Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

51 degrees 40 minutes S 57 degrees 49 minutes W

N.B. The correct analogy, I know, is the season of Beltane on my Celtic calendar, but here I have chosen to go with the meteorological, seasonal descriptor since we’re in a Latin American country. True, there is Galicia and the Latin emphasis on bulls and bull fighting, both Celtic influences; however, in the main the larger influence is Roman Catholicism, but I no longer use Christian liturgical seasons either. So, Spring.

Having said all that I might post Beltane for today only since we have left Latin America behind today by coming to the tiny Falkland Islands (aka Malvinas) and their stoutly British population of some 2,500 souls. Two thirds of the citizenry live in Port Stanley, capitol and our present location, while the remaining 800 plus live in what the locals call the camp.

This is not a distinction without a difference. Among the many differences camp and town see between each other, an important one is that Port Stanley observes daylight savings time and the camp does not. I would be in the camp camp.

These are flat islands 1150 nautical miles from Buenos Aires. Kate and I have signed up for the exclusive, once in a lifetime opportunity, to see the elusive rockhopper penguins. If I counted up the number of once in a lifetimes we’ve done on this trip alone, I’d have to have three or four more go rounds at least.

Once in a lifetime means, in this context anyhow, this costs so much that you’ll probably be able to afford this only once in a lifetime. Besides, just because it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity doesn’t mean it’s worth doing. Visiting the Freshkills landfill in New York would be a once in a lifetime event and I don’t intend to pay anyone to take me there.

We probably won’t see rockhopper penguins (though I confess I have no idea what rockhopper penguins are, but being elusive makes them necessary to see if at all possible. Irony.) again so I suppose this is a true once in a lifetime opportunity for us. I’ll let you know if it was a worthwhile way to spend four hours.

Did I mention yesterday that we returned to the Atlantic once we left the Beagle Channel? We have, and it has been suitably gray and inclement though the Pacific, once we made our way into Peru and the cold waters of the Humboldt Current was gray and chill as well. It seems appropriate to visit a British outpost as our first port once returning to the Pond.

This morning, finally, I feel back to my pre-cold energy level though I hadn’t realized I’d gotten somewhat sluggish. Now I’m ready to hop on that 4X4 and ride out to the rockhoppers and follow them rock by rock if necessary.

Kate’s going along though the ticket says not for folks with back problems. Usually that stuff’s just hype, sort of macho marketing, I hope that’s true in this case.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

On feeling my way back home.

In the first instance travel demands surrender. Means, give up the comforts of home, the usual, the way things are done, for some others home, usual, way things are done. Without surrender travel cuts and slices at every moment. Well, I never! We’d not see that at home! Why did he do that?

In the second instance travel requires curiosity. Who knew cacao beans had such a pleasant tasting pulp? How did Panama make the shift from indigenous people to Spaniards to Colombia to the US and then to their own democracy? How do limenos celebrate the New Year? What do the Chilean fjords look like anyhow? Without curiosity there are no new experiences, only the repetition of old ones in different locales.

In the third instance travel invites hope. This visit to the Chan Chan Citadel will be worth the effort and expense. This trip as a whole will repay the cost of it in money with the more useful coin of new experience and changed ideas.

There is, too, wonder. At the arrogance and audacity of the Spanish conquistadors. At the earthquake defying architectural skills of the Inka. At the splendid isolation of Ushuaia. At the glaciers still crashing and booming their way through the Darwin Cordillera. At sitting, finally, at the southernmost point in the Americas.

Perhaps, when we were at our best, there is, as well, love. It will not always come, but here the acceptance, the embrace of the other can loop to the acceptance and the embrace of the other within, that stranger in your own soul who still feels foreign, alien to your Self.

This love recognizes the sad and searing truth that we press down the parts of ourselves we fear, reducing them to fragments of memory, shards of dark feeling and says, wait. There’s more. Whole cultures built on what you reject. Art forms erected from the very things you fear. Places where the dance tune includes even your most minor key melodies. And does a gavotte, or a jig, or the two-step to them.

So then, surrender, curiosity, hope, wonder and love. Travel’s comrades, partners along the way. And welcome.

This is by way of saying that feeling my back home is not home sickness or nostalgia, it is a desire to return to my place altered, made more, fuller, richer. Not too soon though. Just in time.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

55 degrees 57 minutes S 67 degrees 9 minutes W heading 272 degrees speed 12 knots

Cape Horn. The fabled Cape Horn. One of the roughest passages on the world ocean. The seas throw up spin drift and an albatross sails the winds, heading west with us.

The Veendam has slowed some and will soon make a turn around the most remote of the islands in the Cape Horn cluster, Cabo De Hornos, Cape Horn.

We are down now to 1.1 knots, almost stopped. The captain just gave a long soliloquy on the Cape, but the speaker here combined with my single hearing ear left most of it garbled. He did point out that the southern tip of Tasmania and parts of South Africa are south of our current position. (Kate heard that much.)

Antarctica lies due south about 1000 kilometers.

The day is clear, the sun shining and just a few clouds in the sky. So this is what it looks like beyond the edge of the Americas. Winds here are 11 at the Beaufort Scale, 60 mph. We will not go around the Cape because the Captain feels the seas would be too upsetting for the passengers.

Oh, well.

Birds do not seem frightened. There are terns and sea gull like birds out here, soaring high and low searching for fish and scraps.

So, as mariners have often done in the history of seafaring around Cape Horn, we have chosen to follow the Drake Passage to the east and leave the Cape to another trip.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

54 degrees 48 minutes S 68 degrees 17 minutes W

Ushuaia. The last city in the Americas. The end of the Panamanian Highway. Filled with fin de mundo gift shops, hats, restaurants and a certain pride in being the last. As Sergio, our guide for today, pointed out when we arrived at Lapiata Bay, the southern most point in Tierra del Fuego, “That (indicating a green building shaped like a shipping container) is the last bathroom.” A stock line, I’m sure, but it brought howls of laughter from the bus. We were an easy audience.

As I write this, I’m looking out our cabin, through our floor to ceiling glass doors and ahead of me is a just darkening sky, 9:24 pm, four snow capped peaks of the last remnants of the Andes which disappear into the Atlantic here, and a series of commercial buildings and homes, white with red roofs, all tin. On the only avenue in this town of 50,000 the traffic has its lights on and their lights echo in lights on the dock here.

At the dock with us are the Akademik Sergi Valvov, an all white Russian ice breaker bound for Antarctica, and Ocean Nova, an expedition boat that takes adventure travelers to Antarctica. Ushuaia has 90% of the world’s traffic from the other six continents to Antarctica.

This makes Ushuaia different than you might expect. It has several high end expedition outfitters, a Northface and a Timberland, plus other sources for packs, sleeping bags, tents and hiking boots fit for an Antarctic foray.

It also has several 4 and 5 hotels including a brand new Sheraton, located high up over the city and overlooking the Beagle Channel. It is not yet open in case you were thinking about reservations.

Tonight is Saturday night and I went downtown, a ten minute walk from the pier, to find something to eat and check out the shops and the people.

A few drifter types, back packers whose route had brought them as far as they can go by thumb, wandered around with vague menace, long hair and smoking. Others were young folks who looked like athletic academics perhaps down for a seminar on the Humboldt Current or to take part in a dig in a Yamana midden heap. Clots of teenage girls in tight jeans with cute purses, strolling, watching for watchers. Boys trying to figure out what to do with their presence. And failing. In other words, teenworld anywhere.

Sergi spoke with some feeling about Ushuaia in the winter months when the cloud cover is constant, the nights very long (this is the equivalent latitude of Hudson Bay) and the temperature around or just below freezing. On this latter point it is the moderating effect of the maritime location of Tierra del Fuego, an island, that keeps the temperatures mild. “It is depressing,” he said. And since he had played us for laughs before we laughed. “No, really,” he said, “Our hospital has done studies on mental conditions. Suicides. All up in the winter.” I thought of Iceland.

On June 21^st, the Winter Solstice and the longest night of the year, the Federal and local governments throw a party with bands from Buenos Aires, lots of food and drink. “And we dance until we feel better.”

Ushuaia is the exclamation point to the exclamation mark that is Patagonia. Here civilization peters out. There are a few small settlements, at least one of them is a military base, a few islands, but buses and restaurants and teenagers walking the streets on Saturday night ends here.

This is an inflection point for our trip as well since tomorrow we sail around Cape Horn and head for the Falklands, back north.

On this last I should add. Along the pedestrian way into downtown from the dock there is a sign in Spanish and English. It refers to the Argentinian law which put the Malvinas islands under the province of Tierra del Fuego. In the next paragraph then goes on to say that it must be acknowledged that the Malvinas (aka Falklands) have been illegally occupied by the United Kingdom since 1833. Just to be clear.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

54 degrees 54 minutes S 68 degrees 32 minutes W heading 077 NEE

We left Punta Arenas at 8 pm yesterday in the bright sun of late afternoon. The crew had moored us to four floating buoys as well as capstans on the pier. Watching them unburden the ship of its ties to land became interesting as the wind picked up to 60 kph gusts, pressing the bulk of the Veendam against the ropes tethering it and tightening them. The crew created slack on the buoy ropes while a Punta Arenas tug, Atlas, scuttled over to it, backed up and unburdened itself of two crew who hopped on the buoy and lifted the great hawsers free. The Veendam sucked them back up through the water.

As night fell, we sailed south through the Magellan Strait, then into the Cockburn Channel. In the night we entered the channel named after Darwin’s famous voyage, Beagle Channel.

When we got up, snow covered sharp mountain faces behind sloped and green rock with trees. As we went up to the Lido Deck for breakfast, I noticed a glacier coming up on the port side. I moved onto deck 12, then sky deck, a flat circular deck that marks the highest point passengers can go on the Veendam. It offers a platform for taking in scenery on both sides and in front of the ship and therefore is ideal for photography.

Four huge glaciers appeared over the next 40 minutes, somewhat evenly spaced apart. Rivers of ice. Even after the Amalia glacier, this phrase did not come to mind. Until. These. Now the blue ice runs, courses, screams out of the mountains, pushing, out of my way rock I’m moving on, as it heads for the salty waters of the Beagle.

Four of them, in a row, magnificent, wonders of the natural world. These are world shapers, lake makers, river cutters, earth movers, boulder scatterers. The essence of a stream is to flow, of a mountain, mass, of ocean, to fill, of land, to separate, of a glacier, to create. These are ur-entities, those who come before others and their quiet presence belies their power. Glaciers are the strong, silent type writ large.

In all the sailing we’ve done through the Chilean fjords we’ve done I’ve seen only one house. I have a picture of it. It is the most splendidly isolated structure I have ever seen. The only way to get to it is by boat or ship and the closet inhabited area is hours away. A great place to write.

In Ushuaia, our next port, the Museum at the End of the World graces one end of the road that fronts the ocean. It’s an apt name, for this is the largest community of the far southern end of the Americas. There a couple of small outposts of civilization otherwise, but this is a functioning community.

The Chilean fjords and the geography of the archipelago surrounding the Beagle channel make it easy to imagine that if this is not the end of the world you can see it from here. And, you can.

It’s a remarkable feeling to be at the bottom of the map, a sort of geographical weightlessness, as if the burden of land has almost been lifted and we could float free, unbound to land anymore.

This afternoon, at 2 pm, we begin to explore the Beagle channel on a smaller boat.

Sunset here is at 9:14 pm. The winds are 39 mph. We 262 nautical miles from Punta Arenas and with 9.5 nautical miles of Ushuaia. The sun rises at 5:23 am.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

As we have gone further south, the trip has gotten more and more interesting. We spent today in the area around Punta Arenas, watching penguins on Otway Bay and visiting a working sheep farm on

Isla Risco, both north and east of Punta Arenas.

Punta Arenas is windy, isolated and proud. A couple of years ago Chile decided to double the price of natural gas, used to heat homes here among other things. The Magellan region went on strike. No buses, no taxis, no grocery stores. Nothing. After a week, the government backed down.

60% of the people here have some Croatian ancestry, coming here just before and during the fall of Tito and Yugoslavia. There are, too, indios, British, Spanish and other nationalities.

The Magellan region has 150,000 people, 100,000 of whom live in Punta Arenas. The region’s economy has agriculture, mainly sheep and wool, tourism, oil, natural gas, fishing and some industry.

Carolina (Karoleena), our guide, pointed out that there are 2 million sheep in the region and 150,000 people.

Winds here, on a not too unusual day can reach 150 kph, so merchants and the city government have installed ropes along the sidewalks downtown. When the winds blow west to east, it’s ok; but, when they blow south to north, not. If you look on a map of the globe, Antarctica reaches a chilly white finger out as if to touch Tierra Del Fuego When the winds come from there, it gets cold here fast.

Farms, or estancia, get big here because of the land requirements for livestock, e.g. 2 hectares for one sheep and 5 hectares for one cow. A big farm here can easily hit 30,000 hectares or approximately 66,000 acres. This is because the grass the soil and climate supports here is not ideal for either animal.

To get to the nearest town in Chile, it takes three hours and Puerto Natales is not much of a town. To get to the next Chilean city requires a drive of a day plus. Ushuaia, our next stop, is south of Punta Arenas on the big Isla Grande de Tierra Del Fuego, but it’s a long ways south and, is in the Argentinian half of the island. So the folks here live as a big family in which every one knows every one else’s business.

We drove to Mina Peket on Otway Bay, winding along a country road, headed for a beach where Magellenic Penguins come to nest. Along the we saw a rock formation that looked similar in shape to Ayres Rock. A third of the way down it had an exposed vein showing different geological strata and occasionally large white sections. “Those,” Carolina said, “are Condor guano.” It seems the big birds go to the small caves along this section to rest during the day.

We did several Condors flying around this place and I got some faraway shots. Their wingspan reaches 3 meters. One big, and, according to Carolina, ugly bird.

The penguins we saw looked just like they do on National Geographic. Cute, humanoid, and busy diving into the water, waddling from nest to beach, cuddling, looking down and very modernist in their lines.

As near I can estimate, we spent 11.11.11.11.11 walking back along the wooden walkway from Peket beach to our bus, number 21.

After the penguins, we went to Rio Verde district (Wind River district), where, as Carolina told us they live “a very particular kind of life.” By that she means: no electricity save from generators, water from wells, the nearest neighbor is usually at least 3 k away, a school but no teacher, a nurse for first aid, no fridge. The mayor of the Rio Verde district, a woman, has served for 30 years.

The district has 278 people, 96 of whom live on Isla Risco. We headed across a channel between Otway Bay and Skyring Bay by means of an ancient ferry, a ship too old, 46 years, to hold our bus, so we got out and walked on board. The crossing takes 8 minutes.

At the Fitzroy Farm we ate roast lamb, watched a sheep shearing, met a very unhappy pet puma, then boarded the bus to return to the Veendam. When we arrived back here, the wind was stiff enough to force us to lean into it. It was a physical presence.

Tonight the Beagle Channel, the Ushuaia.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

52 degrees 48 minutes S 73 minutes 50 minutes W

Since 5:00 pm on the 8^th we have sailed through the Chilean Fjords and, at 8 pm on the 10^th have come into the Straits of Magellan. Sunset at this latitude comes at 9:30 pm, so there’s still plenty of sightseeing time. We have come 852 nautical miles from Puerto Montt and have 178 nautical miles to go before we dock at Punta Arenas, a city of 100,000 and the big city in southern Patagonia.

Add those two mileages together and we will have sailed 1,150 nautical miles through the Chilean Fjords.

In addition to their stark beauty these glacier cut islands and peninsulas are so big. 1,150 nautical miles and their extension out from the mainland must be 30 or 40 miles. Within that swath of water lie hundreds of islands, small and big, glacial inlets, snow topped mountains, innumerable straits and channels, bays and inlets plus the glacial carved fjords.

While the cultures and practices of Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, rural and urban Chile, do fascinate me, they represent only a graduated departure from the familiar patterns of home. I have never experienced anything like this. Their very strangeness quickens my imagination and stretches my perceptions because now I have to include them in my perceived reality.

This, for me, is the wonder and essential purpose of travel, to learn what the wide world really holds by getting close, touching it, feeling it, smelling the clean air off the glacier and looking at its bright blue color.

Here on this cold slate gray water, moving past rock and ice, seeing snow caps on mountains my heart sings and the song comes from that deep mind, perhaps even the reptilian brain, the part that knows wildness and remoteness, isolation. The song, like the sacred sounds of Hinduism and Buddhism, unites the singer and the strangeness, the stranger and the earth, a ritual of union within alienation.

There is not, for me, any way to learn these new songs without moving the body from place to place.

And the slower the mode of travel the better. Train, yes. Good. Ship, yes. Better. On foot, yes. Best. Right now we sail, slow enough to take in the otherness of this watery and islanded realm, and it’s good enough for me.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

Amalia Glacier. At 10:00 am we came to the end of the Amalia fjord and found its creator, the Amalia Glacier lying blue and massive, its leading edge right at the water line, small growlers and the larger icebergs floating, blue, the color of captured sky.

The air temperature came down to around 40 degrees with small spits of snow as we entered the glacier’s realm, far now from the heat of Tambo Colorado or the Elqui Valley.

Still Latin America, this area has its own distinct identity, neither Amazonian rain forest or west coast arid desert. This portion of Latin America has more fellow feeling with Scandinavia, the northern US and Canada, than with the Latin America we’ve visited up to this point.

Patagonia, a region not found on any political map, begins south of the Rio Colorado in Argentina and around Punta Arenas in Chile. It means land of the big feet, a characteristic taken from early contact with natives who had large footwear.

Even today Patagonia and wilderness go together, a land largely, though not completely, uninhabitable, though not inaccessible. Many eco-tourist come to the national parks, the long stretches of mountains and plains and lakes, the glaciers and ocean. They come, many of them, seeking isolation and it can be found here.

These fjords have no towns that I can see on my maps, I’ve seen no boats, no planes, no smoke and they occupy the Chilean coast from the 42 degrees S to 54 degrees. In that large territory I can only find three dots for inhabited places and they are all on inlets that push deep into the mainland, far from the ocean and the archipelago.

As the world presses itself into denser and denser population patterns, urbanization continues to accelerate all round the world, it only makes these wild distant places more wild and more distant.

That is not to say that these wild places experience no impact from the remainder of the world. They do. Acid rain. Global climate change shrinks glaciers. Ocean currents carry mercury and other toxic materials all round the world ocean. Over fishing to feed urban markets depletes the breeding populations of ocean wild life.

Even so places like the Chilean fjords and much of Patagonia will, I imagine, remain wild. Their geographical features like mountains and fjords and lakes will survive even dramatic environmental changes. The flora and fauna may not, but some flora and some fauna will come to fill in the emptied gaps in eco-systems. Patagonia and its lands will always be distant, always be forbidding, just like the high mountains of South Asia, the massive forests of Siberia and the rugged Alaskan wilderness.

We need these wild places for we are animals born of the wild places. In our deep minds we remember the vast, the tractless, the forbidding, the uninhabitable because we once tried to live there.

Sometimes we modified the wilderness, look at the United States, Europe, China, South and South East Asia. Sometimes we passed through it on our way elsewhere. Always though our deep minds were made to cope with its challenges and to see to our survival there. With no wild places an essential part of our specie’s memory would go dark as it gradually had no place to replenish.

Like the fresh water from the Amalia Glacier flows out to the Pacific through these fjords, so the story of human evolution courses through the geographical regions, the terra firma which makes up only 1/3^rd of our blue planet, and washes up against the shore of current life, carrying with it the hard won lessons of our kind.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

In the Amalia Fjord, headed for the Amalia Glacier. We’re now sailing roughly east on the 50^th latitude, 50 minutes. We’ve come back into the fjords from our necessary journey out to sea to sail round a large peninsula. On either side of the ship bread loaf shaped mounds of hard rock rise from the fjord, some with small trees and shrubs, others bare. Behind them taller peaks rise, snow dotting them from time to time.

This huge ship feels a bit closed in here, as if it would not do well if frightened with too little room to move.

Clouds brush the tops of both bread loaves and mountains, a scene that could contain a troll or two, perhaps Odin and Thor and not look unusual.

The ship, at 18 knots on the open sea, has slowed down here and we slide past the rocky inlets and their guardians at a stately pace, almost funereal, as if a burning Viking ship might precede us.

The sun and sand crowd will find nothing to like in this part of the world, but two constitutionally introverted northern Europeans (I’m half-German, the Celtic roots only a quarter.) find this vista calming, familiar and conducive to creativity.

I’ve seen glaciers from afar, stuck in the high valleys of the Rockies, but I’ve never seen one as close as I imagine we will get in twenty minutes.

Passengers have a variety of cold weather gear ranging from down coats to shorts and a wind breaker. I bought, as I had planned, an alpaca sweater in Ecuador. It zips and has a register of llamas topped by stylized golden stars with red and yellow wool at the top register and the bottom. As you might expect, it does not stop the wind, but it does make warm with a zip up hoody over it.

This portion of the trip has switched the nature of our journey, putting the emphasis on the natural world and on a particular part of it unfamiliar to both Kate and me.