Strange sort of day today that never really took off in some ways but was great in others. I woke to find I was coughing and sneezing and my throat was a bit sore once again, and I really didn’t feel like getting up early. So I didn’t. The festival events were not starting until the afternoon, and so I had a morning ‘off’ instead. I got up about half ten and spent a while looking at accommodation and logistics for the rest of my trip. I wonder why it seemed a good idea, when I was sitting in Dublin, to have three days in Ushuaia before the Antarctic trip, and then another four days after? I may try and get the flight to Buenos Aires changed.
I went into town, deciding on the way that with the blinding heat and my slightly delicate state I didn’t want to hitchhike, and so I rented the ATV for yet another day. The woman in the shop told me she had no scooters, motorbikes or cars left, as everyone was renting them to get out to the festival event, and in general she did a wonderful job of making me thankful to have any sort of motor at all.
I had lunch in the place I went before at the edge of town. I have been there quite a few times now, and they nod and smile when I come in. Then on impulse I went into the big warehouse-type space where the local artists and craftsmen sell their wares, and there was some lovely stuff there. I was very taken with a copy of an artefact that is now in the museum, a piece of mahogany traced with an unknown script. No-one has the faintest idea what it says or who created the script. I talked to the guy who had made the copy for quite some time – he spoke very good English – and I would dearly love to buy it, but like everything else here it is very expensive. Tomorrow morning I am going to the museum and will see the original, and I will probably have to be satisfied with that.
I got petrol for the ATV – there is a friendly chap there who does all the pumping for you, so you just have to sit there – and hit the road for the festival. I discovered that though the ATV has many strengths, it is not wonderful at twenty continuous kilometres, and I was rather glad to reach the site. It was a lot busier than when I had last seen it. It wasn’t immediately evident where to go, but a friendly Chilean guy showed me the path up the hill. At the top I found myself looking into the crater of a volcano for the second time in two days. In this one there was a lake, deep blue and still. It was just across the hill from where I had been photographing the statues two days previously, and I had had no idea.
Unfortunately, though, I became aware over the course of the next hour that I had in fact missed the event. It was due to start at 2.30pm, and I arrived about 3.30pm as I had thought it would begin late and go on all day. It turned out to have started bang on time, and to be short. There was still probably a thousand people there when I arrived, but I think they were waiting for the confirmation of the time or something of that nature, because at 4.30pm there was an announcement in Spanish and everyone clapped and then left. So that was rather disappointing.
Seeing as I was at the site with so many statues, I tried to go in again for another look around, and they unceremoniously told me my pass did not allow re-entry. If I wanted to go in again, it would be another USD60. I declined.
Thus foiled again, I drove the 20km back to town, stopped by the museum to see what time it opens tomorrow, then went a few miles out a random road I had spotted on the way to the museum, passing local houses and farms. Came back to the hostel and slept for a while, and then about 8pm I went out for dinner. I picked a place I hadn’t been to, close to my usual haunt, and sat outside. There was another man sitting alone at a table also, and then we were joined by a third guy at a third table, and conversation broke out eventually. The guy who was there first left, and I shouted over and back to the third guy until finally I picked up my drink and joined his table.
His name was Jay, and he was a retired VP of marketing. He had worked for Sun for years, and it turned out he was on nodding terms with Google’s erstwhile CEO Eric Schmidt. Jay was very curious as to why Schmidt would stand down, but I had no additional information to give him bar my own opinion. We ended up having a very pleasant chat about technology and the industry for about an hour. He told me that he was in a meeting at Sun in the period where Steve Jobs had been forced out of Apple, and at that meeting they talked about buying Apple for in the region of USD750m. If that had gone through, would Jobs have come back to Apple? Could be a different world we live in now, with no iDevices, or at least not the same ones that we have. But it’s possible that Jobs would rather be first in a village than second in Rome, and we would have no recognisable Apple at all.
Jay also told me that at the height of Sun’s success they had a global party for the sales force in Versailles , where everyone had to come in period dress. It sounded excellent. Jay was part of a group here on Easter Island (though he never did explain why he was eating alone tonight) and one of the other guys had a satellite phone, which Jay had used. He said the handset was not much bigger than a cellphone, though you still need to be outside to use it and it has an antenna, like an old-school mobile. The phone he used was based on the old Iridium satellites, put in orbit with much fanfare and the use of many billions in the late 90s, and then sold for a song when the rise of mobiles phones rather shredded their business plan and the company went bust. Jay said the reception was perfect, with no lag.
So I much enjoyed dinner. It had got comprehensively dark since I left, and it was with some relief I discovered the ATV does have headlights. On the way back I stopped to get water and picked up two beers when I happened to see them. When I got back to the hostel Colby was up so I offered him one of the Heinekens and we sat on the comfortable chairs at the front of the hostel, beside the couch where I have written most of these entries. Over the course of an hour or so Colby increased my knowledge of the US military by several orders of magnitude. He had some excellent stories. One time he was in a camp in Afghanistan when there was a rocket attack. There is a protocol that says you’re supposed to grab your body armour and head for the bunkers, but when Colby looked around none of the experienced guys were moving. The tents they were staying in were surrounded almost completely by concrete walls to protect from shrapnel, so unless a rocket happened to hit dead on top you were safe enough. So actually most people just slept through the attack.
His work in Afghanistan involves keeping the mobile phone networks working 24 hours a day, as right now insurgents will force the operators to shut the network down at certain times. Partly this is to demonstrate their own control over the environment and services there, and partly it’s so they can operate without people being able to alert the police or US military or any other similar party. The complexity of the world out there and its dissimilarity to the world I know is just boggling.
I would have loved a few more beers but none were to be had, and so we said goodnight and I wrote these notes. To end as I began, it was a curious day in that I didn’t see the main event that I intended to see, and I didn’t do much else, but I still had a very interesting time and very much enjoyed it, and learned a lot. And my cold is much better. So overall, I would call it a win.
