Travel with Indigo

Puerto Williams started as a Chilean Navy town and that is just about all it is now.  It’s not as picturesque or as large as Ushuaia but there are some very nice people living in the town.  Most of the people are fishermen, mostly for spider crab, and the season is in the dead of winter.  Not appealing.  There is a very limited number of restaurants and bars–hardly any.

Overlooking the harbor is the bow of the ship Yelcho which is the one that rescued the crew of the British Antarctica explorer Shackleton from Elephant Island in 1916.  Located in Puerto Williams is the authentic southernmost bar in the world, perched in the topside of a sunken small ship, the Micalvi, attached somehow to a marina.  Apparently it sunk in the inner harbor in 1962 and was turned into a bar.

Chef Geraldine, Rick and I decided to go into town and by a real stroke of luck, we asked directions from a guy named Jaime who spoke no English but had nothing else to do so insisted on taking us on a tour.  We figured it couldn’t last too long but it turned into much more than we expected.  Jaime is a fisherman–this is not the season–and his wife and children were visiting in another town so he was available to help us.  In his vehicle, we toured the Navy housing projects and the civilian streets.  We went through the Centro Commercial which took about 30 seconds and then drove to a dam and waterfall that was surrounded by hiking trails.  We all went to a cafe where it turned out the owner Loretto spoke excellent English because she had been to school in Arkansas years before.  We had coffee and a piece of her cake and then went to the best grocery store in town (Simon and Simon’s) where we met the younger Simon and bought some stuff.  It really was a good store with homemade breads and pastries.  Jaime then showed us his boat and the little building where they were applying fiberglass and he explained to us how they used their traps to catch King crabs.  He introduced us to someone who right there sold us some frozen crab and then stopped at someone’s house, went into the garden and cut for us some fresh herbs.  We had a wonderful time and felt like we had really seen Puerto Williams.

At the marina was docked the Pelagic, a 70 foot aluminum hulled sailboat owned by a world-noted sailor named Skip Novak.  Phil and Rick told me about this boat because I had never heard of it.  Apparently Novak wasn’t there but his mate and crew were on hand at the Micalvi bar as they are every night when the boat is in port.  This slim vessel charters to the public and at full capacity, holds a mix of 11 passengers plus 3 crew.  Must be a bit crowded since they only have two bathrooms.  I was told that they cruise from Puerto Williams to the Falklands, down to South Georgia Island and the Antarctic, where they have been three times so far this year.  But like us, they are in port because of the weather in the Drake Passage.  Phil is thinking about chartering a plane to Antarctica to meet up with the Castillo but we’ll see how that goes.

We heard from Castillo that their crossing (the same day we had been planning) was pretty miserable with 15-18 foot seas and 40 knot winds on the bow.  Not pleasant.  So while thinking of them, we took the tender to a new hotel (open only for their second season) named the Lakutaia which was down the river on a hill.  We did not expect to find what we did: a very nice hotel with delicious food and a little putting green of sorts right out the front door.  We had delicious lamb chops and I even tried a pisco sour, which is fortified wine mixed with something sour and lemon and powdered sugar.  Not bad but clearly powerful.  Some of us went back to Indigo after dinner but some went to the Micalvi (bar described above) and didn’t return until about 3AM when the pregnant bartender told them she had to close because she had to get some sleep.  What a day!