Making It Up as I Go Along

by Marian Keyes

  Right, I’ll be back to you later on with my ‘first impressions’ of Ushuaia, the Beagle Channel, the ferocious cold and all that.

  7 p.m.

  We arrive in Ushuaia!

  The other passengers applaud when the plane lands!

  This worries me …!

  Okay, here are my first impressions of Ushuaia. Windswept and rocky and a triumph over nature = Ushuaia. The entire town looks like it’s built of corrugated iron and cornflakes boxes. It’s quite spectacularly horrible, but at the same time admirable. It’s balanced on the end of the earth and it’s got massive other-worldly, black-and-white mountains behind it, looming over it, shunting it into the sea. It makes me think of a tiny tenuous outpost on another planet.

  The whole place looks like it could be washed away in five minutes, but clearly that doesn’t happen because it’s still here, despite the high winds and perishing cold. The roads are packed mud and all the cars are filthy and you can tell just by looking at them that their suspension is but a distant memory.

  But there are bursts of unexpected beauty: there are loads of flowers – they might be delphiniums? Long skinny yokes like foxgloves?

  Our hotel is on the edge of the town and it’s overlooking the Beagle Channel and on the far side are more and more and more of those terrifying mountains. Rows and rows of them keep appearing, popping up into infinity.

  The hotel is lovely and glassy and full of views. Loads of people arrive to check in at the same time, so I’m guessing they’re probably going to be on the ship too, so myself and Himself are discreetly checking them out, but I told Himself, ‘Do not, under any circumstances, make eye-contact with them!’ We are shy peaceful types who find small talk difficult.

  PS: I’ve entirely forgotten about the Alexander Wang bag. Things are different now. New perspective. Yaze.

  DAY THREE

  Downtown Ushuaia!

  Christ. What can I say? If I lived here, I’d end up in the nuthouse in double-quick time. It feels so bleak and abandoned and godforsaken. Although, mind you, there are a fair few churches, which always flourish in places of despair, I find. There are two shoe shops, selling the kinds of platform boots that Ginger Spice used to wear twenty-nine years ago, and there are 400 souvenir shops, selling penguin T-shirts and penguin snow-globes and penguin bookends and penguin carvings and fluffy penguins, and in the windows, instead of human mannequins modelling the clothes, they have penguins (not real but as big as humans and unexpectedly glum-looking).

  I would buy any old shite, I’m famed for it, but after a while of this, even I flagged. ‘I can’t look at another penguin thing,’ I said. ‘My head will burst.’ So we went back to the hotel and watched the first episode of The Good Wife, which I liked. Himself said it wasn’t bad and I said, ‘No, it’s better than not-bad.’

  DAY FOUR

  The ship!

  11.30 a.m.

  We had to check out of the (lovely!) hotel at 10 a.m. but the bus isn’t coming until 3 p.m. so we’re all sitting here in the lobby, still studiously not making eye-contact. Everyone has discreet anti-seasickness patches behind their ears (except me, because I’m on too much anti-mad medication and have to make do with Kwells) and they’ve all gone slightly lurchy and glassy-eyed.

  I got a look at the passenger manifest last night at the orientation meeting and I am the only Irish person! At least half, maybe even two-thirds, of the passengers are from the United States and lots also from Canada and some from the UK and Australia. One Pole, two Japanese, two South Africans and one Braziliard. Oh, and two from Taiwan!

  1.29 p.m.

  I have dulce de leche ice cream and Himself has dulce de leche crème brûlée. They are magnificent.

  4 p.m.

  We board the boat! I’m so excited. We’re on our way to see the penguins! There are about 120 passengers; the demographic seems to be almost entirely baby-boomer people, but there are little pockets of texture – three Asian-looking hipster lads with amazing hair and groovy glasses and bright neoprene T-shirts, for examples.

  Also, there are two young Australian backpackery types and their conversation seems to consist of dire stories of how they were ‘ripped off’ buying four beers in São Paulo, or ‘ripped off’ when they were changing money in Montevideo, or ‘ripped off’ when their tent was stolen from above their heads while they were sleeping in a public park in Lima. They seem to have very bad luck, God love the pair of them.

  5 p.m.

  The orientation meeting in the Oceanic Lounge, where we meet the staff of twelve who do the excursions and talks and whatnot. They’re all scientists of some ilk – geologists, marine biologists, game rangers – but they also drive the Zodiacs (the little boats that bring you from the ship to the land) and are cheery and enthusiastic and really lovely.

  They are at pains to tell us that the crossing is expected to be as smooth as the Drake Passage ever can be. That at around 11 p.m. the ship will be leaving the protected Beagle Channel and will go into open sea, but really it’s going to be freakishly calm.

  7 p.m.

  Dinner. Delicious. The two young Australian backpackers have just discovered that the cruise is ‘all in’ and that they can have as much beer as they want without having to pay for it. They can hardly countenance such a notion. They have never been so UN-ripped off, in all their days! Their delight is – well – delightful!

  8.45–9.45 p.m.

  We watch a show about how cold the Antarctic is.

  10 p.m.

  We turn in.

  10.59 p.m.

  The sea is as calm as a millpond.

  11 p.m.

  The ship turns into a roller coaster! The sea goes wild, the swell is enormous, the ship feels like it’s balancing on its side, then it swoops down into a hollow, then swings up on its other side. This continues all night. I swalley Kwells by the fistful.

  DAY FIVE

  The ‘notorious’ Drake Passage!

  I accidentally have breakfast with a creationist!

  First I have to tell you that the sea was so rough and the ship so bouncy that when I was putting my sock on, I took a tumble into the shower. I had to lie on the floor to put my jeans on. And when I lurched down to the breakfast place, the staff told us that this was the calmest crossing they’d had in living memory.

  Right. The story about the creationist. See, in the dining room, most of the tables are for six people or eight so you get your grub at the buffet and then you ‘join’ people already sitting at a table, and you say, ‘May we join you?’ It’s bad form to go off and start a ‘new’ table until the partly occupied one is full. And obviously you have to make chat with the people you’ve joined. But last night, due to a stroke of tremendous good fortune, Himself and I got one of the very rare tables for two (I think there might only be three in the whole dining room). So last night we only had to chat to each other as, all around us, everyone else bonded. ‘SO WHERE DO YOU GUYS COME FROM?’ ‘WHAT DO YOU GUYS DO OUT THERE?’ ‘IS THAT A FRANCHISE?’ ‘YOU MAKE A LOT OF MONEY DOING THAT?’, etc., etc.

  I live in dread of being asked what I ‘do’, because:

  a) They ask, ‘So have I heard of you?’

  b) Or they have heard about me but say, ‘I don’t trouble myself with that kind of trash.’

  c) They say, ‘YAH, I GOT A GREAT IDEA FOR A BOOK!’

  d) They say, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?

  e) They say, ‘Any of your books been made into a movie?’

  In order to avoid these eventualities, Himself and I have several cover stories ready. ‘Himself
here pretended to get injured at work and we scammed a big fat wedge out of his employers and we’re living on the settlement money. Jump up there and show the man your limp’ is the one we elect the winner.

  Anyway, this morning there was a woman sitting on her own, and Himself and I asked if we could join her, and she said, ‘Sure. My husband is sitting over there.’ And right enough, her husband was at another table, and it wasn’t full, there was still one empty chair at it, so I thought, ‘That’s a bit strange, but each to their own.’

  Then we were joined by two of the staff, two lovely mens who have PhDs in continent formation and albatross feathers and similar. And we were chatting pleasantly about the Andes and how they were formed 33 million years ago – you know, nice, uncontroversial, breakfast conversation, appropriate to an Antarctic cruise, when suddenly Missis-My-Husband-Is-Sitting-at-a-Different-Table-to-Me pipes up, ‘Let’s not forget that the planet is only 5,000 years old and that human life originated in the Middle East.’

  Well! I admit I thought it was some sort of joke! But then she says, ‘All life is thanks to God the creator.’

  She was serious! And we were all mortified. And I was thinking, ‘What are you doing, coming on a trip like this, you raving lunatic?’

  Very quickly we finished up our toast and made our excuses.

  My first breakfast on board was not a success.

  All day

  The weather is extremely bright and there’s heat in the sun and the water is very blue. But the sea is as rough as a badger’s arse and many of the passengers seem to be seasick.

  Outside our window is a massive white bird, staring in at us, giving us the quare eye. It stays with us all day and Himself says it is an albatross.

  You see, Himself, though he denies it until he is purple in the face, likes birds. He set up a bird feeder at home and gets annoyed when the pigeons sit on it and scare away the smaller birds, and he’s always looking out the window and saying, ‘Is that a dove? Well, you hear the phrase “dove-grey” and it’s definitely grey.’ Chatting away to himself, like.

  But whenever I say, ‘You’re fond of birds,’ he says he isn’t. I tell him there’s no shame in it, but he is adamant that he has no interest. I think he thinks it’s a boring thing to like. Or maybe an ‘old’ thing.

  DAY SIX

  Land ahoy!

  Humpback whales ahoy!

  10.30 a.m.

  We weren’t expected to make landfall until tomorrow, but due to the ‘freakishly calm weather conditions’ we’ve gone much, much faster than expected, so much so that at 10.30, when Himself came back from the geology lecture, we spotted some things on the horizon that we thought might be clouds. But we stared at them and stared at them until we realized that they actually are land – the South Shetland Islands. And now we’ve just got an announcement that we’ll be getting off the ship and going on an expedition this very afternoon!

  I do a hasty dress rehearsal of my expedition clothing: one technical vest, a second technical vest, a technical fleece, a down parka, a special yellow waterproof jacket that ‘lock-hard’ men and lollipop ladies favour, a pair of technical long johns, a second pair of technical long johns, ‘furry’-lined trousers, waterproof over-trousers, two pairs of special thick knee-socks, a blue hat, a pink hat and a white furry hat, a pink ear-protector, a purple neck-gaiter, two pairs of technical gloves and a pair of white mittens which look like boxing gloves. I can hardly stand up for the weight of clothes, but they’ll be needed by all accounts.

  The land is hurtling towards us. Big, black, looming, sheer cliffs, and pointy, flinty islands and icebergs which look like they’re made of frozen marshmallows. It’s coming up on us really fast and it’s awe-inspiring and a bit scary.

  Does anyone feel like writing a dystopian novel set in the near future, where the world powers are jostling to own Antarctica because the rest of the world is used up? I’d be no good at writing that sort of thing, but I’d love to read it.

  And here are the whales! Two humpbacks and there’s just been an announcement that due to all the stuff to look at, Liliana’s lecture on penguins has been cancelled.

  Another announcement: the ship’s stabilizers are being taken in – be carefuls!

  PENGUINS!!!!!! Penguins at one o’clock! Swimming in the open sea. Doing little curvy lepps, like dolphins do. And, oh my God, an iceberg has just gone flying past with a load of chinstrap penguins standing on it. Really belting along, they are. They look like they’re actually driving the iceberg, like they’ve decided to escape from Antarctica and the iceberg is their get-away car. ‘Keep the foot down there, Patsy!’ Very good at maintaining their balance. And now they’re gone, but there are several more gangs of them swimming all around the ship.

  Himself has just taken a tumble – it must be something to do with the stabilizers coming off – but he’s up on his feet again and he says he’s grand.

  Every twenty or thirty seconds another batch of penguins appears out of the black water, like they’re putting on a show for us.

  Out on deck, the cold is phenomenal but one of the Asian hipsters is wearing a pair of paisley-patterned shorts and khaki-green Crocs. Maybe it’s because he’s young that he can withstand the cold. No sign of his two comrades. Perhaps they are in the cabin, throwing down some sounds or maybe making a short experimental film or doing their (frankly magnificent) hair.

  We’re really close to land now and the water isn’t exactly black, it’s like a gunmetal grey, and the icebergs aren’t white but sort of a pale-green colour, not dissimilar to the ‘shade’ of the Alexander Wang handbag that I’ve entirely forgotten about.

  12.30 p.m.

  And here is the bing-bong announcing lunch! Run!

  1.45 p.m.

  We took lungeon with a lovely lady from South Africa and her niece, who are travelling together. We exchange pleasant small talk and no one asks what anyone ‘does’.

  2.30 p.m.

  We leave the ship and whip across the sea in the little zodiac boat. The sky is blue and sunny and the snow on the mountains glares like silver.

  We land on Half Moon Island, which is RIDDLED with chinstrap penguins. Thousands and thousands of them, all along the beach and up on the cliffs. They behave exactly like penguins – they waddle, they hop and they slide downhill on their bellies, using their wings like oars. They are delightfully comical!

  They have really cute pink feet and they’re not a bit afeerd of us humans: they come right up to us and cut across our paths and bustle along, looking like they’re in an almighty hurry, like they’re late for something or they’ve just remembered that they forgot to turn their iron off. ‘Out of me road, I’m in a ferocious hurry!’

  Up on the cliffs, being minded, are the fluffy baby penguins, which look nothing like their parents.

  And the racket out of the adults! They shout in unison, like they’re doing a football chant. ‘Luton are shit! Luton are shit! Luton are shit! Come on, everyone, Luton are shit!’

  They stretch their necks long and throw their heads back and open their gullets and howl at the moon like mad yokes.

  7.30 p.m.

  Dinner. We have got a bit of a handle on the other passengers now. Mostly from the US, like I said. The three Asian hipster young lads, they are FABULOUS! One has hair like Sideshow Bob and looks like he’s wearing a black sweatband just on his hairline. The second has an auburn-coloured quiff and matching goatee-facial hair. The third has ginormous Perspex glasses, the type you wear if you are working for Securicor. At all times, at least one of them is wearing a lumberjack shirt. Himself says
it is only a matter of time before they cycle into dinner on a ‘fixie’. We cannot establish what land they’re from because they’re chatty with each other, but in general very quiet.

  There are many solo travellers on board, which I find admirable in the extreme. Many young mens – some Scandinavians, some US citizens and an Asian (am I allowed to say ‘Asian’ without incurring the wrath of someone?) who might be Japanese or Korean or Taiwanese. And a fair few lone womens also. So far I have identified an Australian and a French lady.

  DAY SEVEN

  Deception Island!

  A misty, colour-free day. We make landfall on an island that is a deserted Norwegian whaling station and, well! The atmospherics! Ghostly and spooky and strange and sad and fascinating and fabulous. It’s a (still active) volcano, so the island is surrounded by sulphur pools which are steaming up into the terrifyingly cold air. The smell! Mother of divine! Like there are 40,000 hard-boiled egg sangwidges sitting on the shore.

  I love it here. Love, love, love it. It should be called Desolation Island. Because of the volcano-ness, the sand is black. Everything is in shades of charcoal – dark grey, light grey, medium grey.

  Two wooden fishing boats, bleached to the colour of nothing, lie rotting on the black sand. Whitish whale bones litter the place. A long, low farmhouse – once the home to the poor-bastard Norwegians – still stands but the roof has caved in. A short distance from the house are piles of stones, each topped with a cross and bearing Norwegian-looking names.