Travel with Indigo

This is the day my pals arrive.  Jack and Peter are on the same plane, which is right on time, even after 20 hours of flying.  Captain Toby and I greet them, load their bags into the van we’ve stocked with an ice bucket, champagne and flutes, take them on a brief tour of town, then deliver them into the arms of the crew.  After a bit of post-travel relaxing and getting bags stowed, we all jump in the van and head back out to the airport to greet Steve, whose plane is actually early.  He gets the same welcome, of course.

Chef Geraldine has prepared canapes for our first evening together matched, as you might guess, with an appropriate wine, which begins flowing.  Stewardess Tonya has the salon and guest cabins immaculately prepared, fresh flowers and all.  That evening, we take a brief tour of a few pubs and wander about the beautiful and well-kept town square.

For dinner, we select La Tosca on the second floor of a fine colonial-era building facing onto the square, then enjoy a drink in the Shackleton Pub located in the Hotel Jose Noguiera.  Converted from a wonderful late 19th century mansion built on the town square by a local sheep baron, the hotel is the first place visited by Sir Earnest Shackleton after he was brought to Punta Arenas from South Georgia Island.  He came seeking assistance in getting the remainder of his men off of Elephant Island in the Antarctic, a mission at which he famously succeeded.

It is at this pub that I persuade my compadres to try the Chilean national drink, the pisco sour, an act of thoughtfulness on my part for which I am not yet forgiven.  Its flavor, or so they all say, is something on the order of cold, soured pea soup.  Or maybe sheep dip that has passed its expiration date.  Their ingratitude is shameful.

Following a sound night’s sleep for all, Indigo gets underway on our voyage through the western reaches of the Straits of Magellan and the southern end of the Chilean archipelago.  Right away we experience the weather that will dog us for nearly the entire trip: dense rain, light misting rain, sleet, snow, cold, high winds, fog–these intermixing in combinations that vary by the hour.  It’s the singles bar for bad weather.

As we make our way through the many canals and fjords, we are greeted by a landscape that is stunning by any measure.  Snow-capped craggy peaks, heaping blobs of igneous rock, massifs densely clothed in verdure, waterfalls nearly everywhere you look, wracked and gnarled outcrops of granite, grotesquely formed islands, and glaciers plunging out of the highlands into the sea.  Its green cover, where it exists, rises to a tree line hardly more than a few thousand feet high, testament to the harsh winter that now is just a few months away.

On one day, Captain Toby manages to squeeze Indigo into a tight channel where the mountains rise above us all around.  Mate Kyle (aka Shaggy or Lost) and Engineer Kyle (aka Diesel or Found) expertly tie off the stern to trees on opposite shorelines, and we drop both bow anchors for protection against the ever-present williwaws that erupt without warning.

Steve, Peter and I decide to take the tender and explore the area.  Jack is down with some flu-like germ he caught on his plane ride and remains behind.  After getting pelted with freezing rain, dodging kelp beds and undersea rocks, and churning through tide rips, we decide to go for a hike on shore, although the word “hike” is hardly adequate to describe the event.  Landing the tender on a rocky shore–there are no beaches–we tie the tender to a hefty rock and set out.  The footfall is the most remarkable any of us has ever encountered, quite a lot as if we were walking on soggy marshmallows.  Perpetually wet, the moss, lichens and assorted hardy scrub plants have formed a dense carpet of spongy resilience.  As there are no flat places in this entire archipelago, the going is upward, the least favored of the three alternatives.  And it’s dense with thicket.

When seen through the lens of its weather, the place has an eerie feel, as though it were the living set piece for a Steven King novel.  Evergreen trees stunted and warped by the winds into grotesque shapes, seldom reaching more than twelve feet high, surround us.  Oddly out of place here are dense tapestries of flowering vines, each flower a pale red bell shape not unlike a honeysuckle.  On one of these we spot a bumblebee of well-nourished proportions.  This, along with a very few tiny birds, are the only land-based wildlife we will see for the entire trip.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact of this area is its complete absence of large animals.  Quite unlike Alaska with its bear, moose, elk, deer, and much more, there is not a single large animal visible to the casual visitor, nor any sign of them.  It is also utterly devoid of humans and their habitations.  Even other vessels are rarely seen.  We saw one tiny fishing boat, one sailboat and, on the last day, one small cruise ship, all that in a week.  If you want to “get away from it all”, this is the place to do it.

After stumbling aimlessly through this impenetrable dripping brier patch, we decide, quite wisely in my view, to abandon our aging Audubon routine and return to the warm and not incidentally wine-filled Indigo.  We have covered in our expedition all of about 50 feet–Lewis and Clark, this is not.  It is back on board that we are greeted by the now deathly ill Jack Burnell, he with the pallor of Marcel Marceau and the voice of Joe Cocker.  It all begins innocently enough with the tickled throat, the unexpected cough, and the watery eyes.  Then it spreads to the hit-by-a-Mack-truck roadkill stage when all hope of a joyful life begins to fade.  We’ve all come down with the Jack Plague, and will keep it through the week putting a noticeable damper on the festivities.  We try to rally, and we share potions and nostrums, as apparently we’ve shared door knobs and Indigo air, but to no avail.

Each of us displays various talents in the competition for most artful sufferer.  In the art of coughing, I’d give the top prize to the gutteral eruption motif employed by Steve.  As a trained singer of opera (rock too), he has the lung power to blow out Indigo’s windows, to say nothing of our eardrums, but thoughtfully restrains this with an abrupt percussive B-flat, a tonal expression new to his repertoire and one he has no plans to employ in future performances.  Jack and Peter are tied for the Hang Dog Award.  Similarly pallid (though Jack made an ill-advised effort to improve his with red wine), both affect the fevered misery look to fine result, edging out Your Humble Servant on the last day of the competition.  As a consumer of the restorative known as Vitamin J (Jameson Irish Whiskey, 18 years old), I alone avoid the most noxious effects of the Plague.  it also helps that I’m sole judge of the competition.

Despite our condition, we manage to talk (very) little about business, a great deal about our angelic and flawless wives, tell a few jokes here and there, and not much else (that can be reported).  While under the influence, we shared a few secrets and confessed a few sins–at least they did.  I, having led a virtuous life thus far, kept quiet.  We learned from each other and enjoyed fine companionship.

I tried without noticeable success to convert Steve to the virtues of country music, playing a wide selection for his listening pleasure, but he demurred and bore a look that grew ever more anguished with each tune.  Steve told us about his love of opera and his (short-lived) career in it.  Then he played a recording of some lady apparently auditioning for employment as a police siren.  I told him I just didn’t think a police siren set the right tone for a good party.  More along the party lines, Steve also once sang in the well-known (to him at least) rock band called Axel’s Grease.  This at least displays an upward trend in his music development.  Peter and Jack, both CM fans, took a hands-off attitude to Steve’s lack of a proper upbringing in the music arena.  Peter and Steve came away from the trip having learned more about the Deep South and its Red Neck culture than they likely wanted to know (Jack already knew).

At Puerto Natales, the end of our voyage together, we are all fevered, snorting and coughing–Indigo’s salon sounding something not unlike a TB ward–and so decide to cancel a planned air charter through three of the finest national parks in South America.  It’s just too much for everybody, but especially for the guys facing 20-hour flights home.  So we pile into a van, travel to the local airport (charter flights only) and I see them fly off to get their connections.  But for germs and weather, it was a fine week with three great friends.

Upon arriving at Puerto Natales, the one question that cries out for an answer is: why is there a town here?  It once was a shipping point for sheep and wool from the surrounding estancias (ranches), but now is a town of veggie restaurants and hostels catering to the Birkenstock trekker crowd.  For this blog, its principal significance is that it is the place I get my first haircut in a year.  Before Indigo left Ft. Lauderdale, I vowed to myself that I would not cut my hair until we rounded Cape Horn.  Now that we’ve done so, I can at last get rid of the tangled and gooped-up thicket of decidedly gray hair before I need a perm.  In my infantile Spanish, I tell the lady in the unisex styling salon–it’s a long way to a real barber shop–what style I prefer to have carved out of the velcro mess and she does it, more or less along the lines requested.  It’ll do until I can get back home for a hair tuneup at Cliff’s Barber Shop.