Stephen

After I wrote the last entry we went out to find an aquarium that was mentioned in passing in the guidebook and which has an impressive-looking website. I had been expecting a single big tank and so was rather disappointed on entry; it would more accurately be called a Building In Which There Are Many Small Individual Aquariums, though I suppose that wouldn’t help the printing costs of the flyers. After a few minutes inside I started to hate it. The tanks were too small for their occupants – a sea-turtle went sadly around and around inside his barren tank, pushing up against the glass, and there were collections of big fish in small tanks. In what I can only assume was an indication of the number of attractions of Mendoza, the place was packed with families. I was happy to leave. At least I saw a devil fish on the way out which was pretty cool, though it looked forlorn in its narrow tank.

We spotted a place with snakes on display across the street. I’ve only just realised I don’t know what the name for that is – snakorium, maybe. It was small and dirty and also very crowded, and again the tanks were small, but it was enjoyable in its way. There were various pythons and boa constrictors and what not. It was not in any way evident to me which snakes were poisonous and which were not, and some of them were unsettlingly well disguised as sticks or part of the undergrowth. One of the things I would like to do that I never got around to on this trip is head into the jungle to see some of these guys in their natural environment.

We got back to the hostel to find that the jeep tour we had been hoping to do through the mountains the following day was not going to happen because the driver was otherwise engaged. Why the hostel had pitched us the event without checking if they could do it first is anybody’s guess. We looked at some of the other activities instead but nothing particularly appealed and all of them were quite expensive, and felt like a sort of arbitrary way to pass the day. There is surprisingly little to do in Mendoza other than the wine tours. The pages of the guidebook on the town are mostly filled with information about the city parks, and while those were pretty and interesting, they don’t exactly occupy a full day. So we had a look into seeing how much it would be to change the flight from the 22^nd to the 21^st, and much to my surprise it turned out to be free. Splendid.

That done, the casino was calling from down the street so we wandered the very short distance to it. I had never been in one before. There was a metal detector on entry to make sure you weren’t bringing the heavy weapons, manned by a friendly chap in a suit. The casino was spread over two floors. Most of the space was taken up by slot machines, and on the upper level there were some card and roulette tables. We tried the machines first. I didn’t find the one I tried very self-explanatory or interesting. There were multiple symbols on the screen in a grid about three by six, and you could choose the number of possible configurations you wanted to bet on, so not just the traditional three across the middle would win but also various diagonals and other paths. You could also choose a multiplier on the standard bet, increasing it up to a factor of twenty. All that done, you just pressed the button to bet and the symbols rotated for a moment and you either won or lost. Then you pushed the button again. I mostly lost.

I found the card tables much more fun and interesting. We stood and watched the blackjack table for a while, and Mike considered playing as he has done it before a few times and knows the rules. But we would have hit problems had anything in any way non-standard happened, or had we inadvertently violated some of the house rules or anything of that nature, as we wouldn’t have understood instructions from the dealer. So we let that one pass, and instead placed a few bets on the roulette table.

Roulette is a little more complex than I would have guessed. The numbers from one to 36 are printed on the felt, and if you place your chip on top of one of those you’re betting on the chance of the ball stopping in that exact slot. The odds of that are actually one in 37, as there is a double zero on the wheel in green. If it comes up everyone loses, unless someone had specifically bet on it by putting the chip on the double-zero space at the top of the grid of other numbers. But if you place a chip on the line between two boxes, you are effectively betting on both of them. So if you place a chip of value 10 on the line between three and four, for example, it’s like betting five on each of them individually. If you place the chip on the intersection of four squares, it’s like betting one fourth of the bet amount on all four. You can also bet on ranges of numbers, 12 per range, a shot just less than one in three (with the double zero again shifting the odds slightly off the integer).

Then there is the classic red or black bet, which is what most people think of when they think of roulette. We had got chips worth about 20 euro but were being nickel-and-dimed out of them, to mix currencies metaphorically, so instead I just bet on red. It came up and I doubled my money. And then as it’s something everyone should do once, even if there’s only a tenner at play, I put it all on red. I was actually nervous watching the ball go around and around the outside of the wheel first, then drop down and bounce around it, and then finish on… black. D’oh!

All in all we were there about an hour, and I can completely see how people end up getting attached to playing the table games in casinos, even if the slots didn’t appeal. We had a late nightcap in the hostel over which we talked about how much fun it would be to organise a trip to Vegas. Hmm.

The following day we went to the airport in the morning to get our flight to Buenos Aires. It was to touch down in San Juan on the way to drop people off there and pick people up – this bus-like behaviour for flights is something I have only seen in South America. The San Juan hop was so short that there was only a few minutes in which they plane was not either on the way up or down, and the end-to-end time was about 25 minutes. We touched down and waited a while. I couldn’t be sure exactly how long as I was buried in the end of the Easter Island book, but then there was an announcement that we had to get off the plane because of a ‘communication problem’ at the airport in BA. There was a café up stairs so we went to get a sandwich. There was a news station showing on the TV, and somewhat to our horror we saw that it was covering the very delay in which we were enmeshed. It emerged that all three of the city airports in the capital were in bother, and hundreds of flights were grounded all over the country. And things were likely to remain so for 48 hours. Ouch.

After a wait of about two and half hours they made the announcement that the flight would return to Mendoza. Despite the fact there is not a lot to do in Mendoza it’s a major urban centre compared to San Juan, so we got back on the plane for the short hop. Given that we didn’t want to stay in Mendoza and were anxious to get back to BA for our last few days, and as the airport was likely to be down for such a long time, we headed with a collective accepting sigh for the bus station.

We were sitting on a bus within ten minutes of arriving. I still had a sense of disbelief that it was actually happening. The advertised journey time was 14 hours, and we settled in for what was becoming a familiar routine of reading and playing games on Mike’s phone and looking out the window and thinking of nothing. The services offered by each company are not consistent and this was the only one we were on which served food. It was just about edible. The stops however were not announced so we never knew how long we had, which was irritating. And there were very few of them. At one stop I went into a shop to get food, and as with most transactions here it took a while. The driver got very anxious and then aggressive with Mike as they had to wait for me for a minute or so. He also snarled at me when I got back on. Pleasant chap.

I slept in bursts of increasing shortness and was awake to see the red dawn. Coming into BA we hit the worst of rush-hour traffic and it took for-ev-er to get through to the main bus station. The total journey time was 16 hours. We had inadvertently completed our entire loop through Argentina by land, but it would take a rare and pressing event indeed for me to get on another long-haul bus in the near future. We later learned that the ’48-hour closure’ was actually eight hours, and so all we saved was a few hours. But we didn’t know that when we got on the bus, and we made the right decision with the information we had at the time.

We had booked into a hostel called the Milhouse, which we picked because it shares a name with a Simpsons character. But it clicked with me when we arrived that someone had told me about a notorious hostel in BA called ‘the Mill House’, and we had indeed tripped on that particular one. It’s famous for the kind of activity that is televised late at night on Brits Abroad and programmes of that ilk. Almost everyone there, including the staff, was English. At the early hour we arrived everyone seemed very tired from the previous night’s activities. The girls tended to have blonde unshowered hair tied back, and many of the guys wore wife-beater vests or pyjama bottoms. You could populate a few series of Big Brother without leaving the building.

All that said, it was very clean and well-run and much closer to a hotel than most of the hostels we have stayed in, and it was a more-than-adequate base of operations for the short time we were there. We had a rest when we came in but managed to avoid sleeping for the entire afternoon, then headed out to visit Palermo, an area of the city new to both of us. Our first stop was at the main zoo in the city. There was a good selection of rhinos and elephants and ferocious felines. The most notable event was that a very cute and fluffy chick was in the enclosure with a creature that looked much like a Kimodo dragon, though I don’t think that’s quite what it was. It was certainly a nightmare lizard-ish thing though. We stopped to watch what seemed to be inevitable with a sense of horror and interest. But while the chick cheeped and picked around, the creature seemed uninterested and eventually we left to see the rest of the zoo. But we swung back that way as we were leaving. The chick was nowhere to be seen.

We walked from there to Japanese gardens mentioned in the guidebook. Buenos Aires is so vast that even what seemed like a short walk on a small-scale map took a while. It was nice there, but we have better at home. There was none of the sense of peace and time that such a place should generate, and not a whole lot to indicate its Oriental nature. We left there to go to a large museum which turned out to be closed on Tuesdays. Outside though was a large decibel-meter, functioning as public art, about five metres high and one wide. When a big truck would pass by it lit up to the orange level of lights, and with the honking madness of rush hour I suspect it gets to the red.

There was a museum about Eva Person within range so we went there instead. It was a lot better than I expected and presented a pretty balanced portrayal of the famous Evita. The fundamental question is whether she was a power-hungry gold-digger or a genuine woman of the people, and the truth I imagine is somewhere in between. The self-righteous saintly tone of the translated excerpts from her autobiography don’t lend much weight towards the latter position, though. The expensive stylish dresses on display there could be interpreted either way; I guess you can’t expect the wife of the leader of a country to dress in rags. Ultimately her ending was sad and dark – she died of cancer at only 33, and then the military seized and mutilated her body post-mortem. That’s an act of incalculable bleakness and hate.

We had planned to have one last day of adventure and do a day-trip out of BA, but the flight problems put paid to that. And we had been going on and on about booking a nice hotel for our final night. So in the end, we turned the hotel itself into an event and booked the Four Seasons. I am writing this seated at the desk in the hotel room. It’s a definite one-off-the-life-list kind of place. The bathroom is entirely marble and about twice the size of the kitchen in my old apartment. The beds are as comfortable as the clouds of angels. The doormen are so quick off the mark I have yet to open the front door under my own power. The provided writing paper is thick and parchment-like, suitable for wedding invitations or declarations of independence. It’s wonderful.

Today we have taken things very easy. In the morning we went back to our old hostel and reclaimed the bag that I left there before we headed for Rio Gallegos. We got an oddly paranoid welcome there, even by South American standards – they wouldn’t let us through the front gate until they had come down and recognised us from being there before. Then we crossed town in a taxi and checked in to what may well be the fanciest hotel I will ever stay in and chilled out for a while; the dinner last night has caused some digestive repercussions for both of us. We went out for a wander around and bought a few bits and pieces to take home, and now as it inches towards 9pm I am writing this, and Mike is watching TV. I would estimate the screen to be somewhat over forty inches. We’ll get a final steak somewhere pretty soon.

And there it is. The ending has approached with silent swiftness; the flight home has changed from ‘soon’ to ‘tomorrow’. God willing the next post I write is likely to be in the air, or after my return to Ireland. The excitement of the thought of being back, of seeing Katie at the airport, of seeing family and friends, is far outweighing any sadness at leaving South America. I’m ready to go home.

The sun is shining on this Sunday morning in Mendoza and the streets are nearly deserted. The town seems dozy and uninterested in activity. It feels like a university campus at the weekend.

The final section of the bus journey from Bariloche passed much more easily and quickly for me than I expected, though I think Mike didn’t manage to sleep much. The Hangover turned out to be the second-last film rather than the last, and was followed by Due Date. Not exactly a step up in quality but at least I hadn’t seen it before, and I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Then with about fifteen minutes of it left to run they turned it off without warning. That was at 12.20am, which seemed an arbitrary moment to call it a day. The bus was almost completely dark, and the sounds were of the road and the shifting of people in their seats as they tried to get comfortable.

I slept almost solidly through the night. Occasionally my arm would find a painful position against the armrest and I would half wake up and find a more comfortable corporeal arrangement, but in the 130-degree recline there were a limited number of options. The motion of the bus was restful, much more soothing than the multidimensional rocking of a boat.

Mike woke me up as we were coming into Mendoza. It’s much bigger than I expected, built on the same model as the huge cities I have been to – the centre is tree-lined and shady clean and relatively safe, and the edges are the opposite of those things. There is a large police and military presence, though not as visible as in Peru. We were told that Mendoza is the second most dangerous city in Argentina after Buenos Aires, but so far we haven’t seen anything untoward. Touch wood.

Getting off the bus and into the gathering pace of a new day was disorientating, quite like the feeling of jet lag. We got a taxi to the hostel from the bus station, and as our room wasn’t ready we had coffee and sat out the back in a courtyard area, where I am now writing this. There is a small pool that would allow several people to be in it at the same time as long as none of them wanted to swim. And they would need to have a high tolerance for dirt and a thin layer of floating dust and debris and dead ants. To my left is a little room that serves as a bar and is home to the stereo, not unlike the hostel in Iguazu, and there are tables and chairs scattered around. I am in the shade, naturally, but there are sun loungers for people to lie out in. Though it’s beyond me why anyone would want to do that.

The hostel is on the main street, Avenue Sarmiento. If you go out and turn left you get to Independence Square and the heart of the town a few blocks away, and if you go right you can reach a large park. We had lunch outside, where every now and again an apparently homeless person or child would approach us and ask for money or food, and we gave away some of the latter.

From there we set out for the park. My legs were surprisingly tired from the bus and it was slightly uphill and hot, though we were walking in the shade of trees. We walked for an hour or so and checked our position on the map and found there was about another hour to go. The end destination was a hill that offers views over the city. Discretion seemed to be the better part of valour; we turned back and aimed for the other side of town where there was a museum.

By the time we got there we had been walking for just over two hours and had a good sense of the town. There are lovely houses on the main street that look open and airy and welcoming aside from the fact that every single window is covered with the heavy protective bars I’ve seen so often before. It doesn’t send the most reassuring of messages. And indeed, the hostel requires us to wear an identifying wristband which they check as we come in.

The museum is built on the site of the former town hall, which was unfortunately levelled with most of the town and over half the inhabitants in an earthquake just over a century ago. You can see the old town hall foundations through translucent panels in the floor of the present-day museum. None of the text for the museum exhibits was translated into English, which is a very common state of affairs outside of the biggest museums in the capital cities, so our wander around was brief. There were some old engineering drawings on display which I was much taken with for their artistic as well as technical merit, and there was an early 1900s car. The car was probably the most interesting thing there, and we delayed the moment of walking over to it as if saving the best mouthful of a meal for last.

The ruins of a monastery were nearby so we went to look at those and found some very ancient walls heavily braced by ugly rusting scaffolding. The site is surrounded by a spike-topped fence and clearly someone is genuinely worried that the walls are going to fall. We headed back through the centre of town through a park named after the Chilean man-about-town Bernardo O’Higgins. Poor old Bernardo was clearly not as well regarded on this side of the Andes though, as the park was split by roads and what greenery there was was narrow and tainted by the fumes of passing traffic. Sitting underneath the trees were the sort of people who probably become a lot more proactive about their aims at night, so we ducked back out on the main street.

In the evening we had a very disappointing but still full-priced dinner where the steaks managed to be rare, medium and well-done all at the same time depending on where you happened to cut into them. Probably a two on the SSS, saved only from the lowest reaches of the scale by the fact the meat was reasonably good quality.

We retired at a respectable hour. The hostel accommodation is mostly notable for the fact that the shower, bathroom and bedroom are all in independent locations, though it is nominally an en-suite.

Yesterday morning we were up early to be collected by a bus at 8.45am for a wine tour, the most famous attraction of Mendoza, and it rather upset my carefully choreographed and sleep-maximising morning schedule by arriving at 8.40. I was on it at 8.45 exactly, but the five-minute pseudo-delay clearly irritated the driver and guide.

We had been joking the previous night about the types of people we were likely to meet on it, given that the tour was at the upper end of the scale and cost somewhere just over 100USD for the day, but in the event they were all lovely. There was an older American couple, the lady from Tennessee and the man from Maine. They had both been widowed and then met each other and got married three years ago. They were retired, and so travelled a lot. I asked the man what he had done when he was still working, and he said he worked for the US government. ‘The CIA then, I assume?’ I said. ‘Nothing that interesting,’ he answered, then declined to elaborate further.

Also pushing up the American numbers were a younger couple from Idaho who both worked in a lumber mill, and who had got engaged the previous day. They didn’t say a lot but were pleasant company. The final coupling of the octet, if I temporarily class Mike and I as a couple, were from Holland. They were both good fun and were travelling for eight months in total.

The outline for the day was to visit four places and taste the wines in each. The wineries we were visiting were all at the upper end of the scale, producing mostly fine wines rather than mass-manufactured plonk. The first was called Alta Vista, and they took us through the process of creating the wines there more or less from scratch. The grapes are picked by the functionally-named ‘pickers’, mostly migrant workers from Bolivia who are frequently badly treated. Then they are brought to a sorting table where the best are picked out for the best wines, and from there they go into the mysterious ‘de-stemmer’, a machine whose inner functioning I never learned. Then they are sent into a machine that crushes them enough to let the juices run out, and from that state a series of tanks turns the resulting mixture into wine. You can see that my understanding is still somewhat hazy. I did learn though that it’s the skin of red grapes which gives red wine its colour as the inner part is white, which strikes me as something I had previously known but forgotten.

The best wines are aged in French oak barrels, each of which costs a thousand euro or so. In themselves they are beautiful constructions, hand-made much as they have been for centuries, and we were taken down to a cellar where there were hundreds of them stacked in neat lines, the wine aging inside. It was a beautiful sight in a strange way. Throughout the day I got a sense that wine-making is an indefinitely deep and ancient art. The cellar seemed almost part of something hidden, a rare glimpse into a secret society. That particular winery paints the centre section of the barrels a rich wine colour, fittingly enough, and that just adds to the aesthetics.

We were led back upstairs for the tasting. They have a purpose-built room for it – a long table with a little sink on front of each person. Each sink for some reason I couldn’t figure out has two taps, one in the standard tap position and one almost parallel to the side of the sink itself. The guide for our tour and the guide from the vineyard both used the lower one for washing out the glasses, but both taps were fed from the same water source, so I didn’t quite see the point. Anyway, they brought out four wines and poured us all some of each and took us through them.

I was most intrigued by a chardonnay which smells light and fruity and crisp, and then tastes dry and acidic. The taste and smell do not match up at all, and they told us it was done deliberately by the wine-maker. The nickname for that wine is the Liar. We also tried some of the Malbecs, and I very much liked them. The taste is complex and hard for me to pinpoint – even with crackers and lots of water to cleanse the pallet the taste of the wines seemed to me to change over the time we sat there.

The winery itself was a beautiful place. It was a hot, bright day, deepening the greens of the grass and the vines, and the old stone  building still has an original reed roof from the design of its creation in the early part of the last century, lending it a great sense of venerability. The whole effect is enchanting, and I daydreamed about how it would be to stay there for a long period of time learning about wine and writing and not doing a whole lot of much.

I was sorry to leave it, but the next winery had its own charms. It was called Kaiken, and I loved some of the wines there. I seemed to be able to get a better sense of what they were like, as opposed to the shifting tastes at Alta Vista, though that very well may have been entirely in my head.

The event of the day, though, in an entirely unexpectedly development, was lunch. It is a good thing that I saved the uppermost levels on my steak scale, for I found a 9.9 when I wasn’t even looking for it. Maybe even a 10; I cannot see how it could be bettered.

To back up slightly: the third vineyard was where we were to have lunch, and while we were not doing any specific tasting there we would have wines that were matched with the food. I must admit that I have never given that idea much thought, though I was faintly aware such a thing was possible.

We were led into a bright room with a huge window looking out on the mountains over a carpet-swathe of green grass. At each place-setting there were six glasses, the most I have ever seen. We were served six courses in total, and with each we were served a different wine. And as before in very different contexts an entirely new range of possibility opened before me as I tasted the food and wine together. Each time the wine complemented the food in taste – where there were dark, spicy tones to the food, there were matching echoes in the wine. It is impossible to describe it without using the kind of language that people use to make fun of wine enthusiasts. It was just astounding.

With the steak we were served a 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon, and tasting the meat and the wine together was like finding that all these years I had been missing out on half the experience of eating. The meat itself was perfect – perfectly medium rare, perfectly cut, perfectly presented, perfectly flavoured with a crust of raisins. There were two wines served with it, one of which was the cabernet. The other added to it too, an extra dimension to the flavour, but the cabernet was like a life-long bass-player suddenly discovering a drummer.

The entire meal was epic. Revolutionary. It was the best meal I have ever eaten. I ate more and more slowly to make it last, tasting the wines and the interplay with the food. The final course, desert, was a ‘mini apple and walnut cake’ served with a sharp blend of 70% chardonnay and 30% pinot noir, so that rather than mirroring the food it contrasted it, the symbol clash to a drumbeat. I kept the menu, and I will treasure it.

We had sixteen wines in total during the day, so the evening was a rather slow and lazy affair. We slept for a while and then went out and tripped across a Harley Davidson festival in the main square. We had seen some of them roaring around the previous day, but at the square there were several hundred of them, many driven by exactly the kind of people you would imagine drive Harleys – long hair, beards, leather jackets with slogans and gang names on the back, pudding-basin helmets. The cops kept a close eye on everything and there were hundreds of people there with their children looking at all the bikes, so it was a long way from Hunter S Thompson’s encounter with the Hell’s Angels back in the day.

After that we went for dinner, and the second major meal of the day was comically different to the first. There was a dog wandering around among the outside tables, a large Alsatian-type animal, and he was the recipient of most of my pork. Even he could hardly chew it. But we weren’t really hungry anyway. We came back to the hostel and had a drink outside in the bar area, and it was late by the time we went to bed.

And we’re back to today, which has been rather inactive. We slept late, booked two more nights in this hostel which necessitate a change of room, and got lunch on the main street. We wandered around the town a little, then came back to the hostel to tee up tomorrow’s activities. The day after that we fly back to BA for a final bash at it. For the last while here I have been writing this, and we’ll shortly venture out and see what kind of entertainment we can rustle up. There is a casino down the street which has caught my eye several times. I wonder how many winning hands of blackjack I would need to make this trip pay for itself. Hmm.

As home gets closer and closer it is more in my mind, and the conflict between wanting to keep going and the desire to be back among the people most important to me is increasing in intensity, a straight-up clash between anticipation and trepidation. It will be resolved soon. For now, let me ignore it and instead close with the text of the menu of the greatest meal I ever had.

**

Boden Ruca Malen
Tasting menu
[19-3-2011]

Appetizer

First Step
Quinoa salad with lemon zest and Arbequina olive oil, bread stave and toasted almonds.
Wine: Ruca Malen Chardonnay 2010. 100% Chardonnay. 30% of the mix ferments in new oak barrels, the other 70% in stainless steel tanks. That 30% is aged in oak barrels for eight months, then we blend it all together and bottle.
Pairing: We want to highlight the acidity of the lemon zest with the fresh and citric aromas of the wine. The sweet and toast notes of the Chardonnay combine with the sweetness in the olive oil and the toasted almonds.

Second Step
Sweet potato chips with hummus, strawberry and balsamic vinegar sauce. Pumpkin terrine on a traditional ‘milanesa’, regional cuisine.
Wine: Yauquen Malbec 2009. 100% Malbec. 30% of the wine is aged in oak barrels for six months, then blended with the rest of the wine and finally bottled. A fresh and fruity wine.
Pairing: The fresh and red berry character of our Malbec 2009 is reflected in the strawberry sauce. The acidity and soft tannins of the wine pair with the oily side of the humus and the sweetness of the pumpkin.

Third Step
Cream roasted red beet and carrot croquette served with spicy chimichurri sauce and green sprouts
Wine: Ruca Malen Syrah 2007. 95% Syrah and 5% Malbec. One year aging in oak 80% French and 20% American, then blended and bottled. A full-body wine with spicy, mint and smoky notes, as well as red fruits.
Pairing: We want to show the sweet and mineral side of the Syrah pairing it with the red beet. Combing also the spicy and herbal side of this wine with the green sprouts. Finally the ripe fruits and sweetness of the Syrah match perfectly with the acidity of this step.

Main course

Fourth Step
Grilled  beef tenderloin medallion with Spunta potatoes and Valencian onions baked in butter. Crust of raisins accompanied by sweetcorn chimichurri and smoked dry figs.
Wine: Ruca Malbec 2008. 100% Malbec. 12 months in oak barrels, 85% French and 15% American.
Kinien Cabernet Sauvignon 2002. 90% Cabernet Sauvignon and 10% Malbec. Aged for 16 months in new oak barrels 90% French and 10% American.
Pairing: This fourth step is harmonised with two wines. Due to its soft tannins, its red fruit and greasy texture, our Ruca Malen Malbec pairs with the meat and the raisins crust. On the other hand, the Kinien Cabernet Sauvignon 2002 has evolution notes that mingle with the smoky dry figs. Finally the spicy character of this wine is highlighted by the red pepper and different spices in the dish.

Pre-desert
Black tea granitee

Dessert

Fifth Step
Mini apple and walnut cake on and orange caramel and honey cream.
Wine: Ruca Malen Brut. 70% Pinto Noir and 30% Chardonnay. The must ferments in stainless steel tanks. Method Champenoise, 24 months on its lees.
Pairing: With this desert we want to pair this complex sparkling wine that, due to the 24 months on lees, has evolved with fresh bread, dry fruits and caramel notes. The acidity of this Brut is balanced by the sweetness of the dish.

Coffee/Infusions. Petit four.

As I write this we are six and a half hours into a 20-hour bus journey from Bariloche to Mendoza. We got on the road at 1.30pm and it’s now 8pm. We are in a town called Neuquen, where for some inexplicable reason there are two bus stations within a kilometre of each other. We stopped at each of them for fifteen minutes, and now we are pulled into the yard of the bus company, presumably to get diesel. This will be the last great land journey of our time here – our final step is to fly from Mendoza back to Buenos Aires on the 22^nd, then head home to Ireland on the 24^th, arriving on the 25^th.

The time has passed easily so far, a day made up of large numbers of small moments. This morning we went out to buy food for the journey in a supermarket in Bariloche, learning our lesson from the last long trip, so we have bread and ham and cheese within easy reach. We got a taxi from the hostel to the bus station, bought the bus tickets, and had lunch. We met the Korean girl from yesterday there by chance; but I have not yet mentioned her as I have jumped out of chronological order. We’ll get back to that in due course.

The bus pulled out dead on time and for the first hour or two we passed through the lake-strewn landscape around Bariloche. In the distance were snow-topped mountains, their peaks outlined bright against the sky, and closer were smaller hills of rocks and stones and sand. Some of the lakes are huge, several miles long and wide, running up against the base of the nearest hills. The water is a deep turquoise, the colour caused by the sediment washed in from the mountain rivers. It goes on and on in endless beauty. But as the miles went by the glory of it faded gently away. The lakes became rarer, the mountains on the horizon disappeared, the hills shifted from verdure to desert, and we were back in the great nothing that makes up a much larger part of Argentina than I had ever known before I got here.

The stops seem to be roughly three hours apart, aside from the current run through Neuquen where progress has slowed to the pace of erosion. A petrol station on the side of the road or a two-street town may not be the kinds of things that I would generally look forward to, but they assume a new significance when movement in between is so constricted. The bus pulls up and they make an announcement on the PA system, and generally I can catch the number of minutes we have before we leave again, and generally that number is 15. Usually before they pull out they beep the horn, but not always; the odd solo traveller must occasionally get left behind.

Activities on the stops vary. I think I have already mentioned the dogs – if there are any around they are the primary source of fun, but really anything is up for consideration. At the last one the most notable attraction was a line of ants which were busy carrying small pieces of leaves and twigs and things that were proportionally gigantic to a distant destination. I was able to follow the line to scrub grass at edge of the petrol station, and paced it out on the way back at about 25 metres. If an ant is one centimetre long and we make a very rough approximation on body length, this is the equivalent of me carrying something about 5km, where ‘something’ is a telephone pole or a slab of construction concrete. And these are the kinds of things I think about when there is nothing in particular to think about.

Not long after we got on the road they put on a movie, Salt, with Angelia Jolie, which I had already seen. It was no more intelligent or less entertaining the second time around. Then there was a stop, then a second movie, a Beautiful Mind. I liked it better than when I last saw it, which I think was in the cinema. Oddly as it was about to reach its climax in the Nobel acceptance speech, they chose to make a long and impenetrable (to me) announcement on the PA system about our future movements, drowning out the film audio. The gist of it must have been that we were going to be in this town for a quite a while, though at this precise moment we are finally underway. It has become completely dark since we got here. And they have started showing the Hangover, which I have also seen, and it as witless and low-denominator as when I last saw it. There are occasional moments of humour in it, I will admit, as there must be occasional patches of nutrition in the collective excrescence of a civilisation.

The seats in the bus are reasonably comfortable and they recline a decent amount, but we are not exactly anticipating a restful night’s sleep. It’s not as nice as the buses Katie and I took in Peru, though on the other hand it’s a step up from the mini-bus from Rio Gallegos. Downstairs in the nicer seats somewhere is our Korean friend. Some of the seats are empty. To our right is a man who coughs a lot, and when he does it is a lurching wet sound that hints at a serious illness. Maybe Ebola. He has a coffee cup in the holder on front of him that he spits into from time to time, and it makes my face contort somewhat when I think about it. He is clearly not in good health, the poor man.

Yesterday we did the rafting, as already mentioned. The bus picked us up early in the morning and it was about two hours to the first stop, driving through the lakes we saw again today. We had a very light breakfast and picked up the raft on a trailer, then went to where we would be starting off. We got a detailed safety lecture on what we should do in the event of falling in the river, which was rather different to the only other time I was ever rafting, in India, where it was added as an afterthought that if you found yourself in the drink you should probably float feet-first to avoid bashing your head on the rocks. This time around they showed us the safe position to float (keep your feet up as high as you can to try and float over as many rocks as possible) and explained the commands we would get with regard to when to row and when to stop.

There were eight tourists in total plus the guy in charge at the back of the raft. When he shouted ‘forward’ everyone paddled forward, which in the event was the one we mostly got right. ‘Right back’ meant that the people on the right side paddled backwards, but the implied unspoken part was that the left-side people needed to paddle forward. The same was true in reverse for ‘left forward’ – both of these were for turning the raft either way. ‘Back’ was at least pretty straightforward. Confusing things though was that ‘right’ or ‘left’ without an accompanying ‘back’ meant that that people should dive across the craft to change the weight balance if the raft was tipping. ‘Right’ meant the people on the left should dive into the spaces between the people on the right, and ‘left’ the opposite.

All of that reasonably clear, we set off. There were ten rapids into total. The first was very gentle and we bumped through it. On the second, though, we managed to get the raft stuck on a rock in the centre of the rapid, hanging at a slight left-to-right angle. There were five Americans on the raft, the two of us, and the Korean girl. Some of the American girls were rather freaked out by this turn of events, as to try and free it we needed everyone to get as close to the front of the raft as possible and jerk forward in unison to try and shake it free. All the while the noisy swells of the rapids were just to our left and right, and the angle of inclination increased as we inched the boat forward, so it was indeed somewhat precarious. But after two minutes or so we were on the water again.

Other rapids were much smoother. One was so small we went through it trying to stand up, which is about as hard as you would expect it to be. The best of the rapids was one in which the raft went hard down into a wave I would guess was a bit over a metre high, and the wave broke over the raft. Mike and I were in the two front positions and caught it right in the face. It was cold and invigorating. Following our progress on the banks of the river was a photographer with a big zoom lens, and she took pictures of us in some of the best places. She got some great shots of the raft almost hidden under the foam of the breaking wave.

In winter the river rises six metres above the level we saw it at, and in most places the banks were steep and the tops of them were high above our heads. You could see the waterline in the colour of moss on the rocks. Some of the rapids disappear entirely in winter as there is so much water above them. At one place we passed between sheer rocks walls and came into a sort of curved enclosure where the water gathers and swirls when the river is high. Traced all the way up along the rock were curves that had been carved by the rotation of the water, and though we passed through for only a few moments I loved it; it seemed such an smacking illustration of the slow power of water on a scale of time so long it might as well be endless.

About half way through the journey we passed a small waterfall and directed the raft over to it. I lay back in the boat put my head under the falling water and drank from it, which is something I suspect will be a rare occurrence in my life. It was cold and strong and wonderful.

The bus dropped us back about seven and we had a quiet evening. We went for dinner in a place that was recommended in the guidebook. I’ve had a very hit and miss time with the Lonely Planet recommendations, which tend to apply to places that were active in 2008 when it was written but have since closed down or changed name. This was one of the latter group, operating under a different title, but it was a lovely place. We had lamb that was tender and flavoursome and I had a glass of the house red wine, which was much better than most of the wines I have ever paid for from a menu. We went to bed early, but yet another night escaped me without the rest I would have hoped for.

That brings us to today and to the bus, and as I write these closing lines the Hangover is finishing. I like the end of it better than the beginning, I have to say. It’s 9.35pm so through the window there is only darkness split by the lights of passing cars. Probably when the film is over they will not show another and everyone will settle down for the night as far as such a thing is possible, and many of the remaining hours will hopefully drift by peacefully. It’s strange to be on the road for eight hours and not yet be even half way there.

Very quick update to say the rafting was great fun and we are aiming to get a bus to Mendoza later. Happy St Patrick’s Day!

Twenty-five hours of bus travel brings its own rhythm, where time ceases to have its standard measures and becomes in places slowed but in general quickened. We were on the bus yesterday at 7.45am, and we arrived at Bariloche at 9pm or so. In between time passed in bits and chunks. The most exciting event of the day by 10am was that the bus had a puncture. We had a guide on the bus this time, a luxury not offered to us on the first leg, and he cheerfully explained to me that a car had crashed into the side of the bus the previous day and the net result was that the tire had to be replaced. We were pulled into a petrol station at the time and so the stop there was almost an hour, versus the scheduled twenty minutes.

Most of the stops were short, and they tended to be every three hours, give or take an hour. The first day we stopped in places which redefined my idea of what the middle of nowhere could be – isolated settlements of a few buildings in the great vast nothingness in the Argentinian interior. The entertainment was provided by the dogs, if there were any dogs. Otherwise it was just a question of looking out at the bleak landscape and waiting for the bus to get going again. The second day though provided larger places, and for almost all of the way the road was paved, rather than the gravel road we had on the first day. So though it was slightly longer, day two was a much easier journey.

Looking through the photographs I took it is hard to distinguish one place from another. Most of them were two main streets crossing to form the town centre. One of them had an unusually high number of dogs wandering around, even by the South American standards, and Mike noted that there appeared to be more dogs than people.

We stopped at a place for lunch that was slightly bigger than usual, and had some side streets off the main cross. There was only one place to eat, and the culinary choices were either a sandwich or a pizza slice. We went with the former, and it was a type of meat whose toughness compared not so much to old boots as to the ceramics they use to protect the shuttle on re-entry. I was hungry but could only manage half of it, a rare occurrence. But even that was enough to start a Russian roulette game in my digestive system. And Mike did note that there seemed to be a lot fewer dogs in this town.

Somewhere around half way we saw mountains on the horizon, grey-blue and small compared to some of the giants of the continent. At that point I feel asleep for quite a while, two hours or so, and when I awoke we were among them. The landscape had changed completely, from the sand and scrub that we had seen for so many hours to steep hills and trees and shrubs and plants. The mountain landscape was much closer to Peru or Ecuador than what we had seen of Argentina in the journey to that point.

We were dropped off in the centre of Bariloche. It’s another well-to-do town that gets lots of tourist trade, sitting on the southern edge of a very large lake, built on the lake shore and the hill behind. Looking out at the water it’s easy to forget you are not looking at the sea. Our hostel was only a few blocks away so we walked, accompanied briefly by another guy from the bus who was Israeli. All I learned about him in our short period together was that his backpack was much the same size as himself. He was a small young man, and the backpack was an outstandingly large specimen, festooned with the paraphernalia of camping.

Earlier in the day Mike had got talking to one of the girls from the bus, and the notable facts from the conversation were that she carried a knife for defensive purposes and that she did not stay in hostels that included breakfast in the cost because ‘she didn’t need breakfast’. On the first, I would humbly suggest that there is not a single situation in South America that could be changed to your benefit by introducing a weapon. Even if you have been trained to use it and intended to do so to lethal effect, your interactions with the South American justice system would be intense. But I suspect by far the most likely outcome is that you would inadvertently provide your own murder weapon. On the second point, I have come across quite a few people both on my own and with Mike who are operating under fantastically constrictive budgets. That means lots of camping and sourcing and preparation of your own food, plus many of the best attractions are out of range, and it seems to lead to a rather manic obsession with how much things cost and where a few quid can be saved. Mike has taken to calling these people ‘hyper-milers’.

After our arrival we checked in to the hostel, which is a pleasant and unremarkable place up a steep hill a few blocks from the main square. Most of the check-in time was taken up by the explanation of the rules under which lodging is provided, which seem to boil down to being considerate and not bringing in your own beer. The milers wouldn’t like it. We went out for dinner at an Irish bar we had seen earlier called Wilkenny, confusingly, as if there was some hint of a trademark dispute hovering over the name. We got Irish stew there, which was a decent if soy-heavy copy of the real thing, and we stayed to the early part of the early hours. The end of the bus journey felt like an achievement that needed to be celebrated.

This morning we had intended to get up about ten but in the end we slept it out quite a bit later. Sitting on a bus for two days is a lot more tiring than you might expect, and topped off with a late night we were both tired. And we felt we had earned a day ‘off’. So we took it easy and skipped out on the morning session, emerging from the hostel in time for lunch. Then we went for a daytime look around the town. I had seen a bookshop mentioned on one of the leaflets in the hostel so we went there for a peep, and it was a bibliophilic space of wood and shelves and seats. As I noted to Mike, if I lived in Bariloche and spoke Spanish I would spent a fair bit of time there. After lunch we went to the main museum, which contained the standard mixture of pre- and post-invasion artefacts, illustrating what life had been like before the Europeans arrived and slaughtered everybody through disease if not through a bullet or a blade. My favourite exhibit was a very small canon, where the barrel seemed as though you would have a reasonable chance of using it as a shoulder-mounted weapon. There was another fine canon outside, emblazoned with a large ‘US’ on the metal, and I wonder what is the story behind that one.

There were two more museum we intended to visit. The first was labelled on the map as a dinosaur museum, and it took us a while to track it down. When we did see it from a distance, it was a small shed of the type that was probably in use in an agricultural capacity until recently. It was comically inadequate looking. The chances of a full-size T-rex skeleton were low. So we skipped it. I think what happens is that people come here and find that some of the most interesting dinosaur sites in the world are in Argentina, and then they find that those sites are difficult to get at unless you have a large amount of time, and so these random small ‘dinosaur museums’ have sprung up to cash in on the frustrated desire.

The second place was a ‘chocolate museum’, which gets good reviews online, but we went to the exact spot on the map where it is marked and couldn’t find it. We were in a residential street of houses much lower than the street surface, so we were looking down on them, and we could clearly see that none of them was a museum. Maybe it has closed, or maybe it’s some form of large-scale scam.

We spent most of the rest of the afternoon looking at buses and flights and thinking about how to spend our final week here and where we might be for St Patrick’s day (on a bus, most likely) and so on. It took ages, but I am prepared for that now. Later on we went out for dinner, and we had a drink in the bar next door after. It’s 1am as I write this, and I will be retiring shortly as tomorrow we have an early start for a day-trip that might be less cerebral than the best of what we have done, but will undoubtedly be among the most fun: white-water rafting.

We landed in Rio Gallegos on time and got a taxi from the airport there shortly after 2am. The flight made quite the difference in temperature , probably a 20-degree fall. When we got to the hotel the woman who worked there seemed to be expecting us. She didn’t speak any English, but the standard amount of pointing and smiling and nodding got us through to one of the worst night’s sleep I have had here, and that is a relatively competitive field given the standard of beds in some of the hostels. For whatever reason I could not settle, and I was glad to see the light of morning.

We got up early enough to have a look around the part of the town we were in. There were almost no other tourists as we were not in the centre, and even in the middle of town there is not a lot to see. So it was a glimpse into what life is like in the better-off parts of South America. I don’t think Argentina has anything to offer like that town in Paraguay.

We got back to the hotel (after initially walking by it, inexplicably) and got a taxi to the bus station. Forums on the internet had indicated it was walking distance from the airport, but it was actually several kilometers, and showed once again why Everything On The Internet is to be treated with suspicion if not hostility. We had something to eat there which was on the very edge of making me feel ill – thankfully it stayed on the good side – and we got tickets for the bus to El Calafate.

We were sitting and waiting for it when a minibus pulled up, and Mike made the standard joke about our bus being there, and then our smiles were slightly less radiant when it turned out that was in fact our bus. We put our bags in the back and made ourselves comfortable, and the three and a half hours or so passed easily and uneventfully.

The hostel in El Calafate was only two blocks or so from the bus station so we picked up a map from the tourist office and walked there, then came straight back out to have a look around. The town is prosperous with long, wide straight streets lined with bars and restaurants and shops selling hiking and climbing gear, similar to Ushuaia but even closer to a ski resort.

We had something to eat and then made our way to one of the two museums marked on the tourist map. It was the equivalent of six euro in, which is pretty expensive by the standards of the place, and its main exhibits were posters. In Spanish. It was like someone had taken a farm building and expanded it with some corrugated-roof wings. There were two complete dinosaur skeletons, and the rough theme of it was palaeontology with some other bits bolted on, but its primary function was to take money off tourists.  At least it was open late enough for us to see it. There are, it turns out, quite a few major dinosaur sites in Argentina, and there is an incredible petrified forest, but all of them are difficult to get out without days to spend in the endeavour. They will have to wait until I return for my motorbike tour.

The following morning we were again up reasonably early, and were at the bus station not long after nine to find that the bus to the glacier at Perito Merino had left at 8.30am, and the next one was not until 1.30pm. We booked tickets on that, and went for breakfast; not a lot of other options were evident. The restaurants in the town were clearly not expecting a lot of breakfast traffic, but we found one that served us a sandwich with three kinds of meat and an egg, and if it had all been differently arranged it could have been a fry.

Mike had read about a nature reserve at the edge of the town so we walked out to that and found ourselves at a very pleasant lake, on which there are all kinds of bird life. The first we came across were pink flamingos. I had the binoculars with me, and through it they looked shockingly colourful, almost superimposed on the landscape behind. The trail wandered along the lake edge, and it was a lovely walk. In the winter you can go all the way around but in summer it floods, so we went as far as we could before the water made us turn back. It was one of those things that is not particularly interesting to write about after, but at the time the interplay of light on the water and the birds and clear air made it an enchanting experience.

We went back to get our bus in good time, and it was less then an hour to Periot Moreno, and what we found there was nothing like anything I have seen anywhere else, including the Antarctic, and may be the single most spectacular thing I have seen on this trip. In headline it is a glacier, roughly 30km long, flowing through a series of valleys and coming to an abrupt edge at a lake. It is in motion, hard as it is to believe – the ice at the back force it forward, and the ice at the front occasionally falls into the lake water, forming small icebergs. Or small at least relative to their southern brethren; some of them are still the size of a building. Of glaciers of the type that stay constant in size, it is the largest in the world.

But none of that comes close to the experience of the thing. I suppose I knew before I went there that a glacier is a big ice field, and that seeing such a thing would make an interesting day out, but I certainly did not understand in any visceral sense what it would be like to stand before it. When we arrived the bus dropped us off at a place where we could take a boat tour in the lake, which we duly signed up for. We waited for a while and then the boat picked us up and took us around the corner of a headland, and there ahead of us was a wall of ice sixty meters high. The top of it is jagged and sharp in huge curves and spikes, and the blue pressure-lines of ice run through it. It is not a continuous whole but rather split in places with deep crevasses, and from time to time a chunk of it will yield its position and fall into the water. The boat took us as close as possible to the places where it is less stable, and closer still to the more stable end where it touches land, and we took picture after picture. Is is of the same order of incomprehensibility as seeing a live dinosaur or a Neanderthal, something entirely out of place and time. Many times, much of the planet has looked like this, and the scene reinforces a sense of probability that our race is just passing through like the others before it.

Seeing it from the boat was quite literally awesome, but then we got back on the bus and were taken to where there are a series of observation walkways that allow you to see it from various upper angles. It stretches back as far as you can see, quite literally a river of ice. Following it with the binoculars gets lost in the haze of distance. And its top surface is a continuation of the spikes and blades of the front edge, except in three dimensions. There are spires and peaks and drops and troughs and crevasses all carved out of ice and pushed against one another, as if a city of cathedrals had been reduced to an eighth of its size. I looked and looked and wondered if there is a path through such madness made real, when progress would be blocked by sheer cliffs of ice and massive drops into crevasses, and I cannot imagine such a thing. I am sure it has been done, and may not even be unusual, but to look at the ferocity of that surface and conceptualise a crossing is beyond me.

We spent the rest of the day there, exploring all the walkways and watching it from every angle. You are afraid to turn your back on it because at any moment a truly gargantuan chunk of ice may fall off the front of it, in the process called calving, and if you look away the expectation is that it will happen immediately. The most spectacular sight at PM is caused by the fact that over time the front wall of the glacier pushes forward enough to form a dam in the lake, braced against rock on the opposite side. That causes the lake to rises higher on one side than the other. Eventually the water pushes its way through and leaves an arch of ice overheard, and eventually that arch itself collapses. This happens every three years or so, and you can see footage of it on YouTube. It cannot have been that long since the last collapse, as at the moment water is flowing freely between the ground and the glacier edge where the dam forms. To see the collapse, or to see the first emergence of the water through the ice dam, would be quite something. But if you do see it, you should make sure you enter the lottery in the same week.

The final assault on the sense is aural. In the Antarctic I heard the crash and groan of glaciers yielding under the immense pressures they generate, but here it was magnified. From time to time there was a noise like a cannon blast, coming from the distance of the ice field; you can tell the people who have just arrived because the look at the front wall expectantly,  but any action there would be followed by the sound of a splash. But sometimes there is a noise like a massive explosion – a minor sound at first, the crack of something huge yielding, and then a roar, the sound of something massive falling, It is a noise unto itself, not comparable to anything else I have ever heard. It rolls around the landscape, like the sound of gunfire in a Michael Mann shootout.

Leaving on the bus I kept my eyes on it until it was lost in a curve of the mountains, and one day I will be back. I often say, as I may have mentioned, that in my twilight years I will revisit the best of the places I saw when I was young, but I will be back before that. The magic and immensity of the place are hypnotic, greater even in my eyes than the Antarctic.

Our plan for the following day was to take a bus up the famous Route 40, and as I write this we have completed the first of two days. The most striking fact of it to this point is that there is a huge amount of nothing in the middle of Argentina. ‘Nothing’ needs to be qualified, though – there are hills and plains of scrubland, sand spatted with tough vegetation and the very occasional lama. But that view goes on and on and on for miles after mile, the repeating background of a cartoon. You can – and I have – stare out the window for an hour, and at the end of that time what you are seeing is fundamentally identical to what you were seeing when you started.

The total journey time was just over 12 hours, from 8am to 8.30pm, and while I found the last hour long the rest of it passed easily. We played games on Mike’s phone (I got over 10,000m on Canabalt, which is deeply pleasing to me) and watched a documentary on the Itaipu dam that I had downloaded in burst of pre-planning, we fell asleep intermittently and there were 20-minute stops at the truck-stops every few hours. For almost its entire length the road is not paved, and so going can be slow. We fantasized about what it would be like to take an Impreza WRX or an Ariel Atom on it, and such a thing would be beyond epic. The guidebook notes that there are few links between Barlioche (our final destination) and El Calafate (where we started) and once you make the journey ‘you will understand why’. I can certainly say I now have a good sense of it.

We are staying in a hotel in a town with the same name as the glacier, Poreto Moreno, though it is several hundred kilometers distant. I am writing this on a comfortable chair in a dark and silent hall as there is no WiFi reception in our room. I am just pleased there is WiFi at all. Tomorrow we are looking at much the same journey again, and then we will be in Barlioche, and as ever the specifics of the plan from there are a work in progress. Much idle thinking and staring out the window awaits.

Today is a transit day, and fittingly I am writing this from the airport in Buenos Aires, a place I have come to know well. This is the fifth time I have been here – three times on the transfer to Ushuaia, once to go to Iguazu, and now to go to Rio Gallegos, where we will stay tonight. Tomorrow afternoon we go to El Calafate and the famous glacier field.

This morning we spent a few hours getting sorted out with accommodation and a rough idea of a plan for the coming days, and we had a look at how we are going to close the loop from the south-west part of the country where we are headed back to Buenos Aires for the flight home. That was the moment that the idea of going home became real to me – it is two weeks from today. More on that shortly.

There are no hostels listed in Rio Gallegos on either of the major hostel sites, which I think cannot be a good sign, and most of the comments online are expositions on the fact there is nothing to do there. We managed to get a hotel by asking the helpful girl on the front desk of our hostel in Iguazu to call them for us, and they have since sent me a confirmation email. We will be checking in around 3am, and given our bus is leaving at 2pm in some ways it seems a waste, and we thought of just toughing it out in the airport and bus station. But I have done that trick before and it means being tired for the next day or two, so we went with the more expensive option of beds rather than the cheaper option of airport seats for almost 12 hours.

After our planning we went out for a long and unpressured lunch in the place we were turned away from before. Given that there is no chance of an evening steak today, we had an afternoon steak. It was a 9.7 in my book – epically good, but just short of La Plata in BA. Mike though I think would give it his top slot. We wandered back to the hostel, picked up our stuff, and got a taxi to the airport. The flight from Iguazu to BA was uneventful – Mike ‘rested’ and I wrote most of the last two entries of the blog. We got in and had coffee, then had a sandwich where the only notable attribute was its ludicrous cost – we paid as much for a basic ham and cheese sandwich and a Pepsi as we have elsewhere for a steak.

We wandered to the gate and went through security and now here we sit. Mike is playing a game on his iPhone and I am typing this. All going well later we will get a taxi to the hotel in Rio Gallegos and tomorrow afternoon will see me back in the south, where mountains are higher and the air is cooler and I am far more climatically at home than I am here in the heat. From there we start moving up the west side of Argentina with possible loops into Chile, though all of that is yet undecided.

And home is on the horizon. That one certainly raises conflicting feelings. There are times I miss Katie and my family and everyone so much that it is a physical thing, a tightening, and there have been nights where I awoke in a half-dream state and felt the feeling that it was good to be home slide away as I realised I was no such thing. And yet I would love to keep going, to keep exploring and seeing things and learning things, on and on through the rest of South America and then New Zealand and Australia, back up through Asia, though the deepest reaches of Russia and the Stans, into the Far East, the Middle East, North Africa and all way the way south down through it… I want to see it all and plot my path through it, politics and reality and finances be damned.

Way back at the beginning of this blog, 50,000 words ago or thereabouts, I wondered about what it meant to travel, what was the nature of the thing, and though the question confuses me as much now as it did then, I am at least a little closer to an answer through my own experiences and the conversations I have had with others. A huge volume of information has come my way in the last few months – places and people and books and talks across countries and cultures, and I think to make sense of it I need to be distant from it, to let it recede a little so my subconscious can mull it over. Maybe the purpose of it all is just to get that information load, to feel the complexity that I was on about recently, to draw what lessons you can from the confusion even if they are obvious, even if they have been learned many times before.

Anyway, I am getting ahead of myself. Much yet awaits, and we will speak anon.

We were picked up this morning at the tiring hour of 7.45am by a small minibus, and we spun around town picking up more people before hitting the road for the Brazilian side of the falls. We had looked at doing it independently but the hassles of visas and the possible difficulty of the border crossing put us off. Our taxi driver had offered to drive us around for 600 pesos for the day, but the tour we got cost less than half that each, and his offer didn’t include the entrance fees which are another 100. And he seemed something of a slightly dodgy punter as he waved away our questions about visas and the border without really answering them.

The border crossing on the bus was painless – we gave our passports to the guide from the tour company who went inside with them while we waited on the bus, and then we went through without any physical checks from the border police. There must be some arrangement to allow short trips like ours as we didn’t get any official entry or exit stamp in our passports. The drive end to end took a little over an hour and then the guide took us into the site and we had an hour and a half in total to wander around and amuse ourselves. Had we not seen the Argentinian side yesterday this would not have been nearly enough time, but as it was it worked out nicely.

From Brazil you can see the stretch of the site from the Devil’s Throat roughly half way back to San Martin. It’s crazy: waterfall after waterfall of massive size, lined up as if for no other purpose than beauty and intimidation. There are also falls on the half of the river on the Brazilian side of the Throat, but for whatever reason they have not built a walkway out like the Argentinians have at that upper level. They do however have a walkway on the lower level which brings you out to the centre of the river, so you can look straight ahead to the Throat in the near distance and get an appreciation of it different to looking at it from the Argentinians’ platform, and you are very close to the other falls on the Brazilian side of the river. It’s a curiously balanced situation – the Argentinians have by far the greater number of spectacular waterfalls but you get a better view of them from the Brazilian side, and you get a better view of the Devil’s Throat. And you are very close to the waterfalls that the Brazilians do have, meaning they are almost a more intense experience than overpowering run of Argentinian falls. I thought at first that Brazil had got the short end of the stick in the deal that placed the border, but on further reflection it was an equitable solution.

There is a building very near the edge of the river on the Brazilian side where there’s a café and a souvenir shop and all the rest of it, and there’s also a five-storey or so tower with lifts to the top. At the bottom of the tower you are within two metres of the edge of the falling water on the waterfall closest to the edge of the river. Looking down at the smack of the impact where it hits the rocks below I can only imagine your body would be crushed in a very unpleasant way if you were to stand under it, but the urge to do it is there nonetheless. Behind the sheet of water we spotted a cave, almost invisible in shadows in the strong light. There’s no way up to it and it is not part of the tourist attractions, but I would give a hell of a lot to be able to stand in it. It looked to us as if you could probably just about climb up in the space between the water and the cliff face, and what an experience that would be. A 10.0, for sure.

We went up to the top of the tower, which took us back to the level of the road and offered wonderful views from a broad courtyard. The surface of the courtyard is a metal grill raised up from the forest floor a few metres, and it would make anyone who is afraid of heights uneasy. I looked down at just the right moment to spot a speckled iguana, and I called Mike over to see it. That sparked other people to take an interest, and by the time we left there a crowd of twenty or so were gathered around taking pictures. I was pleased to be the first to see it.

We reversed our journey to get out of the park and were picked up by our minibus again and we set out for Paraguay. Both Brazil and Paraguay were new places for us, and if we continue notching up countries at a rate of two per day we will have set foot in every country in the world some time in June. The border crossing was again easy with the help of the tour company, and an hour later we were at Itapai, the site of the second-largest dam in the world.

The Three Gorges in China is the largest, and by God it must be a big one because the scale of what we saw was not a bad man-made counterpoint to the size of the falls. I am writing this on the plane the following day, so I alas don’t have the facts and figures to hand, but I strongly suggest you check them on Wikipedia and try and map them back to something else that will give an idea of the magnitude of them. What I do remember offhand is that there are 19 generators and the total power output is in the region of 750MW, meaning two of the plants would be able to send Marty McFly back to the future whenever he wanted, with enough power left over to cover Ireland’s energy needs.(Marty needed 1.21GW to run the time machine.)

The site is constructed in the shape of a ‘J’, with the short end comprised of three huge channels to allow water to run off and control the level of the artificial lake. Only one was operational when we were there, and it was a white bubbling torrent of water not entirely dissimilar to a very large scale and almost certainly lethal water-slide. At the end there was a short steep ramp, sending the flowing water up in an arc through the air to the river below, and raising a cloud of vapour of blinding, perfect whiteness. It could not have been better designed as a very expensive tribute to the waterfalls not so far away. We read before going there that the total cost of the dam construction was about USD25B, which seems eminently possible looking at the size of it.

Our tour took us to the base of the damn on one of the landward ends, where we looked up at a great expanse of wall stretching into the far distance with the huge pipes carrying water for the generators emerging from it at regular intervals, and then we went inside to the building at the base of the damn that holds all the heavy machinery. It’s all underground so you can’t see it, but what we did see was a single room 110m high, a number I got from a sign, and I estimate it was 50m wide and 150m long. We were on a balcony high up looking down on it, and amused ourselves by wondering if there were 20m of water below would we have the nerve to jump off into it. The entire tour, I should add, was in Spanish, so we had no idea what was being said and only the occasional sign had any English content. As far as I could tell though that massive interior space was just a function of the design of the dam, which must obviously be rather strong, and not required for anything that specifically needed such dimensions.

Finally they took us back on the bus and drove us along the top of the dam. Alas we were not allowed to stop and get out so we had to content ourselves with the slow pace of the bus. On our right was the lake formed by the dam, on our left a huge fall and the countryside below. The top of the damn is approximately 100m wide, and it’s several kilometres in length. The surrounding side has its own private road network, complete with motorway and stop-signs, missing only traffic bar the odd car or truck or bus.

We both enjoyed the visit hugely and were content with a good day well done when we got on the minibus to head back to Argentina and dinner. However to our surprise we stopped at a town we had passed through on the way, the name of which I will have to check and add later. It’s on the border between Paraguay and Argentina and good grief I have never been anywhere like it. Valparaiso struck me as a place you need to keep your wits about you but this place seemed that wits or no wits you were going to experience something unpleasant sooner or later. The bus parked on the main street and the driver told us not to wear watches or jewellery or take out a camera, and then directed us to a particular shopping arcade, which I assume meant there was a kick-back deal in operation. We soon tired of being in there and went for a look around on the main street instead. On one side there is a long continuous stretch of small huts that form a market – the stalls are on your right and the entrances to shops on your left. As you walk down the alley in between people jump out from both sides, offering you the usual weird South American stuff (a vanity set, for example) and stuff they think will appeal to tourists – one chap shouted several times ‘Canon Nikon Sony camera’ like a sort of mantra. Mike spotted a woman selling switchblades, then we passed an off-licence where just inside the door was a man with a pump-action shotgun. He was rocking his weight around and stepping forward and back in the short view I got of him. Next we came on a large shopping centre with a huge entrance, like you would see at home, except that the entire entrance was barred off as if it was a giant prison cell, and to get in a guard needed to open a small door within the bars to let you through.

That was enough for us. We got out of the market and walked back up the centre of the main street, where there was a grassy central divide with palm trees on it. We found a place on some steps to sit down. To our left was a large scattered amount of rubbish. Several people stopped to have a glance at it as they passed, but everything of possible value must have been long taken.

Mike and I stood out quite a bit, to say the least; the others on the tour were at least from South America and had some chance of blending in. Some people glanced at us, some people stared at us with open curiosity. Twenty metres or so up the main street a large group of men were drinking. Skinny dogs nosed among the rubbish that was everywhere. Now and then someone would come over and try and sell us a camera case or whatever they happened to have. Kids sold bottles of water. No-one seemed particularly aggressive and I wondered if I was imagining things, but in the glances and the dirt and the rubbish and the heat there was a perceptible sense of threat and danger, of being the only people around who evidently had at least some money on them, of being far away from the standard protection that perpetuates the unfairness of wealthy tourists and poor locals.

We got back on the bus as soon as we could, and as the others trickled back on several noted that they were glad to be back too. I thought it was slightly insane that a bunch of tourists would be ejected into such a place, and there was a slight sense of tension as people came back in ones and twos, but everyone had returned by the planned 5pm leaving time. I wonder what the place is like at night, and what constitutes a normal life for someone who lives there, and what they think of these people who come on buses and stay as short a time as possible, and how much of South America is like this.

It was a bit of a thought-provoking end to the day. Once we were across the border into Brazil the character of the town changed immediately – almost no rubbish on the streets versus piles of it, buildings that looked new instead of about to be demolished for safety reasons, better dressed people, better tended grass and flowerbeds, a sense of prosperity rather than poverty. As we were leaving the Paraguayan side we saw three young lads with large rucksacks picking their way across the road towards the border, and I wonder how many other people watched them too.

I was very glad to have seen it all, though it raised feelings of guilt and increased the acuity of my understanding of how insanely the world is set up, where some people have so much and most so little. In the evening we went out for dinner as usual and I thought several times of the town and the people there, but how easy it is to let these things slide away and become distant and shrug at the way things are. We were exhausted going to bed, and it was a pleasant to know we have nothing much to do tomorrow and no reason to get up early.

You might permit me a short period of what Elmore Leonard calls hooptedoodle, a passage of writing which does nothing for the story or the characters but is satisfying to the writer. It has occurred to me several times on this trip that while I knew the world is a complex and diverse place before setting out, actually feeling that complexity and diversity is entirely different to knowing it exists. This is a truism of the first order, unworthy even of a place in the fortune cookie canon, and yet there is a regressive element within the statement that I hadn’t appreciated until recently: even understanding that the world is endlessly complex and diverse requires an understanding of the complexity and the diversity of the world. And when something triggers that awareness – great literature or mind-stretching science or the experience of a new physical place or whatever it might be – it feels to me like a dawning, like the sun is rising over a vista of knowledge and information and awareness that had been dark to me before. In this context ‘it dawned on me’ is a more meaningful phrase than a cliché-detector might allow.

There is just so much there. There are the dimensions of knowledge, like sociology and anthropology and history and science and on and on into the thousands, and then there’s the range of scale, from a tree to a path to a street to a city block to a continent. To understand and internalise even a minute portion of it is straining and exhausting and frustrating and inspiring. For people to say they have ‘travelled the world’ is laughable; at best they have travelled a portion of it so small it’s a rounding error on the level of the planet, and the most they can take from the experience is that it is theirs and theirs alone, a unique narrative path through a limitless complexity. There are 5,500 cities in Brazil, and 200,000,000 people. Are you sure you’ve ‘done’ Brazil?

The waterfalls we saw today were one of those things that let the light shine for me. They’re so jarringly massive and awe-inspiring that you would need to be deep indeed in your established rut not to be jolted out of it. They are created by the Iguazu river flowing off a cliff, but that calls to mind a river flowing in a straight line to the edge and continuing in a straight line at the bottom. The reality is quite a bit more complex.

First, the river is enormous. It’s much more like a flowing lake than a river. And the cliffs it flows off are curved and irregular, meaning there are multiple waterfalls – 250 at the official count, which includes all the ‘small’ ones. The cliff is only sheer at one major point and in most places there is a step of 50 to 100m wide, so the total fall of approximately 85 metres is broken into two roughly-even chunks. So you can think of the river meeting a straight-line cliff but at an angle of maybe 45 degrees, and in places the cliff curves in and out, and in most places there is a step. On top of that, at one of the two main points there is a ramp of sorts running down from cliffs to the ground-level below, and the flows circle around and through it, forming an island. All this happens over a site that I would estimate at two kilometres in length, though I don’t know the official number. The river forms the border between Brazil and Argentina, and the park is partially in each country. Argentina has most of the actual falling water, but the view from the Brazilian side allows you to appreciate much of it at once.

There are two main areas. The first is at the island, which is called San Martin, and it presents a panorama of multiple huge waterfalls flowing down to the step then the level below, plus the falls which happen around the island itself. There is a small island among some of the most ferocious of the falls, and great trees grow on it, continuously soaked in the spray. It looks like it should be the residence of an infinitely wise being. There are upper and lower walkways which you can follow which take you to the edge of the falls, and you can get down to the lower level to look up at them, and no matter which way you see them the power and intensity of the falling water is baffling, hypnotic, impossible to internalise. When you are up close the sound is a roar from something whose breath is endless. The videos we took go some way to conveying the immensity of it all. Still images freeze the water in a way you cannot see in real life, and show a different side to it, but don’t illustrate what it is like to be there in the same way.

We arrived early in the morning for our tour and took a truck through the jungle from the entrance area. There were about 30 people on it, some of them the type of Americans who create the negative stereotypes about American travellers. But we got an idea of what the surrounding jungle is like. Stretched just over our heads were spider webs from one side of the road to the other, a span of several meters, with spiders the size of my hand in the centre. The body was about as big as my index and middle fingers beside each other. High in the trees we saw a toucan bird, a familiar shape from the old Guinness ads.

The truck dropped us off and we went for the boat tour part. This took us down the river at an energising speed, and up ahead we got our first view of the falls. An American woman clapped and shouted ‘Yeah! Oh yeah!’, and while it made me cringe and wonder yet again how they created such a great country without understanding irony or how to lower their voices, I appreciated the sentiment exactly.

We knew that the boat was going to take us close to the falls, but what we had not realised was just quite how close. Perhaps we should have got an indication from the fact they issued us large dry-bags for our backpacks, and told us to put anything into them that we did not want to get wet, including cameras and watches. We packed our stuff in and folded down the top of the dry-bag and clipped it shut as instructed so that it was entirely waterproof, and then we went close enough to one of the falls to feel the heavy mist that rises off it, and then we went properly close. The boat bounced over the roiling water and we were hit with a blast of cold water equivalent to being under a massively scaled-up shower or the heaviest thunderstorm I can imagine or a firehouse if the water was dispersed. It was coming at us mostly horizontally and we were immediately soaked through, like we had been swimming fully clothed. The shock was hilarious and extremely invigorating. One of the staff took a video with a camera in a waterproof casing and we later bought a copy. We haven’t been able to watch it yet but I imagine it just shows us spluttering and laughing and shaking away wet hair and trying desperately to look up. So much water is in the air that it is very hard to open your eyes to see the main body of the falling water coming from above, and though I managed it through one eye or the other I never did get them both open at the same time. Later on throughout the day I saw people in sopping clothes with a shocked expression, and I would imagine they had not been told quite what to expect either.

In the heat our clothes dried quickly, though the humidity slowed the process, and we walked every trail on the map, seeing the falls from as many angle as possible. In one place two big waterfalls are separated by a distance of 50 metres or so and anywhere else they would be a huge attraction in themselves. Here they attract a few gazes and an obligatory picture before people keep moving to see the real monsters again.

The second major attraction is at the opposite end of the site from where the island is. It’s called the Devil’s Throat, and the name is apt. At that point a partial cylinder is missing from the cliff wall, and so the water seems to flow off it into a great three-quarter closed hole. The fall is about half way across the river so there is a walkway out to it, at the end of which is an observation platform, and it illustrates the size of the river that the walkway is 750m long. It feels like you are in a world of water when you are crossing – water stretches as far as you can see, interspersed with islands of varying sizes to create a complex network of channels.

Once you reach the platform at the end you can see the water flowing into the hole, and it feel like standing at the edge of the world watching the sea flow off into nothingness. The hole is in the region of 70m across at its widest point, I would guess, and from every side of it water falls off the edge. The cliff is sheer at the Devil’s Throat – there is no step below – so the water falls the full 85m. But you can’t actually see it land, as the volume of water entering into the hole sprays upwards like an explosion that produces an unusually viscous smoke. The sound is incredible. When you stand on the platform you get drenched by the water which billows upwards and is carried over by the wind, like a heavy cold rain. We stayed there for a few minutes, and I guarded my camera very carefully. It’s a strange contradiction between the desire to stay there and listen to that sound and watch the endless flow of water over the edges and see the bellow below, versus the physical discomfort of actually being there and getting soaked. Mike had the presence of mind to bring a rain-jacket, which I had forgotten to do, but even with that you get a blast of cold water in the face every now and again and you have to turn away from it and wait for it to pass.

The day shot by. It was hard to take a bad picture. The final stage of our tour was to get a boat back from the Devil’s Throat to near the main entrance. It was an inflatable craft that held about 15 people or so, and was paddled by one guy who sat in the middle and steered it down the current. Far off to our right was the Throat itself, the steam of water visible above it. You wouldn’t want to get too disorientated in your paddling. On the way back we saw a cayman, similar to an alligator or crocodile. It was silent and still and evil-looking. Mike loved it; it turns out he has an enthusiasm for such creatures, and was able to tell me the difference between it and a crocodile and an alligator, which I immediately forgot.

We walked from where we were dropped off back to the main entrance, which was not even a kilometre. There is a train that runs the length of the park, from the Devil’s Throat at one end to San Martin at the other, and we had taken it earlier in the day. We were unfortunate enough to share our carriage with a group of unusually obnoxious French people, most of whom chewed gum with their mouth open and all of whom were loud. The journey was trying, and I passed the time with uncharitable thoughts. It was their own philosopher who so well noted that hell is other people.

So it was quite the day. In the evening we went for dinner at a place on the main street, where we had steak of a fine order, probably a 9.0 or 9.1. We have taken to competitively playing a game on Mike’s iPhone called Canabalt and rounded out the day with some of that. A little man runs along rooftops and you have to make him jump from one to the other while avoiding various obstacles, and that’s the entire game. Think twice before you try it, though; from a certain point of view, heroin is just a drug that can give you a pleasant high.

The taxi to the national airport in BA was less manic than usual – the taxi from one hostel to the other had me stamping on my invisible brake a few times – and the flight left on time and without fuss. On arrival in Iguacu we left the airport to find that the heat in Colonia and BA and Montevideo had just been a warm-up act, as it were, and we were now getting closer to the big leagues. It felt stifling to me, but anyone we spoke to felt it was just a very nice day. Google reported it later to be about 31C.

Machine Gun has outdone himself with the hostel this time – not only does it have a swimming pool of decent size but the room has air conditioning, which is the first time I have had that particular amenity outside the two boats. It’s located on the edge of Puerta Iguazu but the town is small and so the centre is less than ten minutes away. There is a building out the front which seem to have two purposes: to house the fridge in which they keep the beer, and to be a home for a very large stereo which they keep pumping until 11pm or so. There’s a very pleasant atmosphere around, and it as one of the best places I have stayed.

The helpful girl who works at reception explained how we should get to the national park and the waterfalls tomorrow, and for the following day we are going to tour the Brazilian side of the falls – they are split between there and Argentina – and also drop briefly into Paraguay, if all goes to plan. So we have a splendid itinerary to look forward to. She also offered us four hours of activities today, which would have involved rappelling and sliding though the jungle canopy on a wire and that sort of thing, but tempting as it was we needed something to eat and so we declined.

The town is arranged around a few main streets and a significant hill, and its most striking feature is the heat. ‘Baking’ is really the easiest way to describe it, albeit not very inventive. We struck out for a point where you can see Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina all at the same time, split by the two rivers which mark the borders, and though it was probably little more than a mile to walk there, it felt like an expedition. When we got back I lay down on the bed and slept for over an hour, and even I-need-no-sleep Mike ‘rested his eyes’, as he sometimes puts it.

I went for a swim and then we ventured out for a late dinner. The first place we tried was full but the second was almost empty. Yet again steak was up for discussion, and this was one was more in the 8.8 region. I have often had as good and occasionally had better in Dublin.

In recognition of another early start ahead, we were tucked up in good time, with the hum of the air conditioner providing gentle background sound.

[March 6]

Machine Gun and I passed a rather befuddled day yesterday in Montevideo before transit to Buenos Aires, where nothing quite went as planned but everything worked out fine. In the morning we had a look online to check the ferry times and then went out to see if we could catch a few museums. We returned to one from yesterday called the Museo Romantico – we’re very liberal guys – and found that it was closed. That means I will probably never get to see the giant lady’s travelling case that is mentioned in the guidebook, and I found (and find) this more irritating than you might imagine. The museum around the corner was open though; we must have been in the right orbit of the moons of Jupiter. There was a pleasant collection of odds and ends, including two cannons which I enjoyed immensely. One day I will have a house with a garden with a cannon in it, which I may have already noted. There was also a picture of a bearded guy with long grey hair sitting in a chair and holding a shotgun or similar weapon, and I christened this one Future Mick.

There was another museum on the map called the Museo Numismatico, which reminded me of a word I could not quite place, and we walked the seven or eight blocks to it in thick, cloying heat. I suppose I would get used to the heat it if I lived here, but it would take years. Despite the map we could not find the place until we eventually realised it was inside a bank which we could see, and that it must be related to coins. Mike noted that the building we were looking at was the most closed-looking building he had ever seen.

We decided to adjourn for lunch and give up the museum hunt as a bad business, so we had a sandwich and coffee at the place we had been before, and then left for the hostel to get our stuff and head to the ferry. When we bought our tickets we found they were three times the price mentioned online, and I went to ask why that was so. The young lady said ‘tarife con web’ or something along those lines, and her expression invited me to try and do something about it. No options presented themselves other than being irritated, which I duly was.

The journey was comfortable and passed quickly, first a bus back to Colonia and then a ferry to BA. There is an incongruously large ferry terminal in Colonia and it seems to be the main crossing point from BA, rather than the Uruguayan capital. We got a taxi from there to our hostel. Machine Gun may have taken my comments on his hostel-booking abilities somewhat to heart as this one was near the top of the scale, but alas it was overbooked. They had booked us a room elsewhere, and were somewhat unapologetic about the situation. They asked us to pay for the following night, even though they could not put us up that night, on the basis we would come back. We regretfully declined, pointing out we would be better off staying two nights in the place they were sending us to. The level of apology suddenly increased, and we all parted on very friendly terms, but we made no promises and did not pay.

The new place turned out to be a long way further out from town – Mike estimated 7km on his phone. It was slightly more expensive, but the original hostel had given us the money to cover the difference. You did not get a lot for your expenditure though, and we decided early to stay only one night. We were starving by that point, and asked if there was anywhere around we could go for dinner. We were directed to a pizza place two blocks away. If you looked at it on a satellite view, I suspect it would appear as the sole bright spot in a field of darkness.

We waited a while and then got menus, then waited another while and they took our order, and then we waited a very long while in which nothing happened. Neither of us had a watch or a phone so I can’t say for sure how long it was, but it was certainly nudging over an hour end to end. I was unusually hungry, it has to be said. The napkins were starting to look tasty. Then one of the two pizzas we had ordered arrived. We shared it on the basis the second may never emerge, but much to my relief it did. By then I would have eaten a third, but if I was greedy enough to order it I would probably be sitting there still.

This morning we found a new hostel nearer the city centre and moved there, and like all logistical things that took much longer than you would think it should. Mike suggested that we walk the distance to Recoletta, which was about 4km. It wasn’t too hot and we even got a bit of rain on the way, and it was a stimulating and orientating stroll. We stopped for lunch and then arrived at the Recoletta graveyard.

I had some idea in advance what the place was like, but it’s so far out of the usual run of things that any non-pictorial description is difficult to visualise. The entire graveyard is composed of elaborate mausoleums, most of which are like single-room dwellings created with the benefit of wealth and taste, some of which are the size of small churches. A few have spires. Many have statues. The La Paz tomb has elaborate carved angels looking upwards with pained and tearful expressions at the man himself, whose carved image sits on top of the tomb. And there is not just a few of these massive monuments to a life lucratively lived, but hundreds. The graveyard is arranged around wide central paths, down which two cars could pass each other, but off those are narrow alleys through the tombs. Other alleys intersect with those, so the whole effect is of the blocks of a city in miniature.

It really is an extraordinary place. Eva Peron is buried there in a relatively simple and austere black grave, but it’s still a marble construction the size of a room in a graveyard where the elite of Argentina are buried, so it’s hardly low key. Her tomb is sealed with a marble door and there are no windows, but in many of them there are windows and a door and you can look through to see the coffins inside, generally raised off the ground on stands. Some that I saw had the piece of furniture you see in churches to allow a single person to kneel, which I don’t know the name of.

I may have already noted that as I have been wandering around these last few months I have seen dozens of statues and monuments to people now little-known or rarely celebrated. But to have a statue in your honour means your life impacted the lives of many others. You probably carried out deeds of note even in the overall torrent of human affairs, be it in battle or business or arts or exploration. And now those people are forgotten. When we look over the past it’s only the colossi who stand out: da Vinci and Franklin and Shakespeare and Brunelleschi and Lincoln and Plato and all the rest. We may be able to sit down and name person after person from field after field, but those we can remember are a near-invisible slice of even those who were great enough to have a statue or a park or a road named after them, or who were wealthy or celebrated enough to be buried in the Recoletta graveyard. Almost everyone dies in anonymity.

It was with such melancholy thoughts that we left the graveyard to find a band playing upbeat trumpet-driven music just outside for the tourists, which felt like adding a guitar solo to a Gregorian chant. The Gallery of Fine Arts was our next destination, which was a little harder to find than the map indicated, but not long later we found ourselves standing outside a blocky building of stone and pillars and time. It hasn’t changed since it was built in the mid-1800s, according to the guidebook, when it was apparently originally created as a waterworks plant. Who knows what elegance the builders would have brought to bear had they originally intended it for its rarefied current use.

We got audioguides so as not to be hampered by the lack of English signs, and set out. There are two large floors covering world and Argentinian art across the ages, with some religious paintings from the 12^th and 13^th centuries, running right up to within the last 50 years when things get inaccessible for me. There was also some sculpture, of what I would consider varying degrees of interest. One piece was a hollow stone that had been carved with various holes in places, with the holes lying on planes that were either concave or convex. That meant, according to the audioguide, that there was a ‘dialogue’ between the alternative hole types, and in what way this makes sense is entirely beyond me. The overall shape was supposed to represent the curves of a woman’s body, but again to my eye we were back to seeing stories in the arrangements of stars. It did though occur to me that writing explanations of modern art for auidoguide scripts might be a temporarily engaging occupation, and in that vein I would suggest it was a brave multi-spacial interpretation of the alternating energies inherent to creative thought.

The pictures I liked were those that were more accessible, and my favourite was that of a meditating monk. His face was under a cowl and invisible from up close, gaining definition in the most delicate of shades only when you stood back. It had no mention in the audioguide, so I assume it was unremarkable in the scheme of the field, but I loved it. There no copies for sale in the gift shop, but if there were I would have one now.

We went to each room in the place and by the end of it I was very tired and my brain was not able to accept any more visual stimulation or new information, which is always that way I feel at the end of my time in a large museum or gallery. That often makes me wonder about better ways of experiencing these things. We sat on the grass outside for a while, and then went to a café that is famous for various artists hanging out there, none of whom I had ever heard of. Approximately half the tourist population of Buenos Aires was there. I paid the equivalent of six euro for a slice of lemon tart and a further three for a coffee. We stayed for a while though, as it was pleasant in the shade of the table umbrella watching the people go by on the square.

I checked the guidebook for somewhere to eat and identified a place nearby, but when we got there it was somewhat above our state of dress and intended budget, so we went to the place next door instead. The steak was excellent, rating over a nine on the SSS, though still overshadowed by La Plata. If it was in Dublin, though, it would be the best place in town.

We had a nightcap in the hostel but were in bed in time to allow for an early start to get the flight to Iguacu at the end of a tunnel of Argentinian territory in the north-east corner of the country. We’ll pick up the story from there.

I have finally got the Antarctica pictures online:

https://picasaweb.google.com/stephen.flanagan/TheAntarctic#

We never did make it to pseudo-carnival last night in the end as we found a very conducive spot not far from here for a drink after dinner, and the hours slipped by. This morning then it took a while to get all the basic information clear, like where I was and who was the guy opposite me and why did my head hurt and generally what the hell was going on. But eventually equilibrium was restored.

Our lack of flights and buses for the near future had grown to be a bit of a worry, and as the internet connection was functional we decided to have a look at that before doing anything else. So began a protracted and frustrating and ultimately losing battle with the website of the bus company called Via Barriloche. It was only in Spanish, which meant much use of Google Translate. The final step of the booking page had a two-minute countdown timer which ratcheted up the tension like the music in a horror-movie. Many returns through the same process were required. My Spanish vocabulary and level of rage both rose significantly. Eventually we got through it to find the booking would not complete for an unspecified reason, and we gave up and looked at alternatives.

The long and the short of it is that after several hours we had flights booked to Iguazu for Monday, and from there we will fly to Rio Gallegos in the south on Thursday, as travelling directly to El Calafate (which is the access point for the glacier) was prohibitively expensive. We can get a bus from Rio Gallegos which only takes four hours, the Argentinian equivalent of a stroll around the block. We were much relieved to have it all done. We have a few other bits and pieces to bolt on, but the transport was the main thing.

It was 2pm by then so we went out for a late lunch in a small cafe. That took an hour, which seems to be the minimum time for a meal in South America. In the main square is an enormous statue of a man on a horse, and we went there afterwards. The statue is of gargantuan proportions, raised up on a plinth that’s the size of terraced house, and is undoubtedly the most impressive I have ever seen in terms of size and visual impact.

We had read that underneath it is a mausoleum, and we went down there for a look. It was one of those glorious surprises where something you expect to be interesting turns out to be amazing. It’s a large space, probably 20m square and 5m high, and very dark. The floor, ceiling and the walls are black, and the floor descends in several large steps. At the lowest level there is a grave marker for someone famous and important, and on either side of it stand two soldiers. I thought at first the two soldiers were models, until Mick pointed out that they were blinking. They were dressed in full ceremonial uniform, complete with swords, and stand almost perfectly still. They exude discipline. You walk around the space at the uppermost level, as if following a broad ledge, looking down at the soldiers below. On the walls are the names of battles and dates in huge letters made of concrete. Whatever the font is it’s beautiful, and the letters are arranged with masterful use of space. They are lit from below, casting shadows that seemed to me to have been part of the design of the typography. The whole effect is unsettling and moving. I loved it.

On the way there we had bought tickets for a guided tour in English of the theatre just off the square. It’s an imposing edifice of columns and stone and grandeur, and looks unchanged since its creation in the 1850s. In the entrance hall is a chandelier made by a company in England whose factory was destroyed in WWII, so there are very few of the original chandeliers in the world. The young lady who was showing us around told us with a hint of pride that the theatre has three of them, and we learned later that the largest weighs half a ton.

The main performance space continued the impressive tone set by the entrance, and is where the largest of the chandeliers is. The space is very high, the walls lined with private boxes. The ceiling above the front of the stage is painted with various symbolic images, and the centre of the ceiling around the chandelier is inscribed with the names of great writers and composers, dispiritingly few of which I have had any exposure to. They don’t sell the boxes at the front any more as they have a poor view of the stage, but back in the day these were the most expensive as they were the most visible to the crowds on the ground and the people in the other boxes, and their attendees were going to be seen as much as to see. The place spoke of glamour and high society, dark suits and expensive dresses. We were both very taken with it.

From there we had intended to continue our power-tourism burst, but the two museums we went to were in the standard configuration of Uruguayan museums as we have found it, which is to say closed. I think they don’t want visitors to the museums here. So we went for a short stroll on the sea front and then for a coffee, sitting outside in the evening sun. As I write this we are back about an hour, and will shortly go out to get something to eat, and tomorrow and Sunday are as yet unplanned.

Colonia del Sacramento turned out to a be a sleepy little town where there is nothing much to do, and even if there was it would be too hot to do it. At the time of its founding in the 1700s Colonia was a home for smugglers and ne’er-do-wells, and it seems that was enough excitement for the following three hundred years.

The hostel (we had one, thankfully) was about five blocks from the ferry terminal, so we walked to it. The sun was intense, even hotter than BA. We never did manage to get an official number for the temperature but it was certainly into the thirties.  The town is built around the corner of a bay, with the south and western edges at the water. The streets are lined with trees that give much-needed shade. The buildings are crumbling but dignified, and on the main street is an old white edifice that is something to do with the government. Aside from the name of the place, it looks like how I imagined a colonial South American town would look.

Since Machine Gun has taken over the hostel-booking duties we seem to have seen a marked decline in the standard of accommodation. Our welcome was from a chap who really didn’t seem to be old enough to have a job, but he was friendly and helpful and confirmed the story that the two owners of the place had met in Ireland. He handed us sheet and pillowcases for the beds and showed us to the room, which we were sharing with a French couple. The bunk-beds were rather vertiginous, and several times I awoke during the night on the top one and felt around carefully for the edges.

We left there and went to the tourist office, where they suggested we go to the old town and have a look around. Given there is not a lot else to do I would imagine working in that offices requires a very high tolerance for having the same conversation over and over. It was a pleasant stroll away down the main street, Flores. The map showed quite a few museums but all of them were closed. The guidebook says that they close on a different day each week which seems like a scheme that could not be better planned to confound the tourists.

But it was a pleasant place to be. There is an old tree-shaded square, and beside it are the weathered ruins of a convent. There is a lighthouse which you can pay to enter and climb, which we duly did. The stairs spiraled the opposite way to how they do in castles – in the latter, they were curved to allow the defender looking down the stairs to use his sword with his right arm, forcing the attacker trying to get to the top to use his left. Things got rather cramped at the top, but once we emerged into the daylight there was a superb view over the town and it confirmed our suspicions that we were not in fact missing a district of world-class museums, free booze and rollercoasters. At the top of the lighthouse we met an Irish girl, who was with a tour group. If you could somehow map the position of all Irish people on the globe surely not a square mile would go untouched.

We walked the rest of the Old Town, the highlight of which was a tile museum. Mick failed to see the glory of it. I got several pictures of tiles through the window, the museum itself being closed due to the orbit of Jupiter moving into Mercury or however they decide these things. There was one street of buildings from the original colonial era, with a drain down the middle and ancient stones. Its name gives the title to this post, though alas there was no further information as to what prompted the melancholy nomenclature.

We retired to the hostel for more logistics planning and a beer. The collapse of the internet shifted focus from the former to the latter, and many of the world’s problems came up for discussion.

Mick realised that we had lost an hour in a timezone transition which we were otherwise unaware of, so we went for a slightly later dinner than usual. We ate at a place near the centre and a very pleasant day came to a gentle close.

This morning we were up about nine, and I managed to return to ground level from the upper bunk with all bones intact. We had breakfast in the hostel of two slices of toast with caramel – you get what you pay for, I suppose, but I was thinking somewhat longingly of the pancakes on the Expedition – and struck out to put Phase Two of the Colonia plan into action: renting a dune buggy.

We went to a place where we had seen them earlier. There was an older chap behind a desk of sorts facing the street, like a window with no glass. I asked him if he spoke English and he said: ‘No.’ Then he looked at us as if intimating that it was our move, punks. Through the standard method of occasional words and much pointing we managed to negotiate the various forms required – he seemed perfectly happy with my print-out from Dublin City Council with my licence details, and he hardly looked at Mick’s at all.

A dune buggy is essentially four wheels, two seats and an engine held together by a surrounding metal frame. Our particular specimen had come a long way from its hey-day, and not seen a lot of maintenance in the intervening years. The left-side lights didn’t work until Mick pushed the electricity cable a little tighter into the casing. The owner seemed very pleased. Mick was already seated and went to put on his seatbelt, which was the kind that holds rally drivers in place. The owner indicated this was entirely unnecessary, if not downright cowardly. I swung myself on board and we found that the space was rather tight indeed. You would certainly want to be on good terms with anyone you were sharing it with. We started it up and were off.

The controls are one pedal to go, one to stop, and a wheel to steer; it certainly strips driving a car to its basic elements. We headed north up the coast road towards where the tourist office lady had indicated there was a bull ring. We were on a fairly large road and I indicated to Mick that the time had come to floor it. He let me know that we were already at full speed. It was not quite the head-tipping acceleration I had been hoping for. But it gave the same sense of being in the environment as the quad bike, feeling the bumps in the road and the wind and smelling the fumes of other vehicles. Naturally the speedometer was broken (as was the fuel gauge) but we probably got up to somewhere slightly over 30mph, or maybe even just a shade under forty.

The bullring when we got there turned out to be disused and falling into ruin. I had been under the impression it was active. It’s large and circular, in the model of a mini concrete Coliseum, and must have held quite a few thousand people. There is a fence around it to keep people away, but there were several places where clearly a lot of people had already gone under or over it, so we went in for a look. The seats were over our heads and the sun was shining through them, and through the entranceway ahead the grass of the ring itself was a vibrant green. It was very photogenic. But scattered around were chunks of concrete that had fallen from the seats to the ground below, so we took a few pictures and didn’t stay too long.

I took over the wheel from there and we drove to a nearby museum. As it was, of course, closed, all we saw of interest were two dogs of the type that people who are frightened of dogs probably have nightmares about. Thankfully one was chained and one was behind a fence. So we took the coast road back to the centre and dropped off the buggy. When we pulled it up and got out the covering glass for the rear indicator fell off, which I think summed up the mechanical state of affairs nicely.

We had a quick lunch and went back to the hostel to get our bags and walked to the ferry terminal to see about a bus to Montevideo. The bus station is also at the ferry terminus, but we didn’t actually see that. The ferry company runs transfer buses to the capital, which I had said several times to Mick it was very unlikely we would be able to get as we were not technically transferring on a ferry ticket. Naturally we got on without a hitch, and within fifteen minutes of arriving we were on a bus heading east.

The countryside was green and verdant and the road just like a European road. Apart from the palm trees it could have been Ireland on a particularly fine day. I slept for much of the journey and woke at the edge of Montevideo. At first glance it seems much like the other big cities I have been in, packed full of noise and action and pollution and sunshine, all happening against a backdrop of buildings that are mostly crumbling and old. We got a taxi from the bus station to the hostel without any problems. This hostel is somewhat further down the scale than the last one, and has an epically low cleanliness rating on hostelbookers.com, but something about it presumably appealed to Mick. We have a private room this time, which even has a balcony, but its defining feature is a hat stand. On entry I tossed my Indiana Jones hat across the room Bond-style, and to my eternal satisfaction it landed right on a prong, where it now hangs.

We’ve been chilling out here for about an hour as I write this, and shortly will venture out for food and a stroll. The girl who works here told us its carnival time, but we think it’s an indefinite-article carnival rather than the highlight of the year. However she recommended a place for us to go later to see traditional music, and once Machine Gun had confirmed there will also be booze on sale we were happy enough to plan to see that. We’ll stay here tomorrow also, and if all goes well return to BA on Saturday morning and then fly to Iguazu on the same day, but due to the unfortunate lack of internet connections we have not yet got that booked – the connection is also down here, though they tell us they are working on it.

So all in all everything is well, and more adventures await.

I have slipped in my blogging duties recently, but I need to temporarily interrupt the chronology to say that Mick has arrived safe and sound and we are together in Buenos Aires. However, on his second night he had a brush with some local muggers, one of whom produced an Uzi which was presumably fake. Thankfully all that remains of the story now is a good anecdote.

Mick arrived on the 26^th as I think I have noted already. He met some girls from Galway on the plane, so he spent his first day touring BA on the tourist bus with them. (He managed to amass a remarkably large set of facts about the city in a short space of time, which he has been regaling me with ever since.) On his second evening they all went out for dinner, and then Mick started to make his way back to the hostel to meet me, as I was due to be there about 11pm. It’s the same hostel that I stayed in the last time.

It wasn’t that far from where he had dinner to where the hostel is, and so he set out walking. It’s a very easy thing to do without really thinking about it, especially when you are starting from a place that has lots of people around, but it is undoubtedly dumb. He was about half way back when he saw two young guys – he estimates them to have been about 16 – catch sight of him, and turn from the street they were about to go down to follow him instead. There was no-one else around. They were some distance behind him. Mick kept walking; he said later his heart was punding. One of the two guys moved quickly down the opposite side of the street to be ahead of him, so he was boxed in. He came to a red light at a junction with cars passing by, and instead of stopping he crossed the street to the other side, at which point his path crossed directly with the guy who had gone ahead. The guy shouted something and then pulled out an Uzi machine gun.

As if operating from a checklist in a book called ‘How to get yourself killed in South America’, Mick spread his arms wide and shouted ‘What!’ He was running on pure adrenaline, he said after, and the gun looked plastic and fake. He also noticed it had no magazine, and the guy was holding it as if to hide that, which showed remarkable presence of mind under the circumstances. The guy then swung the gun to hit him, but it didn’t come within more than a foot. Then Mick shouted at the guy again, and he walked off, joined by the other guy. Mick made it the rest of the way home uneventfully.

By the time I joined him in the hostel about midnight he was calm about the whole thing, but good Lord that story could easily have had a very unhappy ending. Mick was rattled when he came into the hostel and he told the guy working there about what had happened, but he seemed to think it wasn’t much to shout about given Mick had no actual wounds to report. You can be sure we will both be a boon to the South American taxi industry in the future. And I have taken to calling him Machine Gun Mick.

Going backwards, then: my last few days in Ushuaia were quiet and pleasant. The day after I last wrote, and despite my predictions to the contrary, I slept until 11am. One of the girls back from the other tour of the Antarctic was going into town the same time as me so we shared a taxi, and had lunch there. Then we got a taxi up to the chairlift which leads to near the glacier you can see from the main street in the mountains behind the town. The chairlift was both slower and more expensive than I anticipated, but once at the top we had splendid views over the mountains and the town and the Channel beyond. There were some trails leading up to the glacier proper, i.e. to where you could put your hands on the ice, but the stiffness of my legs meant I was content to just look at them.

We had a pleasant afternoon up there, and then returned to the town and parted ways for a while before regrouping to meet other friends of my companion’s. They were to be in a group in the Irish bar in town, but when we went in we were the only customers. The Irish bar was as Irish as I am Bahrainian. We had a drink there and something to eat, and I was back in the hostel early. Getting up late really shortens the day.

The following day was my last in Ushuaia. In the morning I caught up on email and news, and then went to town and strolled around and said my mental goodbyes. I bought a bag for the Antarctic stuff that I intended to leave in the hostel in BA, which at the time of writing has been done, so I am less weighed down with stuff. (I dreamed the other night that my camera was working again, but alas that was not the case on waking). I got some chocolate from the café that I really liked, and then walked back out to the hostel slowly.

On arrival at the airport, I found chaos unfolding. I checked in uneventfully then went upstairs to where the two doors were to the departure gates, and found that both were blocked by protesting people, and the doors themselves were closed. One of the protestors had his hand on a pillar used for holding up the ropes to form the queue corral, and he was banging the metal cylinder repeatedly against the metal base, producing a rhythmic, almost musical sound. People were clapping along and shouting, though I could not make out what they were saying or even what language it was in. I spotted a reasonably friendly-looking punter and asked her what was happening. She was French, and called over an English-speaking, French-looking man to explain to me that they had turned up for a flight in the evening of the previous day which had been cancelled. They had had no information about any replacement flight and had been in the airport ever since without food or water being provided, or any suggestion of leaving for a hotel, or anything of that nature. They were clearly tired, and I felt very sorry for them.

Things were escalating. Two men took the desk where under normal circumstances there would be a person checking boarding passes, and moved it on front of one of the doors. Then a group of people took the pillars and ropes used for the queue and used them to block the second door. I stood back, wondering what would happen next. The shouting got louder. There were some very angry people. It’s hard to know where it might have gone had a man not showed up with a gun. He was part of airport security, and he didn’t take it out of its holster, but he looked like a grim specimen. The crowd suddenly dispersed away from the doors. The security guy and another man moved the desk and ropes out of the way. One of them looked at me and said ‘LAN?’ I nodded. They opened the door, and said ‘Hurry,’ then pushed me and a few others through and shut it immediately after.

I could hear the clapping and shouting and calling for the following hour, until I got on my own flight which thankfully left on time. I wonder how long they were there. Hopefully as I write this two days later, they are not there still.

As we took off and got to cruising height, Tierra del Fuego gave me one last show to say goodbye. The sun was setting, and from the plane I could see the incongruous, almost shocking blue of lakes high up in the mountains, from small pools to large expanses. A river wound over and back through a broad, high-walled valley, the twisting of its bends the product of the flowing water of time unimaginable, an illustration from a geography book. The immensity and harshness of the mountainous land at the end of the world was strangely inviting, like a mirage. I watched from the window until I could see no more and the curtains of cloud were firmly drawn closed.

On landing in Buenos Aires we had to wait for almost an hour on the plane as apparently we didn’t have a gate to get off at, which in the scheme of oversights and errors would seem to be a strange one. But we finally got out and I got a taxi to the hostel and heard about Machine Gun’s adventures. I had pondered on my words of greeting and went with ‘Doctor Nichol, I presume,’ rather than ‘The Nichol has landed.’ But it was a close-run thing. We had a beer or two on the terrace outside until the small hours, and it was very pleasant indeed.

The following day – now yesterday – we were up at a reasonable hour and went for a long ramble around the city. Mick reckons we covered a good 10km at a conservative estimate. We started at the bridge which was designed by the same guy who designed our Beckett Bridge in Dublin. The one in BA looks like an earlier draft. They say here that it represents tango dancers, though to see it takes the same sort of imagination that sees dragons in the constellations. We walked along the river front, and then had lunch in a famous café where various poets and writers used to meet, including Borges. From there went to San Martin, a square where there is a monument to the fallen of the Falklands War, with two soldiers on front of it standing to attention in the sun. The names are written on austere black stones, and it’s hard not to look at it and not hear Thatcher’s tones of Received Pronunciation. The lady’s not for turning… Politics and blood.

About four we went back to the hostel to plan where we might go over the coming weeks. We are much constrained by the fact that the waterfalls and the glaciers we want to see are in exact opposite corners of the country, northeast to southwest. We looked at flights and buses and combinations thereof and have a reasonable idea of how we might manage it at acceptable though not low cost, and hopefully we will have something booked within 24 hours of the time of writing.

All that took several hours, as it always does, and then it was Steak O’clock. I had been going on about it all day, and we were among the first few into La Plata. When I had been there last the idea of being there with Mick seemed far in the future. I agonised about having the chorizo instead of the medallion, but in the end I stuck with what I know. And it was good. Very good. It was a 9.8 on the SSS, the Steve Steak Scale. I very much doubt that anything could ever beat it – a fine cut of Argentinian meat in a good steakhouse in Buenos Aires is probably the top of the game. But I reserve the top two points because out there in the world are Kobe beef and Shanahan’s and other things I can only dream of, the famous known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns, and perhaps there is a higher expression yet of the art of the steak.

The early hours again found us on the terrace. We met a guy from Slovenia and his girlfriend and had a pleasant hour or so with them. I was rather wishing this morning that we had gone to bed earlier. Looking in the mirror I was greeted by a chap who looked tired, and who had crazy  mad-scientist hair. I really need a haircut, and the longer I leave it the more I look like Doc Brown from Back to the Future.

We had a swift breakfast in the hostel and got a taxi from there to the ferry station, from where we got a boat to Colonio del Sacramento in Uruguay, and it is on that boat I now write this. It is, apparently, the fastest ferry in the world, and takes one hour to complete the crossing. Some of the other boats take three or even six. To my right is a window out of which I can see muddy brown water to the horizon, and it does seem to be moving by rather quickly. Certainly faster than the Expedition. The ferry station was very like an airport – we had to check in our bags and go through scanners and fill out immigration forms, and then many stamps were required before we were successfully relinquished by the Argentinian authorities and accepted by their Uruguayan counterparts.

Our plan now is to see Colonio and go from there to Montevideo, then back to Buenos Aires. All going well we will fly to Iguazu for the waterfalls, and some time later fly back to the southwest for the glacier. Those flights will form the pillars of the trip, with other travels around them which we are currently investigating. Oddly when we are in the south I will be back close to Ushuaia, where ‘close’ is less than 20 hours on a bus. We looked at meeting down there and then working our way back up there, but the logistics grew too complex too quickly, so we stuck with the original plan of meeting in BA and looping from there instead.

And that brings us back up to date, where hopefully we will stay. Looking back over the entries I think that when I write each day as it happens the end result is more alive. I am still way behind on organising photos too, but aiming to put that right as soon as I have a decent internet connection again.

Land has just come into view off the starboard bow (no Klingons that I can see, though), so it’s time for me to wrap this up for now. We’re booked into a hostel run by two Uruguayans that met in Ireland, or at least I think we are – Machine Gun took care of the booking so possibly we’ll be hanging out with his underworld pals and sleeping on park benches. So wish me luck, and talk soon.

I spent most of today engaged in my new favourite activity of climbing a hill while sweating and complaining all the way and swearing I will never do it again, getting back down eventually, and looking around for a new hill to climb.

The problem, you see, was the one trail in the park marked ‘strenuous’. It’s such a curious choice of word, for one thing – not ‘difficult’ or ‘challenging’ or ‘experience required’. And the trails we had done already had been really steep in parts – was a strenuous trek just more of the same? I had been thinking about this on and off yesterday, and today when I woke up I had nothing much to do, so I asked guy at the desk to get me a seat on the bus to the park again. If the hike was just too difficult I would turn back, no problem.

By chance a young Dutch chap was also heading to the park. His name is Elmer or similar, and he is tall and thin. He looks like a solidly-delivered punch would have him falling like a cut Sequoia, but that he could walk for Ireland. Or Holland, I suppose. I told him what I was at – that I was going to look at the difficult hike and would turn back if I couldn’t do it. He nodded and we agreed we would try it together, and he would go on even if I went back.

The bus dropped us near the trail. I realised about that point that I had four Oreo cookies to eat and nothing else, a mistake I had made the previous day also. (I had full waterproof gear, plenty of water and a mobile phone, though – I am slowly getting better at it.) Not to worry. The opening part of the trail brought us by the shore of a lake that stretched long and thin into the distance. If a magical being gave my three wishes that could produce an instant Zodiac, I would have used one of them there.

We left the shore and turned towards the woods. From the trailhead I had seen the rocky peaks of the mountains stretching upwards beyond the treeline. The trail was gentle at first and then began to get steeper. It switched over and back and then settled itself on a sort of runway going steeply upwards. I began to find things hard. We were walking on what was like a natural staircase of tree roots. The trees were tall and straight with most of the vegetation near the top. (I must learn to identify trees.) It was very pleasant, in many ways, but I was sweating and out of breath. Elmer was in the lead. His stilt-like legs were giving him an easy pace that I found it very hard to match. I began to think of going back. That seemed like an awful idea though, an idea that could never find any expression in reality. I kept going.

After maybe 45 minutes I stopped for another break, the third I think, and we agreed that Elmer would keep going at his pace and I would go at mine. ‘See you at the top,’ he said. He clearly did not believe this. ‘See you there,’ I said. Neither did I.

But: once I got could go at my own pace, and once I could let the tense pressure in my legs build up and then ease whenever I wanted – the part that I so sorely missed at the Inca Trail – I did much better. I would walk slowly, going up and up, until my legs were just short of screaming, then I would pause for just a few seconds to let them relax and ease, and then I would go again. Repeat ad nauseum. As I climbed, the trail was hard to see in places, and once or twice I stopped and wondered where it was before seeing a reassuring yellow stake in the distance, marking the way forward. Sometimes I had to climb over fallen trees, other times a chunk had been chainsawed away to allow passage. High up the hill many of the trees were dead or twisted, and I had to carefully go between them; that place must be just beyond freaky at night. Sweat ran from everywhere it could run from, and my t-shirt was wet against my skin, and it streamed down my face and dripped off my eyes and nose, but I was in a rhythm and going fine. Thoughts of turning back were ludicrous now. It was just a question of step after step after step, each one leading upwards

The trail led into the small valley of a nascent stream, water bubbling down its centre, and I followed that upwards, and then I was coming to the edge of the treeline. Ahead of me was a few hundred yards of bog and then the rocks of the upper mountains. And also, to my surprise, was Elmer. He seemed equally surprised to see me. I had thought he would be way ahead, and I think he thought I would turn back. We spoke a few moments and he went on his way again. I couldn’t stop thinking of the Terminator and the relentless progress of something slow and steady. I was pleased with myself, no doubt.

By the time I reached the bog he was well ahead again, and I had to pick my own way through it. It was soft and wet and despite my best efforts I sank to my ankles at one or two points. I had thought of getting runners in the town before the hike, figuring it would be a path all the way and it would be easier without my heavy hiking boots, and I was very pleased that I had not. A few places I had to jump to get over boggy water, but the trail was constantly marked, and finally I reached the last section, the rocks of the upper mountain.

And damn that bit was hard. Conor Mc is my gold standard of fitness, and I think even he would have found it a little difficult, though no doubt he could have run up there carrying a sheep under each arm if the need ever arose. I had gone way too far to go back; retreat was just not on the table. I told myself it didn’t matter if it took me three hours to do this last part. (The entire trail up and down should take four hours.) It was like climbing an enormous pile of loose rocks of various sizes, and so sometimes my footing slipped and I had to pull myself forward, almost like walking through snow, and that was harder still. I kept my eyes on the edge ahead of me that looked like it was near the top, and I can tell you that it was dispiriting to finally get there and find that the summit was way, way beyond that.

But I never, even then, considered turning back. That section was hard but not quite miserable. It wasn’t as bad as the Inca Trail because I wasn’t sick and I could stop when I needed to. I made steady progress, again thinking only of single steps, and slowly I rose. Getting to the top of that section was very, very satisfying.

From there the summit was not far. There were a few more climbs but they were easy, and then I was there. I took a little video as I went – I made several clips as I waked up, which I hope to edit into one and then put on the Tubes in due course. Elemer was sitting with his back against a rock, and he smiled at me when he saw me and said he knew I could do it. He’s a nice kid.

There was euphoria this time, no doubt. The Beagle Channel opened out in front of us to the west, down which I sailed to Antarctica just two weeks ago. To the east was the vast lake at the foot of the mountain where we had started, and the water of the sea and the water of the lake seemed to be hardly the same substance, an entirely different shade of blue in each. The mountains wound and interlocked in that way which seems to indicate a higher pattern at work if only we could read it, like a fingerprint or a retina. In the middle ground were the thick forests, one of which we had walked through, and which from our height were like the diagrammatic woods on 18^th-century maps. I ate my last two cookies and drank water and sat on a rock and got Elmer to take a picture of me, and all of the pain and the sweat and the uncertainty of getting up there were far off, rumours, something that may never have happened. The final height we reached was about 975m, less than 100m short of Carrauntoohil (that’s 1,038m, according to Wikipedia), though in this part of the world it barely counts as a foothill.

The way down was long. My knees hurt after a while and I was hungry so didn’t want to stop, and the going on the rocks was slow and slippery. The bog was still wet on the way back and I got even muckier (an attempted jump ended in total wipeout, meaning my jeans are not in commission until I have a chance to get them washed), and then the way down through the trees was slow as there were so many possibilities to twist your ankle or indeed wander off the path. But we got there. I bought a sandwich and ate it in great bites, the food-intake equivalent of gasping. We waited an hour for the bus and when it came I got on and promptly fell asleep.

I woke to find we were in town to my surprise, but that suited me fine. I walked – slowly and stiffly – to the laundrette and picked up my clothes, then went back to the supermarket and got the essentials (booze and water), then got a taxi back to the hostel. Couldn’t manage any more walking. When I was finally in the hot water of the shower it was the unsullied pleasure of something that has been hard earned.

In the evening most people in the hostel cooked and I felt that I should cook too, but I didn’t have anything to make. I suppose they have their idealism and youth and I have seven years of corporate politics and stock options. So I went out for dinner instead, back to the same place as the last two nights. I spoke to no-one bar the waiter, got another taxi back, and ever since I have been catching up on my notes for this blog.

Mick and I have rather mistimed our meeting – he is arriving in Buenos Aires on the morning of the 27^th and I get there the evening of the 28^th. I am not quite clear where the confusion arose, but mistakes of that nature generally trace their origin back to me. Mick himself I think is as yet unaware of his impending solo time in BA, but I have texted and emailed him so we should be all good. A man of Mick’s resources and ingenuity should be able to find something interesting to pass the time in the Argentinian capital for 36 hours without too much trouble.

For myself, tomorrow will be an easy day after today’s exertions. I may yet go back and take the steam train. I would imagine I will be up early enough as I have been shifted to a room with eight people instead of four, and even my coma-like morning unconsciousness will not be able to survive all that movement. I like the idea of finding a café and writing up some ideas for another children’s book that I have been kicking around, and of course it will also be fun to freak out the locals. And at some point I will read the speculation about how the post-Fianna-Fail political world of Ireland will order itself. I can’t say I was sorry to read of the kicking that they so richly deserve, but all the same I wonder if the result is justified based on their recent actions, rather than the entire span of occasional corruption and regular arrogance that has sustained us through the boom.  We sold those houses, we bragged of the price increases, we looked to invest in Bulgaria, we bought 100,000 new cars in Dublin in 2000… No-one made us do that. We got the government we deserved.

Right. Everything is winding down here in La Posta, and I have written in the region of 5,000 words and drank approximately one litre of beer in the last hour and a half, so I bid you a tired, sore but happy goodnight.

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 24^th, 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.

—

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.

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 24^th. 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.

Deception Island was the final stop on our cruise around the Antarctic – high winds and bad weather prevented the last planned landing elsewhere, so we landed in two places on Deception instead. But it was a suitable end to the adventure.

Deception Island is the visible tip of a volcano. From the sea floor the volcano reaches up in the region of 4,000 metres, but only the top few hundred are above the waves. Some number of millions of years ago, in the deep geological past, seawater flowed into the cone of the volcano, and we can only guess at the magnitude and magic of what that event may have looked like. Today what we see is a ring of mountains with narrow beaches at their feet almost completely encircling a patch of sea. It’s a magnified version of the Devil’s Crown in the Galapagos, but whereas that could be swum across in only a few moments, Deception Island’s circle of water is roughly two miles in diameter. It’s another visual underlining of the size of volcanoes. The entrance to Deception is between a cliff on one side and a high spit of land on the other, and collectively they are called Neptune’s Bellows.

On the way to land on the Zodiac I realised it was the coldest day yet that we had been out. Everyone was hunched down in their warm clothes. The wind was strong and ripping. High up in the ring of mountains, weathering over the aeons has produced a natural viewing area, where the ring of stone has been lowered as if roughly cut away. It’s called Neptune’s Window. On the way up there it started to sleet, and the wind caught and it dragged it almost horizontal. It got colder still. This was not the best day for a swim. Every time I thought of it I got a little wave of nerves, and excuses rose like bubbles.

At the Window we had a great view over the island from one side and out to sea on the other. Deception was once a home for whalers due to its natural protection from the worst of the surrounding sea. On the beach are eight or ten abandoned buildings from that time, falling down from age and the elements. We were told they were off-limits, but you’d need to have great faith in your own luck to go in even without the warning – they look as though not much is keeping them together, and some are already collapsed. The buildings are rough and functional and surrounding them are rusted, riveted tanks and pipes and gears and bits of machinery. It’s a place that could spark a thousand stories.

Up at the Window, the Australians kept the laughs coming. (Sorry Simon.) Julio had made several jokes at his talk about the hot springs at Deception Island and finding a palm tree to hide behind to change into your swimming trunks. There are in fact springs coming from the volcano, deep under the water, that mean the water in the circle of Deception is roughly one degree warmer than the water of the open sea, so it’s closer to -1C rather than -2C. As we were standing mostly in silence in the teeth of the wind, looking out over the black rocks and ruined buildings, an Australian woman said to one of the staff, ‘Where are the hot springs?’
Everyone smiled, assuming it was a joke.
‘Julio said there would be hot springs,’ the woman repeated, insistently.
Smiles faded slightly.
‘Well the water is warmer in here, but not by much,’ said the guide, who did not have perfect English.
‘But where are the springs?’ said the woman again.
I chimed in and explained the water of Deception are slightly warmer than the water elsewhere in the Antarctic.
‘I thought there were hot springs,’ she said, looking somewhat disgusted, and turned away without further comment. I imagine she wandered off to look for a palm tree.

I came back down from the Window and walked to the buildings at the other end, and on the way I passed the GAP people who told me swimming would kick off in 45 minutes. I nodded and kept walking. The sleet had eased and then returned. By not watching where I was going I damn near walked into a fur seal. This is not a good idea, as they can chase you and they can bite. We have been warned many times to keep an eye out for them, because they carry diseases of the sort that rapidly descend into the need for a helicopter. Once I started looking I saw they were everywhere, and I had to pick a careful path through them, keeping the recommended distance of 15m.

Then from somewhere behind me I heard a scream and then a cheer, and I turned to see that the swimming had begun.

The non-swimmers were gathered in the lee of a large metal construction shaped like an angular half-moon. The opening swimmers were stripping down. I didn’t think about it much and took off my jacket, then my hat, then my scarf. I already had my togs on under my jeans. While wearing just a t-shirt the wind was cold, but it didn’t seem to feel much worse on bare skin. There were a few other people getting ready at the same time. I turned to them and said ‘Let’s go!’ to find they had already gone and were on the way back out again. I picked my way through the crowd of people huddled in their coats and scarfs and hats and gloves and stood and looked at the water. I had the presence of mind to hand my camera to one of the people there and ask them to take a few moments. And then I put my head down and ran. I think I made it three steps into the water before I dived.

It was astonishing. They had told me that sometimes the shock of cold makes people involuntarily take a breath underwater, and that was why they had some of the sailors standing by to pull people out if necessary. That had freaked me right out. But I felt nothing like that. It was nothing like anything I have ever felt before, an awareness of water and cold and being part of it for a moment, an unsustainable thing by its nature. Almost as soon as it had happened it was over. I stood in the water, which was up to my thighs or so, and a high-pitched sound of cold escaped me. There was laughter and cheers, as there was for everyone.

When I got to the shore I found my feet and legs were numb. Feeling came back in my legs in a minute or so, but it took more than five minutes to get feeling back in my feet and toes. And in fact changing back into my clothes was the worst part – my fingers were not working quite as usual so zips and buttons were hard, and the rocks and grit of the beach were painful to stand on as feeling returned. Everyone said that.

That special moment was the spiritual end of the Antarctic trip. Later in the day we landed on Deception for a second time, on the opposite side of the circle. We climbed to the top of the hill of the crater and there was a view over a shallow lake and a half-starved river where water runs out to sea. Other than that it was a view only a geologist could love. There was so much mist and fog it was hard to see anything further than 100 yards away, and it was bitterly cold. All the tourists were corralled into the path up, the top, or the path down. It was package-tour 15-minutes-in-the-Collosseum stuff. Getting back into the Zodiac I had conflicting feelings of relief to be over this particular landing, and sadness at leaving the lands of the Antarctic.

Already my thoughts turn to when and how I might come back.