The eve of the Antarctic

The Antarctic trip includes one night in a hotel called the Cilene del Faro, which is on the opposite side of Ushuaia from the hostel. So this morning I walked from one to the other with my roughly 20kg of stuff. It was most probably the furthest I will carry the rucksack during this entire trip, if all goes well.

I was a bit later setting out than I had planned, despite the fact that I was up early, as over breakfast I met an Argentinian family on their holidays, two parents and two kids. In the course of the conversation I told them that I was going to the Antarctic tomorrow, and from their reaction they would dearly love to be going themselves. I almost wished they were going instead of me, so clear was the desire, and I hope they get there at some point. The mother spoke perfect English and translated for everyone else.

We had got a basket of toasted baguette slices as part of the meal, one per table, meaning I had as many for myself as they had between them, and I had only eaten one or two. In a funny moment, the son of the family took some of mine, and the parents were scandalised. I tried to hand them all over and indicate I didn’t mind in the slightest but they were having none of it. But on the way out, I put the whole basket beside the son and told him to have it at, and everyone seemed pleased with the final outcome.

When I made it to the hotel it turned out I was sharing a small apartment with two bedrooms and a large living area. My roommate is Colin, an Australian chap who has just turned 70, though he seems younger. His wife has gone to London with their granddaughter, and he has come here to head to Antarctica. He was a salesman for a large company I had never heard of that sell the descendants of asbestos among others things.

I met him in the afternoon when I had come back to the apartment to get more money. Since the Quito wallet debacle I don’t carry much cash and generally don’t bring the card either, and everything here is expensive, so when I had got to the door of the maritime museum I realised I didn’t have enough money on me to get in. I invited Colin to come back with me, if he was interested, and he was, though eventually he left me at it.

I spent several hours there poking around. The building was once a prison. One wing of cells now forms the main body of the museum, with a separate little exhibit in each cell. A second wing has been left much as it was when the prisoners were there, though, and it’s a bleak place to be. I paced out one of the cells and it’s six feet by ten, so the same width as a snooker table but two feet shorter. The cells were designed for a single occupant, but generally had two. There was a high window with two sets of bars on it.

In the height of the operational prison security was relatively light, as even if you escaped you had nowhere to go. The land around was too inhospitable, and you couldn’t light a fire as the smoke would betray you. So most people that did escape just returned of their own volition.

The prison was part of a penal colony when originally established, and the whole idea behind that is one that should give us pause. The British had been shipping people to Australia for years by this point, in the mid 1800s, and so the idea was not without precedent. It is, though, a terribly odd one, to create a society of thieves and criminals who are bad enough to exile but not quite bad enough to execute. Mixed up in there is the fact that keeping people in prison is expensive, and that offences of the day seem ludicrously slight by modern standards. But I find it very odd to think that the idea of a penal colony seemed a reasonable one, a good solution to a difficult problem.

There was a very small exhibit on Shackleton with a beautiful scale model of his ship, the Endurance, and even an accompanying model of the open craft they used to travel from Elephant Island to South Georgia Island across the worst seas in the world. Shackleton himself, after his great adventure, had something of a bitter end, with much booze and tobacco. It was a heart attack that carried him off eventually. I suppose after something like he did, all the rest of your life is telling the story.

After the museum I went in search of a light rain jacket, given the disappointments of the one I bought on Easter Island, and found that you could choose any two of thin, waterproof and cheap. The top-end ones were the equivalent of E200, astonishingly. I eventually found one from a line that has just been replaced for about half that amount, but even that seemed very expensive to me.

I went back to the hotel and picked up my new septuagenarian friend and we went out for dinner. I had steak for the third night in a row – in my defense I had a very light lunch – and it was excellent, but not quite in the same league as what I had in BA. That said, if it was in Dublin I would cross the city to get it. We had a beer with that, and then headed back.

I spent the next few hours getting my stuff organised for the Antarctic. Frustratingly, South America’s habit of relieving me of my possessions is continuing unabated. The T-shirt from the Galapagos that I really liked never emerged from the laundrette in Santiago, but I only realised that today. And also, the lock on my rucksack must have got caught in something on the way through the airline system to Ushuaia, as it has entirely disappeared and taken the zip fixing with it. The zip is still somewhat operational, as the base is in place, and I can lock the bag in a less secure way by using a fabric loop at the bottom. But it was a combination lock that was very handy to have, which Dad had given to me just before I left, so the whole thing was rather irritating. And indeed on top of that I realised with a thud today that I was not wearing my hat when I should have been wearing my hat, but when I went back to the bookshop I had been in earlier it was there. I was very relieved.

The bookshop, incidentally, was excellent and had a large English section, and I went in without the intention of buying anything and with the intention of not buying anything. I came out with a book by Theroux on a journey to Patagonia – Katie and I had seen the very same volume when we were going through the book-famine in Banos in the cafe where it was for rent but not for sale, and I couldn’t resist it. The number of books though has reached unmanageable levels again; I will regretfully have to leave a few in a suitable new home after I get back from the ice.

This last week I have felt that I have lost a lot of time in logistics and not taken advantage of what time I have had, and I guess part of that was just waiting to go to the Antarctic. Tomorrow, things should move back into a higher gear in terms of exploration and newness. In the morning I am booked on a four-hour tour of the Beagle Channel on a sailing boat – I had hoped to do that today, but they were booked out. Then at 4pm we board the Expedition, and later tomorrow night we sail south. Earlier today I went to docks with the small binoculars and had a look at the ship on which we will be sailing. Given my knowledge of nautical matters, all I can confirm is that it floats. But I very much look forward to getting to know it.

This evening I read the welcome pack and it turns out there is satellite internet access on the ship, but it may be prohibitively expensive. If it is not, I will try and post day by day, otherwise I will put everything up when I get back.

I have just checked on Wolfram Alpha, and today is the 40th day of my trip, with 40 remaining. As I write this I am sitting in the sixth-floor bar of the hotel in Ushuaia, which has decent music and an amazing view of the water and the city and comfortable couches, and indeed its only drawback is that it doesn’t have a barman. If it did, I would have a glass, and if I had a glass I would raise it, as this has been quite the experience. Google Analytics tells me that some of you are still with me, reading along; I hope that you too have drawn from these pages some of the excitement and newness and occasional frustration that I have felt, and that something of the magic of South America is with you too.