnesota stamp on it. As it happens, Jon (stepson) went to school at Breck with the folks who have made millions selling just these units. And here they were in the Falklands.

Port Stanley could be in the English countryside. It has the telly booths, public houses, a Thatcher Drive, their own pound notes, a proud post office making a big deal out of Falkland stamps. They drive on the left side of the road and have an English school system with small classes which includes college at Winchester College in England at age 16 and, if the kids do well, university after that. The schools are modern and well maintained.

This is a place it would be fun to come to for vacation, if it weren’t so far from home. In fact, Kate and I have liked Ushuaia and the Falklands well enough to live in either place, although they have the same problem as our third favorite, Hawai’i. Too expensive for travel to see the kids or for the kids to come see us.

The trip after Valparaiso, which began in Puerto Montt, included the Chilean fjords and several glaciers, went on to Punta Areanas, then Tierra del Fuego and Ushuaia, finishing here in the Falklands has been by far my favorite part of the trip. Cooler, for one thing, but also terrain and wildlife that was both exotic, yet somewhat familiar, and an isolation that appeals to both Kate and me.

The next few days return us to Latin America, Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Rio, then home.