Travels in a Thin Country (33 page)

‘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.

*

Puerto Montt, where the ship docked, was much further north than I wanted to be, so I had to take a shorter trip by water back the way I’d come. The journey through the islands on the
Puerto Eden
had meant that I’d missed the whole of the Eleventh Region, the remotest part of the country, and although much of it was impenetrable I intended to tackle the slices that weren’t. I didn’t like the idea of retracing my steps, but it was unavoidable in southern Chile.

A ship was due to sail that night, so I bought a ticket, sat down at a café on the docks and read a local paper. There was a story on the front page about a twelve-year-old girl who had given birth to her father’s child. She came from one of the isolated fishing communities I had sailed past. I often heard stories about the dark side of what looked like paradise. They seem to be told about remote settlements almost everywhere, but the nether regions of archipelagic Chile did seem exceptionally prone to such excesses: besides incest of every imaginable variant I was recounted stories of a range of highly imaginative forms of bestiality and other practices which would have done credit to a roll-call of Old Testament prohibitions.

Although the
Evangelista
was owned by the same company as the
Puerto Eden
, the two were as different as the desert and the icecap. The
Evangelista
was a passenger ship, capable of transporting four hundred people in comfort and offering reclining seats, televisions and a bar, and it was as empty as the
Puerto Eden
had been overcrowded: there were less than forty of us on board. For the first half of the twenty-two-hour voyage to Chacabuco, a very small port in the middle of the desolate and labyrinthine Eleventh Region, we sliced through thick fog. The other passengers were all men, and when they weren’t sleeping they entertained themselves by staring at me.

I slept on the floor, in my sleeping bag. Late the next morning the clouds evaporated and sunshine reflected off the glaciers as gulls skidded along the water, so fat with fish that their wings beat the surface as they tried to take off. There was another gringo on the ship, a Swede in his late twenties called Pontius Bratt. He was writing a paper on economic reforms under Pinochet at a university in Santiago. When we arrived in Chacabuco it was dark, and we had to wait an hour to disembark. Chacabuco didn’t have much to offer. Pontius and I found rooms above a bar lit by an orange light. There were two men in the bar, drunk beyond all sense of time and place.

I left early the next morning, before anyone else got up, and left the money for my room on the sticky bar. Another shabby, one-night hotel, passive provider of that delicious anonymity of transience.

I made my way then to Coyhaique, uplifted by the extravagance of the landscape, cleft by the coiled Simpson river. This was my final region of Chile, and it had been saving up the best till last.