En Patagonia: Chapter Two

 

Punta Arenas has a wonderful familiarity about it – I have more Chilean stamps in my passport than from any other country. It is one of the main gateway cities to Antarctica – certainly for those folk heading in and out of Rothera. And it’s not just those who are working for BAS (British Antarctic Survey) – several Transiting Aircraft will fly from Punta to Rothera where they refuel and spend the night (or multiple nights if the weather is bad), before heading to various different locations on the continent. This might be to the Pole, Union Glacier, or Neumayer (a German scientific research station). Many of the aircrew for these planes will return year after year, and so it’s really not uncommon to bump into a familiar face when you’re in Punta. There is certainly a wider Antarctic community vibe about the place. But it’s not just that – it’s also the familiarity with the landscape, of knowing which cafes and restaurants you like, of knowing where to go for a walk, and the peace of mind that comes from all of that. I really like Punta – I’m never there that long that it gets boring or loses its novelty, and yet I know it well enough to feel completely content there.

That first evening after arriving back – after unceremoniously dumping kit bags just inside the hotel room door, and star-fishing on the double bed, and taking a luxuriously long shower without worrying that you’re going to drain the reverse-osmosis plant – I went out for a quiet dinner with the pilots and the engineer of the Dash-7. It was a parting of the ways – David, Vicky, and Kristina would be headed back to Rothera in the morning, Al and Marie would be making their way north to the UK and France respectively, and I would be staying put in South America for a while. After eating we took a wander down to the front – there was a delicious warmth to the evening sun, so we carried our jackets and stood watching some remote-control car racing for a bit. There were also folk playing basketball, kicking a footy about, and practicing tricks on skateboards and BMX bikes. I found it all utterly fascinating, and I felt a gentle happiness as I watched on with friends, simply observing the scene.

The next couple of days were fairly unremarkable in many ways – I found that I was sleeping quite a lot, that realisation of just how tired you are when you finally stop. I took short walks around the town, I sat in cafes, I booked a string of buses for the next part of my trip, and tried to keep calm at the almost overwhelming sense of freedom that was now mine. I was by myself in a foreign land, there was almost no direction to my life other than that which was mine to decide. This in itself may not seem like anything out of the ordinary – but when you put it in the context of how life had been for the past four months, it felt like a strange world to navigate at first. When you’ve been craving anonymity for so long, and an escape from such a highly predictable routine, and when you’re suddenly gifted with all that you’ve been dreaming of - it can seem a little bit like loneliness and a life devoid of purpose initially. I found that without a rigid framework to mark each day I had to summon up huge amounts of motivation to do even the most basic of things. And with the vast array of choices now available to me, my ability to make decisions of any kind had just about gone out of the window entirely. I had to decide which type of coffee I wanted to drink before I went into a café, or else I would have been sat there for so long I would probably have got into some sort of panic and left before I could order a thing! And I found that I would go to eat at places that I had been to before, and would order the same thing that I had eaten there the last time because it was far easier to stick to what you knew than to have to consider something new. For me at least I needed the comfort of taking the easy option – I’m sure that others post-Rothera are different – and different for me would come anyway in the next few days. I had booked my bus routes to Argentina – a land I had never been to before.

On my last day in Punta before my travels began, I woke to glorious sunshine, a strong Patagonian breeze, and something that vaguely felt like energy! I put my running stuff on, packed a small bag containing an apple, a snickers bar, and a book, and took a taxi to the Reserva Nacional Magallanes – a beautiful, forested area situated on the hill up above Punta. It felt incredible to be amongst the trees- to breathe in the sights, sounds, and smells that came from the dense vegetation. I ran and walked my way around the trails, and I was almost reduced to a crawl in the higher-up sections which were out of the trees and exposed to the full extent of the wind. I estimated that at least six pegs would have been required to keep a single item of clothing attached to a washing line up there!  I got back to the Rangers Station an hour and a half before the time I had booked my return taxi for. So, I took my book out, sat on the grass, and read for a while. I also ate my apple and my snickers bar. I did have to admit defeat to that eventually – the unrelenting wind got to me, and so I went to sit inside. Also in my bag were a couple of pens and some paper, so I started writing a letter to a friend. There were a few other people waiting around in there, including some French speakers who were waiting for a taxi, too. I didn’t let on that I knew what they were talking about – not that it was anything secret or particularly interesting, they were mostly just saying how windy it was.

My taxi ride turned up at ten past five, and I was starting to feel quite hungry and had decided that I would go to Mesita Grande for a pizza when I got back into town. The taxi driver asked where I was from, and when he found out that I was English he began talking very animatedly about Margaret Thatcher for the next couple of minutes. I couldn’t understand all that much – but I got the general gist that he was a big fan, and he threw General Pinochet’s name in there a couple of times as well. I strongly suspected that the taxi driver thought that Margaret Thatcher was still alive, and so I thought that I should probably break the ‘news’ to him. Upon doing so, he let out a sigh, pointed to the sky, and said that Margaret must be with St Peter now. I didn’t really know what to say to that, so I sat there without reply and went back to thinking about which kind of pizza I was going to order later on.