Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  ‘All bosses are bastards,’ announced the marine on my left, kicking an innocent radiator. The pair of them had been put ashore for bad behaviour and were waiting to hear what their punishment would be.

  ‘What I need is a good night out and lots of bottles of pisco. Fuck the bosses.’

  This sentiment hung in the air as the three of us sat there, damp, miserable and planning our revenge, until the door swung open and a tall captain appeared, immaculate in crisp navy blue and polished gold. He stopped in front of me, saluted, clicked his heels and handed me my passport.

  ‘Capitán Lathrop, Señora, a sus órdenes.’

  The marines leapt to their feet and looked from the captain to me and back again with abject horror, obviously deducing that I was a plant. They stood like saluting statues as I shook hands with the captain, looked him in the eye and tried to compose myself. There is much truth in the cliché about men in uniform.

  ‘Dismissed.’

  He put the marines out of their misery. I cast around for my very best Spanish and told him it was my life’s ambition to reach Tortel and that my only hope was aboard his ship. He in turn looked me in the eye.

  ‘I would be delighted to take you, but the ship is very overcrowded and cramped, and there is no room except in the marines’ quarters, and I could not under any circumstances whatever put you in there.’

  That did sound rather gruelling.

  I found that a gas-carrier was leaving for Chacabuco, but the manager of the shipping company that owned it told me, after I had waited two hours for him to return from his cousin’s wedding reception, that it was against international regulations for such a vessel to carry passengers. My only hope, at five o’clock, was the regular cargo ship which left every ten days for Puerto Montt and which carried a few passengers in portacabins on deck. These places were taken weeks in advance, but with some desperate lobbying I procured a passage, and to celebrate I went for a farewell drink with William, one of the footballing yachtsmen. He had left the Creighton to continue his journey overland, and he had with him a British white-water rafter. It was 9 March, and all three of us had picked up mail from home that day. The boys were crowing over their Valentine cards, and thought it was inordinately funny that I didn’t have any. They went on to entertain me with stories about the rough passage I was to endure on my cargo ship for four days and rushed to their dictionaries for a translation of Golfo de Penas, the name of a notorious stretch of water I had to cross in archipelagic Chile.

  ‘Gulf of Miseries,’ cried William, delighted.

  ‘Gulf of the Torments,’ said the rafter with obvious glee.

  Bloody men, I thought.

  I caught the last bus to Puerto Natales, a port three hours away to the north whence my ship departed and the end, virtually, of the road. After that it was fjords, islands and icecaps. It was still pouring with rain, and the light faded on a dark blueish-grey and cadmium yellow Patagonian landscape. We stopped to pick up a man waiting next to a single cinnamon tree, the pair of them illuminated in a pool of light spilt through the window of a saloon bar. Most of the passengers on the bus were Natalians who had travelled from Puerto Montt via the long Argentinian loop. When the first lights of Puerto Natales glittered on the horizon against the background of Last Hope Sound the passengers shouted ‘Las luces! Las luces!’ (The lights! The lights!), and it was a hopeful introduction.

  It was wet in Puerto Natales. I checked into a wooden boarding-house with huge rooms and a woodburning stove in the hall around which people had draped damp clothes, and the sweet smell of wet wool drying opened doors in my memory. The owners of these clothes, I learnt later, were waiting for my ship. Everyone who came to Natales seemed to do so in order to get somewhere else. It was a basic kind of place: bars with steamed-up windows and dripping horses tied to telegraph poles in the wide mud streets. A lot of the men looked like John Wayne.

  I took one organized tour during my six months in Chile. It was a daytrip to the Torres del Paine national park, the only place in the country known to all tourists and travellers and one where it is essential to spend at least a week. An authoritative and normally po-faced book called South America’s National Parks published in the United States by a company called The Mountaineers says this about Paine:

  Torres del Paine is not a mere park, but a park of parks, a destination of travellers to whom a park is more than a place in which to be entertained, but rather an experience to be integrated into one’s life. Torres del Paine is the sort of park that changes its visitors …

  ‘Resist the temptation to take a one-day tour,’ the book went on to recommend. I didn’t like being given that kind of advice, and took a small-minded pleasure in refusing it, although the fact was that I genuinely didn’t have time to do the park properly because my cargo ship was leaving the next day. I rather hoped that to make up for my failure to devote a respectable period of time to the park, the tour would at least be spectacularly bad, but it wasn’t. The guide was called Fabien, and he was young, helpful and very well informed. He drove me from Natales to the park in a Japanese car with two elderly Argentinians. These latter were themselves Patagonians, and a debate simmered for the first hour about the relative merits of Chilean Patagonia (of which Fabien was a native) and its Argentinian counterpart. I asked about the Patagonian boundaries – where it began and ended – and this provoked a furious exchange of views. It appeared that Patagonia possessed the ultimate in topographical mystique: like Tartary and Christendom, it wasn’t pinned down by boundaries. It was outside the mundane administrative framework of provinces and countries; it existed on a higher plane.

  I asked if they could sum up the difference between Chilea Patagonia and Argentinian Patagonia in one sentence.

  ‘Absolutely none at all except the Chilean bit has mountains,’ said the Argentinian.

  ‘Quite,’ said Fabien, and that was that.

  At the Milodón Cave between Natales and the park we saw a fibreglass replica of the fěted prehistoric Giant Ground Sloth, an apologetic cross between a dinosaur and a bear. The cave was rather beautiful. The Argentinians, I noticed, had acquired the habit of calling each other ‘mammi’ and ‘pappi,’as if their relationship had been subsumed in its entirety by their numerous progeny. Pappi videoed us standing next to the fibreglass model.

  We followed the cordillera then, the landscape still rimed, and Fabien waved at ponchoed men on tall horses driving immense flocks of sheep. He pointed out large lone ranches, the focal points of vast tracts of dry yellow land. For several miles the sun shone into clear air, and the dull and dreamy colours sharpened. But then a dun wall of vapour appeared, and the hillsides swirled in the mist. Mammi never stopped talking, though she was obviously used to being ignored as she never seemed to expect a reply.

  As soon as we entered the park we saw hundreds of tawny guanacos. These animals had got rather a bad press. Their habit of spitting when cross was so well-known in Chile that the water-canons used on protestors during the dictatorship were named after them. The rheas were more difficult to spot – but we did find some, ungainly quilted ostriches silhouetted against a pale granite mountain, the peak of which had a slate coating, like chocolate sauce frozen on an ice-cream cone. It wasn’t until much later that the three granite towers (the Torres of the park’s name – actually crystallized rock masses) solidified in the mist. One of them was over 7500 feet high.

  ‘It makes me feel humble,’ said Pappi.

  At Lake Grey we walked across ribbed sand towards the icebergs, and in the woods behind them we are box-leafed barberry fruits, the elixir of Patagonia, which cast their spell if you taste them and compel you to return. As we stained our lips red we listened to Magellanic woodpeckers, and once or twice the crimson crest of the male flashed between branches. Among the waterfowl of the Paine lakeshores Fabien had pointed out a fat bird called the Chiloé widgeon which sang a three-syllable chorus; when I listened properly I heard a finely tuned orchestra vibrating through the cold
air, percussion furnished by the high-pitched squeal of a piqued guanaco.

  As we drove back to Natales at sunset coots, flamingos and black-necked swans were gliding together on a small lagoon near Lake Sarmiento. A flock of the Chekhovian swans, breaking the silence with the synchronous flapping of their wings, flew towards the mountains, dark necks horizontal against the bruised sky. The clouds were backlit in a way now very familiar to me down there in the far south, and upland geese patrolled low over the yellow, green-tufted steppe.

  Before the sun rose I crossed the gangplank of the Puerto Eden, a seven-tonner sitting gloomily on the dark Natalian water. I found my cabin, and lay down on one of the six bunk beds, breathing stale air. Two young Germans arrived.

  ‘It’s going to be a long trip,’ said the woman. ‘What are we going to do to amuse ourselves?’

  ‘I can think of one thing,’ said her boyfriend, embracing her.

  I thought, I’m going to be lying here seasick for four days with people bonking in German all around me.

  Alongside the cabin thirteen trucks were loaded with sheep, youngish cows and horses. They were packed tightly together, with no space to lie down. The sky lightened, and people milled around on the top two decks. When the ship’s hooter blew the animals panicked, and the cows shat on each other’s faces. Six dolphins saw us off.

  The nice man who had found a ticket for me had put it about that I was a journalist, and the captain invited me up onto the bridge, apologizing that my berth was below deck with the ‘small herd’ (he was referring to the tourists, not the animals). I assured him I was quite happy, and he introduced me to the second mate.

  ‘Peter Shilton,’ said the second mate when he found out I was English. ‘I am Peter Shilton.’

  His real name was Patricio, and he was a sad character in his mid-forties, with Brylcreemed hair, dark circles under his eyes and a wife who had divorced him. He was embarrassingly kind, regularly placing tea, sandwiches and whisky on the ledge in front of me, explaining weather patterns, showing me tidal charts and poring over Admiralty maps to point out exactly where we were. Given my affection for Mornington Crescent I was disappointed to note that we were not going to pass Mornington Island. It was on an Admiralty route, and we were confined to commercial channels.

  The captain wore dark glasses all the time, even when he raised his binoculars to his eyes, and this made him look sinister, an impression supported by his generous applications of pungent aftershave. His name was Trinquao, which conferred upon him a Rabelaisian flavour he did not deserve. The ship, he told me, was travelling a route commissioned by the government in 1978 when Argentina closed the southern border crossing. The border had since reopened, but Chilean truckers preferred the maritime passage, as it was cheaper.

  The Puerto Eden waited for an hour in the shadow of a mountain until the tide facilitated her passage through the Angostura Kirke, one of the narrowest navigable routes in the Chilean waterways. To steer us through, the captain, a study in concentration, called instructions to the seaman at the helm behind him. The water was as smooth as an ice rink, and the air as cold, but the sky was vivid blue, and the sun shone. Shortly afterwards we sailed past the silent expanses of the vast Alacalufe Forestry Reserve, and I thought what a nerve they had, naming their park after a people their forebears had systematically massacred.

  A hundred people were incarcerated on the 340-foot Puerto Eden as well as the animals, trucks, two bulldozers and a few cars. Besides twenty-seven crew members there were twenty truckers, a handful of students returning to university, a large family who didn’t stop eating for four days and about forty foreign tourists. The latter consisted almost exclusively of backpackers ‘doing’ South America. They were mainly German, with a few North American, French, Dutch, Australian and Swiss. I shared the two triple-decker bunks in my cabin with three Australian men and the German couple; the room was in a kind of portacabin on deck, next to the horses, and it had no windows. The ship’s administrators had made quite an effort to make it almost as bad for us as for the animals. The ‘dining rooms’ were on the second floor of the portacabin, one for the truckers and one for us (as there were more of us, we had to use ours in shifts). The two rooms received completely different food, and the rotten-toothed truckers dined on steak and salmon while we, the rich orthodontized offspring of the West, were ladled greasy soups and watery stews. Breakfast consisted of two slices of stale processed bread with a slice of luncheon meat between them.

  ‘This was sure worth getting up for,’ said a Californian biologist the first morning.

  What was worth getting up for was the view of the islands, and it was different every day. Stepping out of the fetid cabin was a thrill.

  I spent the days on the bridge and the evenings with the travellers, and time slid by rather agreeably. There was one young man who was always alone; he looked different to the others, and they ignored him. He had shaved half of his head, and the hair that was left was long, blond and floppy, reminiscent of the post-punks of Camden Town. His Oxfam overcoat stood out next to the brightly coloured German outdoor gear, and he looked pinched and unhealthy, whereas the others exuded vigour. On the second night I shared a bottle of pisco with him. He was a British climber, and he had just spent five weeks getting to the top of Torre Central in Paine. That granite tower, over 7500 feet high and with a 3600-foot face, has only been conquered by thirteen teams since the first man stood on the summit in 1963. Paul had slept in a tent he had made at home in Wales which hung from one point on the rock, suspended over half a mile of empty space. When he got to the top he and his partner only stayed there a minute because they were afraid they would be blown away. They used half a mile of rope and had allowed themselves to take up one book each. Paul had chosen a physics text book. He had been sponsored by the top climbing equipment firms, but was planning on selling all his gear in Bariloche, an Argentinian resort, to raise cash for a ticket home. He was diffident, even difficult, and he chose his words carefully, the antithesis of the strident backpackers; although he wrote pieces for the climbing press he said he found it painful because for him climbing was an intensely personal experience. His vision was to marshal all his mind, all his body and all his spirit to climb higher. Over the next two days I coaxed stories out of him, the pupils of his eyes as small as the hearts of grey cornflowers in the sunshine of the top deck.

  Months later I unearthed an account of Chris Bonington’s ascent of the Torre Central, recorded in The Alpine Journal in 1963, before Paul was born, and I relived the thrill of the climb, not on a cargo boat in the Patagonian fjords but in the sound-dampened hush of the British Library Reading Room.

  The ship docked only once, and that was at its namesake, Puerto Eden. At about noon one day twenty painted houses emerged out of the vapour, and half-a-dozen fishing boats came rowing out to meet us. They drew up alongside our ramp and loaded boxes of smoked mussels onto the ship (the deep-water ones they call cholgas), shouldering crates of beer from the hold in exchange. There were brown mussels in bunches too, strung together on reeds, and women as leathery as the cholgas humped them swiftly in the light rain. The first mate, who was much younger than Patricio, much quicker, and much more handsome, turned his head away and suppressed a smile as wads of cash were pressed from hand to hand, payment for illegally caught king crab.

  The dozen Alacalufe in Puerto Eden are the purest alive. The settlement was on the first steamer route from the Magellan Strait up the Pacific coast, and this brought regular contact to the northern Alacalufe. They remained far more isolated than their relations to the south nonetheless, as their territories had little to offer the predatory Europeans and mestizos. One erect old man had come from the village to stand on deck in his Wéllingtons. The third mate, a short, wiry individual who had done well for himself and had a gold tooth to prove it, tried to engage him in conversation for my benefit, but extracted oñly monosyllables.

  ‘He talks,’ said the third mate later, ‘like you, with an accent
.’

  Whenever we approached a difficult strip of water the dark-glassed captain appeared and stood on the bridge calling his instructions. Once we squeezed past a very small island presided over by a white statue of the virgin emblazoned with the words,’ ‘Gracias Madre’ (Thank You Mother).

  ‘The only virgin in the zone,’ whispered the first mate.

  The tourists quietened down as we saw from our maps that the long, rough route across the open water of the Golfo de Penas – the Gulf of Distress – was only an hour or two ahead, and wild rumours of atrocious weather reports circulated through the cabins. I thought of a line I had read in the diary of an Englishman shipwrecked in that gulf in 1741. On 25 December he records that he ate a pair of raw sealskin shoes for his Christmas dinner. The midshipman on the voyage was the teenage John Byron, the poet’s grandfather; the ship was called HMS Wager, and it was on its way to plunder Spanish settlements on the Pacific coast. They had a horrible time on the shores of the Gulf of Distress. Byron went on to become a vice-admiral, but he was always dogged by miserable weather; the poet said of his grandfather, ‘He had no peace at sea, nor I on land.’

  Patricio came to my cabin with some blue seasickness pills, and I took them. A smoking volcano appeared just before we left the friendly islands on either side and sailed into the ocean, and a wandering albatross flew over the deck.

  On the fourth day we woke to islands again: bottle green and intermittently disappearing into white mist, a landscape drifting in and out of consciousness. It was true that there are a thousand islands in archipelagic Chile. The gulf had not troubled us, and I learnt from Patricio that the name doesn’t refer to distress at all. It was originally spelt Peñas (‘cliffs’), and in the hands of British cartographers the tilde dropped off, leaving the incorrect Penas. I made a note to write to William and the rafter about this. At breakfast an air of mild celebration infused the dining room, muted only when we noticed a dead horse being winched overboard. Later, the islands melted into gradations of blue, from a rich cobalt to a light Wedgwood wash, and we lay on the decks like lizards after the cold, wet weeks of Patagonia.