A day at sea is a timeless thing. On the Expedition, people wander around looking bored. Groups play cards or board games. Meals serve to give structure. There are lectures, but not the headline stuff of the Heroic Age – one of them was about long-line fishing and its impact on birds. The library is much busier than usual. It’s all about forms of waiting.
I love it. It’s 5.30pm as I write this and I’ve read, fallen asleep and written intermittently throughout the day, switching from one to another whenever the mood strikes. The seasickness tablets make me drowsy and deepen the delicious not-at-work feeling of being able to fall asleep during the day. I imagine I would get tired of this eventually, but it would take a period of weeks rather than days.
We have had a touch of bad news on the ship in that a young woman has got a bad case of appendicitis. She has been treated by the ship’s doctor but needs a hospital, so we are making for a place on Cape Horn where a helicopter will be able to pick her up and take her to Ushuaia, so it’s serious stuff. The Drake Passage has again been mild, but the weather is apparently bad at the Cape.
The upshot for the rest of us is we we’ll get back to Ushuaia a day early, and then disembark as per the original schedule on the morning of the 24th. I have accommodation booked for that night, but am otherwise plan-less. There is a steam train to a national park that I think I will try for. Mick is incoming in a few days and has sent me a proposed itinerary of fractal complexity. I’m likely to just agree in confusion.
Ushuaia is a tax-free zone, though I am not entirely clear what tax they are referring to, so I was thinking I might also look at how much a replacement SLR camera would be if I was to buy it here. I imagine John Argentinian’s Camera Emporium can’t match the prices from Amazon, or indeed my international network of camera smugglers (i.e. people who would bring me one from the US), but I live in hope.
I have had a wonderful time on the ship and met some fascinating people, and the Antarctic itself has been an other-world experience, but I will be glad to get off and return to independence. It will be nice to be somewhere and be able to stay there as long as I like, and to stand within four kilometres of a cliff-edge without being told to come back. Some of the people on the ship have been travelling alone for significant periods – Nina the cyclist for almost a year, a guy called Anthony for 23 months (and all within four countries) – but I am not sure how much I would like that extreme either. I am looking forward to having Mick as a comrade in arms. And indeed, I am starting to come to the point where I cast the odd glance ahead to being home, and all that means.
Through the library windows as I write this I can only see the grey of dense fog. What it must have been like to be here on a rough, small ship almost 200 years ago, without charts, dependent on the wind, bitterly cold, seeking your fortune among the most dangerous waters and the most inhospitable landscape in the world… And what a shame it rested on the back of such brutality to the whales. It was not the harpoon that killed them but the explosive charge of black powder carried by the harpoon, which detonated inside their great bodies. Some of the whale populations were reduced to one per cent of their original numbers, though at least we can console ourselves that now they are recovering.
Dinner is about half an hour away, a landmark in the timesape, and after that I will read more and possibly write more. About nine they often show a film. Last night was a documentary on Shackleton, a paean to his leadership skills. He kept the Polar Medal from McNeish, the carpenter, and two others, after it was all over, which I often forget. They had ‘rebelled’ to some degree on the ice at a particularly dark moment. That was a hard thing to do, in the sense of uncaring and violent rather than difficult; but maybe all great leadership is edged with a vicious blade.
Right. I’ll stop here or we won’t know where we’ll end up, and we’ll speak again anon.
