The last day on the Expedition was a long one, and as I write this three days later it seems hazy and distant. Not a lot happened. In the morning there was an engine-room tour, something I had signed up for the moment I heard about it, but it turned out to be disappointing. There were roughly 15 small groups for the chief engineer to show around in the 10-minute slots, and he seemed uninterested in his task. It was loud and we had to wear ear muffs, and he spoke quickly and without raising his voice. He was therefore impossible to hear. All I could pick up from the one-minute pre-tour briefing was that there were two active generators and one on standby. Otherwise the machines were a mystery to me, and I passed among them in ignorance. The smells and the sounds reminded me of the mechanical engineering labs in NUIG. Later on I spoke to someone who confirmed my guess about the desalinisation plant was correct, but they could provide no further detail, and there was no-one else to ask.
After the tour there was a documentary about a sailing ship going around Cape Horn in 1929. The guy who had shot the footage as a young man in the crew of the ship narrated what was happening in a voiceover created in 1980, and the overall outcome was excellent. They travelled east to west around the Cape, known as the ‘wrong’ way as it is against the prevailing winds and currents, and so they encountered severe storms. Huge waves broke across the deck, knocking sailors and breaking bones. The guy had got some footage from the top of the mast, 17 stories high, and it showed with brutal clarity how dangerous it was. In the narration he said that he had showed the footage to a convention of captains at some point during the intervening decades, and many had said they had never seen so much water cross a ship’s deck without the ship going down. Superlative claims of that sort tended to be frequent in the documentary, but I could certainly imagine it being true.
In the afternoon, as lunch was starting, we reached land and dropped off our patient. The receiving people sent out a small boat to get her. My nautical vocabulary fails entirely when it comes to describing the boat, alas; all I can really say is that it looked like my stereotypical image of a fishing boat. It was significantly bigger and more comfortable than a Zodiac, though, and the weather was calm and clear, so hopefully her short trip was uneventful. Later on we were told in an announcement that she had reached the hospital and they had operated and all was well.
We reached Ushuaia about four, and once we were docked there was a not entirely pleasant feeling of having never left. I went ashore down the gangway and had a look at the prices of a few cameras and found they were prohibitive, almost twice what I could get through the smugglers’ network. So that will have to wait and I will have to content myself with the compact, which in fairness has been working very well. In the evening I packed and read and wrote, and I went to bed early.
In the morning of 24th, which is now yesterday, there were many goodbyes. I must admit that few of mine were tinged with much regret. I left with the email addresses of the people I most liked, which would fit on a very small piece of paper. There was some complex arrangement where you could put your luggage outside your cabin to be brought off the ship for you, and then pick it up on the dockside, the idea being to save you carrying your bags on the stairs. It was optional, so I ignored it. I therefore got to carry my own bag off the ship under the disapproving glances of the GAP people, and I was quietly pleased to offer this one last contravention of the desired group behaviour.
Ushuaia was my oyster. I got a taxi to my new hostel, which is called La Posta. It makes up for in friendliness and cleanliness what it lacks in location. It is near the airport but about two miles from the city centre, a long way in a small town. But after all the food on the ship, I need the exercise.  The pleasant young chap at the desk told me I could leave my bag there no problem but my room wouldn’t be ready until ten, and he asked what my plan was for the day. There is a steam-train that runs from outside of the town to the nearby national park, which I first read about in Dublin, and I said that I thought I would take that.
‘The train,’ he said, with the gravity of one who has given the matter much thought, ‘is for retired people.’
He then told me he would get me a place on a bus that would drop me directly into the heart of the park – the train only goes to its edge and then straight back – where I would be able to choose a hike in the range of ‘moderate’ to ‘strenuous’. I am enough of a realist to know on which end of that scale I belong.
The bus would come and pick me up at the hostel, it emerged, and there was another guy also going from here. He turned out to be an energetic mid-twenties recently-qualified lawyer from the Netherlands called something in the region of Manno, and we got along very well. Manno could speak a smattering of Spanish, which he had learned in a two-week course in Buenos Aires, and I got the feeling that at most things he was rather quick on the uptake. There were four hikes in total, three of which were marked as moderate, and we chose one which wound along the coast of the bay, offering superb views of mountains to the right and sea to the left.
It was a lovely walk. The trail mostly stayed level with the water but occasionally plunged inland as if curious to see what was there, taking us over steep but brief hills. We kept up a good pace, and were of much the same level of hill-climbing ability. After the confinement of the ship it was splendid to be out in the countryside unwatched and uncontrolled. No sooner had that thought come to me on the trail then I heard a ‘Hi!’ from a friendly voice, and there were two people from the Expedition. I think I had dinner with them once, but their names are as distant to me as what the Neanderthals called the stars. ‘Hey guys!’ I said, ‘See you at the end!’ We kept going, and from that point I made sure our pace did not flag.
The trail dumped us back on the main road through the park rather unexpectedly and we went to a building marked on the map about a kilometre distant where there was a coffee shop. We were both starving. The most suitable food was slices of quiche, which we rapidly dispatched. By then it was still early in the day and so we decided to try another short trail.
That meant we needed to cross the park, a distance of about 6km, and that meant engaging with the buses. The bus system is, to put it mildly, curious. One company brings you into the park, say Company X. If you are waiting outside the coffee shop and a bus from Company Y pulls up, the driver will ask if you are with Company Y. If you are not, he will not allow you on the bus. Even if the bus is almost empty, and even if you offer to pay. You have to sit and wait for the Company X bus that brought you in, watching the near-empty bus drive away. It’s a system only an oil company executive could love.
We finally got a bus from our company that dropped us at the head of the second trail. This was one was shorter but steeper than the first. It was OK at the beginning but then got rather hard. My usual set of recriminations presented themselves. I swore this was the last trek I would ever do. We got to the top, and I took a bunch of photographs, and we strolled back down easily, and I thought that maybe trekking wasn’t such a bad thing.
It was into the early evening by then, so we went back to the hostel and chilled out for a while and then went back into town for dinner. Manno had spotted a nice restaurant during the day which we tracked down. It was cheap and excellent. We had a couple of drinks with dinner, and then decided to go for one more. We ended up in a pool hall near the harbour, rather unexpectedly, which seemed very dodgy as we were going up the steps but turned out to be perfectly civilised and full of people with their families. There was table service. There were several beers. By the time we were walking back to the hostel there were, as James Herriot so well noted, slopes where there had been no slopes before.
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I must confess that another day has passed since I started this entry, so please allow me to reset the timeframe again, to February 26.
Yesterday, then, I woke up at 10am with a head that worked fine for tasks like dressing and showering but was unsuited to anything more complex. I have taken the plunge and started staying in shared dorms rather than private rooms since I came back from the Antarctic, and for my first night I slept deep and sound. The idea of a dorm, I must admit, does not appeal to me at all, but much like getting into cold (non-Antarctic) water, once you’re in it’s not so bad. I was in a room with two sets of bunk beds, four people in all. I was somewhat surprised to find that they are mixed, in that both ladies and gentlemen stay there. Our Victorian forebears would not approve, but I found it presented no evident difficulties. The ladies in my room would certainly be able to keep up their end in the event of a snoring competition.
I was a bit sore from the trekking and so aimed to take it pretty easy. On the best tourist map of the town (there are several competing maps, listing different businesses – the restaurants and what not that are listed are the source of funding for the printing and production) there are twelve attractions listed, which are then numbered on the map. If you, dear reader, should ever find yourself in Ushuaia I urge you to procure that map and look at the numbering of the attractions from west to east. They are scattered in a pattern that seems to me to be entirely random – the headline attraction of the town (the museum I was in before I sailed) is in the mid digits, and number one is something so unremarkable it has slipped my mind entirely. It doesn’t seem to be alphabetical, or by cost, or age, or region. If there is an order, it escapes me.
Anyway. I decided that I would have a look at all twelve, which took me on a pleasant tour through the museums and churches and parks of Ushuaia. Given that I had little to engage me for the day, I had a long lunch on my own in a café that sold mediocre sandwiches and wonderful, beat-skipping chocolate. While there I wrote some notes long-hand, and made the curious discovery that if you sit in a café and write people stare at you like you’re some sort of free-thinking liberal in the very act of starting a revolution of the disfranchised. Several times – maybe four in total – I looked up to find I was being stared at.
In the evening I went for dinner in the same place as last night, though with a book for company this time rather than my Dutch friend. I sat downstairs at a corner table and muddled through the order in my pidgin Spanish, and then a voice from my left said, ‘Excuse me, do you speak English?’ Something about it triggered all of my dislike alarms simultaneously.
‘The Queen’s,’ I said. The speaker was a woman around the boundary of her 50s and 60s, also alone.
‘What’s a good tip?’ she asked.
I resisted the urge to suggest Beef or Salmon in the fourth at Newbury, as I often have in the past. I have no idea if that even makes any sense. Instead I said that ten to fifteen per cent was my understanding, unless it was clearly already added to the bill.
‘That a lot!’ she said.
That’s practically a global standard, I thought, but I said nothing. I turned back to my book.
Silence for a moment. Then:
‘What’s ten per cent of 75?’
Ye gods.
‘Seven,’ I said. ‘Or eight if you’re feeling generous.’
‘I don’t have seven,’ she said. ‘I only have five.’ Her accent put an entirely new vowel sound in five, turning it into ‘fiii-uve’, and lending it the harshness of being trapped in a lift with an air-raid siren.
‘I’m sure that will be fine,’ I said, glancing up for a very short instant.
Much counting of money followed. It occurred to me I was being unfriendly, if not actively rude. I silently sighed and closed my book, and engaged properly with the conversation. It turned out she was travelling to the Antarctic in the morning. She was not on the GAP boat, which was a pity for her because she would have been among her people. More interestingly, one of the people she was meeting was later leading an expedition across South Georgia island, with the boat dropping them off on one side and picking them up at the other. That’s the route that Shackleton followed to get to the whaling station after the 800 mile sea voyage in the Caird, and you would need to be a proper mountaineer to be able to do it. I was much intrigued to hear about the trip. The woman thought the cost was in the region of 10,000 US dollars, though. I will also need to be rebuilt with Wolverine-style titanium bones.
The woman didn’t stay long in the end, as she had just arrived off some long flight from somewhere or other. New Zealand, I think. We said cordial goodbyes and I wished her luck at the Antarctic and I made my way back out to the hostel. And for the rest of the evening I just hung out, not doing much of anything, chatting to the people here. There are all sorts. I am in the upper range of the age distribution but not quite at the top of it. The youngest person I came across was 22. A bunch of people about my own age or a few years younger were just back off an Antarctic trip on a different boat, and I spent much of the evening talking to them. They asked me if I could help them get their DVD to show on the wall-mounted TV  – people seem to sense my ability to make situations involving technology much better or much worse. (I got it playing eventually.) After talking to them I have to say that their trip sounded better than mine – it was smaller and longer but the cost was similar. Plus they got further south, and had more landings. And they saw a storm. Anyway. I retired about midnight, and was woken a few times during the night by the gaseous nasal expulsions of the ladies, but broadly I slept well.
For the next day I will start a new entry, and get the chronology of the blog back on track.
