PATAGONIA NOTES

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PUNTA ARENAS 1

The world changes depending on where you are. This overly-obvious truth never the less feels more true than ever here, in Punta Arenas. Next stop South is the South Pole. The tip of the continent of Antarctica reaches out so that it looks like it’s trying to touch Patagonia. Punta Arenas has been the base for many of the great Polar expeditions. In front of the port there are boards which include Scott, Peary, Admunson and Shackleton. Not to mention a whole host of other names from other countries whose fame hasn’t made it to the Anglo-Saxon world. It’s the middle of Summer and it feels like the edge of Winter, which is the permanent state of this outpost. If Summer is like this, you can’t help thinking, shivering in the biting wind, how can they survive Winter. You look South and realise the icecaps are almost within reach. The official name of the district is Región de Magallanes y Antártica Chilena. Legally speaking, we’re there, in amongst the icebergs, in a land of immense, dazzling whiteness.

Due East, more or less, are the Falkland Islands. Our taxi driver used to be a sailor and spent time there. He says there are two big islands and hundreds of little ones. On every one of these little islands there lives a British couple, who fly the flag and share their island with lots of sheep. He says the pubs open at ten in the morning and shut at eleven at night and the police fine you if they catch you drunk at 11.30. There’s nothing else to do there, so everyone drinks all day, but god help you if you’re caught drinking after closing time.

On the roof of Punta Arenas fire station, there’s a Croatian flag. The fire brigade was founded by Croatians in 1902. There’s also a Croatian club called Sokol. The immigration to this part of the world was diverse. The cemetery contains a Scottish quarter, an English quarter and a host of Eastern European sectors. Croats, Slovenians, Slovaks and more in amongst the more typical Spanish and Italian stock. A sign in town celebrates the Slovak novelist Mateo Bencur, who ended up going back to live in Croatia, where he wrote two nostalgic novels called Patagonian Travels and The Call of the Mother Country. Patagonia is as good a place as any to start over. You can imagine a whole load of Croatians arriving at the end of the world at the start of the last century, thinking, you know what, this town really need a fire brigade. Later we come across another fire station, founded by Germans. There’s probably one for every nationality that ever emigrated here.

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TIERRA DEL FUEGO

We leave Punta Arenas around 8 in the morning, driving North East to take the ferry at Punto Delgado, the mouth of the Magellan Strait.. The wind is getting up and the guide is worried that the crossing will shut, as he later finds out happens around 1pm. The crossing takes no more than a breezy 20 minutes: this is the narrowest point in the Magellan Straits. The approach on the other side is cluttered with Argentine lorries taking petrol from the Argentine part of Tierra del Fuego north. They have to cross Chilean territory in order to return to Argentina. When the ferry shuts down due the to strong winds which are typical of the Summer months, the backlog of lorries trying to cross builds up incrementally.

Tierra del Fuego is an island, separated from the continent by the Magellan Straights, named after the man who found a passage through them in 1520. He never landed on the inhospitable island. He first named it Tierra del Humo, having seen smoke from native indian fires. When he got back to Spain, the king decided the name Tierra del Fuego was more evocative. The Chilean half of the island is far from beautiful. It’s low, flat, scrubby.. Further south, the cordillera continues its march towards Antartica and there are forests, but here it’s a bleak Lear-like heath. The wind sweeps the land like a lawnmower. The few, sparse trees are stunted and the grass sways in a vast, hypnotic emptiness.

After being driven for almost 2 hours, seeing little, we arrive at the Western coast in a Bay called the Useless Bay (Bahia Inutil), as it’s too shallow for boats and therefore good for nothing. [Wikipedia: “The bay was named in 1827 by Captain Phillip Parker King, because it afforded "neither anchorage nor shelter, nor any other advantage for the navigator.””] We’ve come to see a colony of King Penguins. There used to be a lot of King Penguins on Tierra del Fuego, but like the indigenous population, they were exterminated. About a decade ago, an enterprising fellow decided to bring them back. He set up a penguin colony, which is protected and thriving. It’s funded by the £12 every tourist has to pay to visit.

When we step out of the van, the wind is challenging. As we walk down to the coast it becomes even more so. The penguins stand around, an odd mix of noble and gawky, observing us. The wind does not appear to affect them. For us, the wind is a scourge. Never have I known a wind quite like it. It makes standing up a challenge. Not an intermittent challenge; it’s a constant one. Relax for a second and you’re in danger of flying off the earth’s handle. The wind whips its way off the coast, announcing without any doubt that this is not a place meant for human inhabitation. It’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to knowing what it feels like to be at the Pole. Or Mars, come to that.

We all sway about a bit. The penguins, who are on the other side of a stream, continue to observe the humans’ pathetic attempt to incorporate themselves into this ferocious landscape. Finally, having taken about a million photos each, we retreat back to the safety of the van and head towards the Chilean capital of Tierra del Fuego, Porvenir. Porvenir has a population of 5000. It is categorically not a tourist town. We’re taken to a cheap and cheerful place where we’re served sizeable guanaco sandwiches. The return ferry has been delayed an hour, which gives us time to walk around the town. However, this is a town where walking is a feat not to be approached lightly. The wind is a little less fierce than at the coast, but not a lot. We stagger around the low-rise streets, with houses made out of prettily-painted corrugated iron. There is a seaside promenade, but you’d need a constitution much stronger than mine to enjoy it. Places like Bridlington or Scarborough seem tropical in comparison with Porvenir.

The guide takes us to the museum. We learn about the two different native tribes who used to occupy this land. The Yahgan lived off the sea, using their canoes as second homes. The Selk’nam lived off the land, hunting guanaco. There’s a statue depicting them in a  small park. Four figures walk barefoot, wrapped in animal hides. These people occupied the land for over ten thousand years. There is a way of living in the wild nature of Tierra del Fuego, but the secrets have vanished with the tribes. They were hunted in the early twentieth century, when the land was given over to sheep farming. The sheep drove out the natives’ traditional food supply, the guanaco, so they started hunting sheep instead. As a result, the sheep barons paid people to hunt them. Hunters were paid at first upon presenting a pair of ears, but later they had to supply a head. The most famous hunter was s a Scot, Alex McLennan (nicknamed Red Pig), whose fitting fate is described in Chatwin’s In Patagonia. Chatwin also writes about another Brit, Thomas Bridges, a missionary who later become a landowner himself. Only Bridges, far from hunting the Selk’nam and the Yahgan, did all he could to preserve their culture. He complied extensive dictionaries of their languages and sought to offer them a safe haven on his land. It may have been a doomed endeavour, but the contrasting stories of Bridges and McLennan say a lot about what it is to be British. No matter how far you go, travel always seems to take you back to where you came from.

The ferry was due to leave at 7pm but ended up leaving at 8.30. This included a twenty minute wait in the biting cold as not one but two broken down cars were towed off. The towing involved a four wheel drive driving onto the ferry extremely quickly, executing a neat three point turn on deck, a rope being attached and the breakdown towed off. Except that the second time this happened, the  rope broke. Then, as if by magic, the broken down car started working again. We stood around in the wind, once again, watching the pantomime. Finally we boarded and the ferry headed off. The ferry was packed. A British man started telling a Dutchman about how terrible the Piccadilly Line was. As it got out into the current, the ferry began to pitch and yarl more and more impressively. Apparently, when sailors finally discovered the way round Cape Horn, the Southernmost tip of the Americas, they preferred going that way as the Magellan Strait seemed even more dangerous. I’m sure the minor paranoia which more than one person on board was experiencing as the ferry fought against the current would have seemed absurd to a hardened sailor, but the crossing helped to give some idea of what the early navigators faced as they tried to find their passage around the Americas, through to the Pacific, in this cruel but astonishing part of the world.

{Thought: a visit to Tierra del Fuego is a kind of anti-tourism}

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PUNTA ARENAS 2

There’s a woman speaking English in reception. I’m upstairs eating breakfast. I can hear her but I can’t see her. Her accent is weird. It’s fluent English with an accent I’ve never heard before. A kind of rarefied posh (Lady Di) mixed with Kiwi mixed with something coarser or earthier. The woman starts telling the receptionist about how many Chileans there are working in the islands. I realise she’s from the Falklands. The thought crosses my mind that the Falkland Islanders are like the King Penguins. A breed you hear a lot about but never see, unless you travel to the most inhospitable places on earth. She asks the receptionist if he’d like to visit the Falklands. The reply is ambivalent.

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FUERTE BULNES

The first stop, an hour or so South of Punta Arenas, is Puerto Hambre. Port Hunger. In 1584 a group of 300 settlers arrived here. Their objective was to establish a community that would safeguard the territory for the Spanish crown. On a mild Summer’s day, it’s a beautiful, if chilly spot. The settlers arrived in March. Every month the hours of daylight change radically. At high summer dawn arrives at 4am and night around 11pm. In midwinter, dawn arrives at 11am and night falls around 3.30 pm. Within weeks, the hours of daylight would have begun to evaporate. The settlers, trying to build a home in a land where nothing grows, must have felt as though the night was closing in on them. The wind and the cold and the darkness and the emptiness. The odd glimpse of distant mountains through rainclouds. Dolphins and whales passing by like freemen in the Straits whilst they were trapped like lifers. By the time the British adventurer Thomas Cavendish arrived, three years later, all that was left of Puerto Hambre were the fresh ruins of a failed endeavour.

A little further up the coast is Fuerte Bulnes, founded 300 years or so later, in 1843. This is a classic Wild West fort, made out of timber, rebuilt in the 80s to the exact specification of the original plans. The guide points out that whilst the location is spectacular, offering commanding views of the strait, it was a grim place to be stationed, with the nearest fresh water 5 kms away as well as being brutally exposed to the elements. The fort has a history of mutiny and rebellion, eventually falling into disuse, before it was rebuilt a first time, as a historic monument, in the 1940s. Whilst the rest of the world was at war, the Chilean army made a historical reconstruction of a 19th century fort. Recently a state-of-the-art museum has been opened next to the fort; the juxtaposition of the high-tech museum with the bare-necessities fort feels like a fitting metaphor for the way in which the country has developed in the course of 150 years.

There’s a lookout at the far end of the fort. As ever, we were pressed for time. The tours try to squeeze more in than they can and you don’t get the time to savour the place. All the same, I managed to slip down to the waterfront. The Magellan Strait continued towards the Pacific. To the East lay Dawson Island, where the Pinochet regime sent its political prisoners. In the distance was the Darwin mountain range, the last, seismic gasp of the Andes. The water was calm and kind. Great tree trunks, deunuded of all flesh, lay scattered and whitened on the shore. Small birds, far too tame for their own good, flitted about just out of reach. Twenty kilometres further on, off-road, lay Cape Froward, the Southernmost point on the continental land mass of the Americas. It wasn’t the end of the world, quite, but it felt tantalising close, as close as the birds which continued to hop around as though man was as tame an animal as they were.

I reached down and picked up some flints as a momento. The craggy shore is slowly fragmenting , as it has for millions of years. The flints were sharp and felt comfortable in the hand. When I got back to the hotel, I placed them on the table. Hours later, I looked at them again. They looked like tools. Perfect tools. Tools which are as well designed as an iPhone or a Ferrari. And, in their heyday, far more valuable.

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LA VICTORIA & THE BEAGLE

If you go past the vast tax-free Zona Franca, past the garage and the statue to the Selk’nam on the road to Puerto Natales, you come to a small park where there’s a re-creation of Magellan’s ship, La Victoria, as well as Darwin’s Beagle (still in construction). The most striking thing about the Victoria is how small it is. Fifty sailors, at least, various animals, and captured natives crammed into a space not much bigger than a two bedroom flat, adrift on the ocean, heading into the waters which defined the word ‘uncharted’. When they got to the Magellan Straits, one of the Admiral’s other boats in the flotilla turned round and deserted, hot-footing it back to Spain. Bowie died last night, the news was there when I woke up this morning. If I was looking for a connection between his death and our visit to the ship today, it would be found in the lyrics of Major Tom. The only way you can begin to capture the sense of complete alienation the voyagers must have felt would be to imagine floating in a most peculiar way, in a blue planet earth, with the stars looking very different, each and every day.

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PUNTA ARENAS 3

An antiques shop in the middle of town has a sign outside, inviting tourists to come in and browse. The man working there is friendly. He tells us it’s his mother-in-law’s place. He’s a journalist by trade. He shows me his book of photos of Patagonia, illustrating all the things we’re not going to see. The nature shots look astonishing and it’s clear that you need to try and spend more time down here to get to know it better. Everyone asks us if we’re going to Torres del Paine, the vast natural park that’s a five hour drive away, but the truth is we don’t have time to go there for more than a day, which doesn’t seem enough. We mosey round the antiques shop, looking at an old wood burning stove and other curiosities. There’s a sizeable metallic object in a cabinet. The journalist gets it out for us to look at. It’s part of a British helicopter, which made a forced landing at Agua Fresca during the Falklands War. Chile supported the British, in a neutral sort of way, and allowed the helicopter, which was in trouble, to land. The story goes that the helicopter was destroyed, but not before a local got to it and cut off part of what might be a propeller. It’s for sale for a comely £90. I say only a crazy Brit would want to buy it, and the journalist adds - or a crazy Argentine. He’s happy to let me take photos of a little bit of lost history. He tells us he’s been to the Falklands, showing us the pictures in his book. There’s a weekly flight from Punta Arenas, which means you’re compelled to spend a week there before you can come back. He seemed to think that a week was plenty long enough.

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A professional type, North American, sits writing emails on his Macbook Air in the Cafe Chocolate Baeriswyl, the finest purveyor of hot chocolate in Punta Arenas. Taped over the camera on the laptop is a small strip, cut from a post-it note. On this strip is the following slogan, handwritten in biro: “It’s always right now’.

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