The driver of the pickup coasted downhill into the bus station in Tarapoto, riding in neutral with the engine off. Gas is expensive. Jesus and I booked front row seats on the upper floor of a large, touring bus. The huge panoramic windows created a greenhouse heating effect in the afternoon sun and the entire second story swayed unsettlingly around every curve and I pulled my bandana over my eyes and tried to sleep. It was an eight hour trip from Tarapoto to Chachapoyas. I woke well after dark, suspended over the road in a glass-enclosed crow’s nest that bobbed on an invisible sea. It wasn’t until the bus headlights flickered back on that I realized why the night had seemed so black. The headlights wavered, off, then on, then off again, at the least reassuring moments. A knot of people crowded the side of the road. Beams from a few weak flashlights shone on the white t-shirt and jean shorts of the dead man laid out a few feet away from his crunched motorbike. People behind and around me rubbernecked shamelessly. Onward we groaned, squeezing past other buses and trucks and around hairpin curves. “Chachapoyas 75km,” said a dented road sign.

Three AM was the magic hour for transport in Chachapoyas. Massive construction projects routinely closed the roads between Chachas and all points north, south, east, or west. Leaving the city meant catching a taxi or combi at three in order to clear the construction zone before it closed at six. Getting back required waiting on the other side until the road reopened at six PM. The city was our base for several days, and Jesus and I became regular customers at the street corner where the combis left. We’d show up at two-thirty AM, buy over-sweetened black coffee in tin cups from the older woman who dozed behind her gas burner and glared at me when I woke her up, and start asking around. Everyone told us something different. “That bus already left.” Or, “Si, si, it will be here, just wait.” “It’s that truck, that one’s going to Coechon,” “No, that one’s going to Luya.” “No, there are no cars to Leymebamba, you have to take this truck to Tingo first then wait there and maybe another bus will pass. What day is today? Tuesday? Yes, I think today there will be a bus in Tingo.” No one wants to say, “I don’t know.” We learned to ask everybody, twice.

One day, Jesus and I visited Gojta Falls, to the north of Chachapoyas, the third highest waterfall in the world. 771m (2,500ft) high, the force of the water as it hits the pool at the bottom creates a hurricane-force wind and drives a wall of mist fifty feet in every direction. Later that afternoon, we sat in the backseat of a taxi in a long line of cars, combis, trucks, and buses, waiting for the road to open. “¡El Perú Avanza! (Perú is advancing!),” read the back of the bright orange uniform of the construction worker holding traffic back. The woman in the front told us they were widening the road to allow the two-story tourist buses to cut through the mountains. “Breaking news,” the radio shouted suddenly. A bus had gone off the road in Luya, the next town over. “Cinco muertos.” Five people dead. We listened to the announcer talk on a cell phone to a hysterical woman who’d crawled out of the wreck. “No one is coming to help us, we are dying,” she said. “Dios mio, oh, Dios mio,” the woman in the front seat crossed herself. A few minutes later, the worker standing in front of us lowered his stop sign and moved the sawhorse barricade to open the pass. We zoomed into the opening, jockeying for position with the other vehicles, speeding around the newly widened gravel curves like racers in a cross-country speed match. The driver steered with his left hand and with his right fumbled in a CD case, selected a disc, and popped it in the stereo, cutting off the woman’s sobs on the radio. Led Zeppelin’s “All of My Love” rolled from the speakers and the driver honked and accelerated to cut off the taxi squeezing in on his right.

On our last morning in Chachapoyas, the cranky coffee vendor glared and sold me cold, coffee-flavored sugar water. I poured it into the gutter, then sat on the curb and leaned sleepily on Jesus’s shoulder. Two abuelitas wrapped in blankets sat next to us, waiting for a car going to Celendín, same as we were. This was market day in Celendín, they told us. We were lucky, because normally there are no cars to this town. But they didn’t know when a car might be coming. “Ask that driver. Maybe you can ride with him.” They pointed to a man who was weaving up the street toward an already overloaded truck. Six young boys and a couple of tired-looking men saw him coming and swung themselves up on top of the merchandise, burrowing into the blue tarp cover. The driver dropped his keys twice as he struggled into the cab. “He’s drunk,” Jesus whispered to me. A different truck, a flat bed with wooden-slat sides pulled in next, and I negotiated passage for the two of us. We crawled in the back, over sacks of grains and corn and mesh bags filled with other wares for the market. The truck stopped a few times on the way out of Chachapoyas, then began picking up speed. I slid into a hollow between the sacks and tried to sleep. It was cold in the back of the truck; wind slipped through the boards and sliced through my clothes. Another passenger settled onto the bags next to me and offered to share his blanket. The three of us, Jesus, the stranger, and I huddled together under the blanket, grateful for the body heat. The men slept. I watched the stars play overhead like a film strip, interspersed with overhanging eucalyptus branches, and I breathed the air of the moment: cold, tinged slightly with diesel and old wood, dust, and romance.

7 – 19 August

After such a show, Puerto Williams was only going to be anticlimactic.  My arrival coincided with the afternoon siesta.  I got a ride from the airport with a father and son in a blue flatbed truck who were picking up packages and supplies from the plane to deliver in town.  They dropped me off in the centro commercial, a muddy square smaller than a city block, boxed in by a series of diminutive shops and restaurants, all closed.  A ten minute walking tour let me drop my backpack at my hostel and showed me all the town had to offer.  The town’s most interesting attraction is the prow of the ship Yelcho, amputated from the rest of its body and planted in a small plot of grass in front of the naval barracks.  This is the prow of the Chilean naval vessel that rescued Shackleton’s men from Elephant Island in 1916.  I sat in the grass next to the monument and ate a cream pastry I’d bought at the (only) bakery.  I tried to imagine the gray steel ship breaking through the ice-clogged water, appearing like a beacon of hope to the men who’d been stranded for months, but the sun and the sound of the navy men doing calisthenics in the gymnasium behind me were distracting.  It’s hard to appreciate history when it’s 1) decapitated and 2) surrounded by a white picket fence.

The shops began to open again at 2:30, and I made the rounds, hunting for gas cannisters for my stove.  Two hours and six stores later, I now possess the only four cannisters that exist on the island.  They’re all half empty, but they’re all I have.  I am also now officially recognized on the street as “that crazy gringa who’s going to hike the Dientes Circuit – ALONE (¡dios mios!)”.  After I registered my hiking intentions with the local carabiñeros (police), I was stopped twice by uniformed officers, asking if I wasn’t afraid to be hiking by myself, and didn’t I want an official escort?  Word spreads fast in a small island town, and today, the crazy gringa and her search for “¿gas para camping? is the most interesting thing happening.  I extended my plane ticket yesterday to allow myself an extra two days in town after I finish the circuit (7-8 days), thinking that I’d want time to explore the urban Isla Navarino in addition to its wilds.  Little did I know.  Ah well – the mountains await.

This was the Navimag, not a luxury cruise. This was a four-day ferry ride with beds and a bar. Our meals were uninspiring, but filling, and were served on blue trays in the small cafeteria. My bed was a cozy upper berth within the labyrinthine lower cabin, with a soft, narrow mattress and curtains that could be drawn closed. The public address system crackled and popped with announcements throughout the day: movies, informative lectures on history, flora, and fauna of the Patagonian channels, and approaching points of interest along the way. The staff member in charge of announcements was a young German woman, and her careful delivery of messages in first Spanish, then English, then German became a subject of hilarious imitation. I’d been skeptical of taking the trip at the start. Though not fancy, this definitely wasn’t the sort of thing I’d normally do – it was expensive, and it was touristy. The Patagonian coastline is remote, inaccessible by road: the Navimag is the only option for those wanting to explore the 1500km stretch between Puerto Montt and Puerto Natales. Touristy or not, I wanted to see the Patagonian waterways, so Angus and I shelled out the cash and set sail.

In spite of the two hundred other people making the journey with me, I felt an incredible sense of intimacy with the environment.  Other than one tiny settlement that we passed on day three, we were the only people for miles and miles and miles.  No Carnival cruise ships rock these waters.  No commercial fishermen ply their trade, no pleasure yachts offer three-hour dinner cruises.  We saw one or two private fishing boats, and a lone yacht under sail. The channels and their treasures seemed to exist only for us. The weather changed, grew colder as we pressed further and further south into the uninhabited heart of Patagonia. On the afternoon that we passed the Pio XI glacier, the skies were the color of steel, and the wind tasted of ice. The third largest glacier in the world, Pio XI is eight kilometers of ice flowing slowly from the mountains to the sheltered waters of the channels, massive, mind-blowing. I stood on the deck with the rest of the passengers, and listened to the deep, rumbling voice of the ice as it settled and cracked and flowed. Huge white-blue icebergs floated on the still water, small only in comparison to the massive glacier face. Elbow to elbow, my fellow travelers and I were awed, all whispers and smiles. Marc leaned close to speak in my ear. “Everyone is so quiet.” I shook my head. “What is there to say, what can I possibly say in the face of all this?”

Later that evening, the glacier growing smaller in our wake, Angus, Clementine, Jerome, Marc, Ben and I drank pisco sours with glacier ice. Even in our glasses, the ice retained its voice; it cracked and popped and snapped and hissed until it sounded like we were drinking rice krispies. The sound of the ancient ice mingled with our chatter, our French and Spanish and English and our laughter. And the tourist ship rolled on through the night, a tiny floating hive of humanity, a speck in the sea, southward bound.

More pictures of the curanto, the cruise, and a photographic preview of blog entries to come…

You’ve seen this phenomenon in movies.  There’s some powerful, unconventional, emotional performance.  The audience is quiet, stunned, uncertain of how to respond, until one person stirs, putting his hands together once…twice…and then a little bit faster and a little bit faster as others begin to join him.  Slowly at first, but steadily, until the entire audience is on its feet, clapping, cheering, united in their adulation and enthusiasm for the performers.  It’s become a bit of a cliché, but after sitting in a bus on the side of the Pan-American highway for an hour, waiting for the six passengers that the bus driver forgot at the last station, the slow-clap seemed the only appropriate response.  As the bus shifted into gear and lurched into traffic, finally, I grinned at Angus and put my hands together once…twice…and then listened with glee as the entire bus erupted into cheers and hollers and laughter.

It was meant to be an eleven-hour bus ride from Santigao, south to Pucón, to Angus’s uncle’s farm.  First the bus was late.  Then it broke down.  Then it had to wait for the passengers it had left behind.  At first Angus and I were nervous, then incredulous, and then it just became entertaining.  We took turns at the window, watching the countryside roll past.  The hills around Santiago were brown and dry, but as we moved south they became greener, lusher, larger.  From hills to mountains to volcanoes.  We listened to our MP3 players and communicated in signs (Charades, rather than English or Spanish has become our first language.  As I struggle with the Spanish, I’m losing command of the English.  Inarticulateness is a new experience for me.).  Angus, the artist, drew himself an elaborate tattoo and I befriended the old Chilean woman across the aisle who wore a pale flowered dress and waved a black lace fan back and forth in front of her face.  She drew my attention to the recently-erupted Volcán Llaima as we drove past: a smoking black cone ringed with ashy clouds.

This was day four in Chile, and despite the monotony of the road, probably the most relaxing.  The first three days, in Santiago, I was in a daze.  Not four hours after landing, I was sitting at a table with a Chilean family, eating corn, tomatoes, and barbequed meat, struggling to speak Spanish, struggling to accept that this was reality.  Raquel, Raúl, and their children (José, 17, and Juan Pablo, 20) were helpful, welcoming, and patient, but it all seemed too far out.  Angus and I lazed through the scorching summer days (85-90F, easily) next to the family’s pool, ate what was put in front of us, and tried to follow the conversations that rolled around us like a hot Spanish wind.

Raúl took us on a walking tour of downtown Santiago (el Centro), where we saw La Moneda, the house of La Presidente, and had our picture taken with the carabineros in front of the mansion.  They wore sharp white uniforms and carried thin, jeweled swords.

For New Year’s Eve, the family ate a late meal, then took to the streets at midnight for the fireworks (fuegos artificiales) display.  People choked the streets, flinging confetti, kissing and hugging and wishing each other “¡Felíz año nuevo!”  Children ran and shreiked, champagne was poured, and when the fireworks ended, the party really got started.  Angus and I rode with José and Juan Pablo to an outdoor event stadium, and from 2 AM to 8 AM we danced, drank, and tried not to get lost in the crush of the 6,000 other young (16-20 year olds) revelers.  Raúl picked us up at the front gate of the arena at about 9 AM, just as the heat of the sun began to be unbearable, and we spent the rest of the day passed out by the pool.  The whole celebration might have been a hallucination; it still surprises me to realize that it’s 2008.

The timing of this place is disorienting.  The days begin late.  Breakfast is light, and the biggest meal of the day is at 1 PM.  There’s a snack around 5 PM, a light dinner at 10 PM, and then off to the discos when they open at 1 AM.  The keyboards in the internet cafés are different.  For the first time I can correctly apply accent marks and upside-down question marks without needing to consult Microsoft Word Help.  Supermarkets are overwhelming, and as I can’t understand numbers when they’re spoken to me, paying for things is a trial.  The young boys who bag my groceries get tips.  Taxi drivers do not.  Stray dogs are everywhere.  There is so much that is different, my eyes got tired, and my head hurt from trying to translate and absorb.  It was a relief, therefore, to get onto a bus and to have thirteen hours of nothing-time in which to work on assimilating the past days’ barrage of information and newness.

Not to say that the strangeness and unreality has disappeared.  Living on Angus’s uncle’s farm is like being in NZ.  We’ve been here for five days, hiking and exploring the countryside and enjoying being able to speak English.  I keep forgetting that I’m in Chile.  Still, there are new things to learn and plenty to keep us occupied, and there will be stories to follow.

In the meantime, ¡felíz año nuevo a todos!  Check out the photos: http://community.webshots.com/user/susanm483 and check back again soon!  Ciao for now…

My first night working as a shuttle driver, transporting drunken souls the mile or so between McMurdo and the Scott Base for the weekly “American Night” over on the Kiwi side of the island.  I’m from NH.  I know how to drive in snow, wind, sleet, hail, rain, fog, ice, deer, moose…but an Antarctic condition two storm proved to be a whole new game.  Gusting winds buffeted the van as I attempted to navigate the narrow pass over the hill.  Snow flew past horizontally, steadily lowering the visibility from perhaps 100 feet, 50 feet, 20 feet… Forward movement was measured in inches as I first tried to follow the reflective road markers, my high beams picking them up at odd moments through the curtain of snow.  When those vanished I dropped my headlights and followed the tire treads on the road directly ahead of my front left tire.  And in the moments when the wind blocked even my view of the hood of the van, I sat on the brake and marveled along with my passengers.  THIS is Antarctica.

It’s gone condition two twice more since then.  The wind has woken me, shaking my corner, ocean-view room, screaming through the plumbing, hiding and revealing buildings less than 50 feet away from me as I walk to work, my legs blown sideways each time I lift one to take another step forward.  If my face wasn’t shielded by goggles, balaclava, and the hood of big red, you’d be able to see the maniacal grin.  Roll on Condition 1!!

#2 – Flagging Field Trip!

Spent an entire day away from work, away from town, and miles away from reality.  Fifteen miles north of my current reality, to be exact.  In a Hagglund, a Pisten Bully, and two snowmobiles, ten eager souls and I drove and rode out onto the sea ice, along the edge of Ross Island to Cape Evans.  THIS is what I came here for: an impossible to duplicate experience in an extreme, beautiful and unique environment.  If I hadn’t been absolutely stupid with excitement, I could have wept with wonder.  Memories of the day have the delicate sense of a dream about them: more feeling than fact.  Our mission was to plant tall, bamboo flags into the sea ice, marking the safe route for vehicles traveling to the cape.  The lead vehicle laid down the line, and the rest of us took turns following behind, drilling into the bright blue ice with electrical and hand-driven augers, then setting the flags against the wind.  I drove the Hagglund (a giant orange bisected Swedish military vehicle)!  I drove the snowmobiles!  I stood on Antarctic ice and walked across a pressure ridge; I worked next to the Erebus Ice Tongue and within sight of the Barnes Glacier.  I gazed up at the sun, low in the sky, watching as it illuminated the snow blowing off of the islands and cast pink shadows on the Royal Discovery Range on the other side of the Sound.  I felt the -20something air chew through my gloves, and experienced the once in a lifetime opportunity to feel the (significantly colder) wind on my bare skin as I dropped my drawers and peed faster than I’ve ever peed before.  At the end of the day, the sun didn’t set: it melted.  It softened, losing its spherical form and oozing across and into the seam where the ice meets the sky.  The sun’s blood is red and yellow; I watched it spread from the snowmobile, sitting backwards, leaning against my friend Andre’s back as he drove, speeding over the frozen water on our way back home.

#3 – The aurora australis

The Southern Lights!  As the nights get shorter, the opportunities to witness these natural phenomena become fewer.  One night last week, however, they were visible from town, bright enough to overcome the building lights.  I stood with a friend, Brennan, on the back staircase of his dorm, and stared at the pale green wisps of…light? cloud? energy? fairy dust?  They resemble all of those, but are in fact something quite different.  They dance.  The music is far beyond our sense of rhythm; they seem to drift, disappear and reform in irregular patterns and intervals, but nothing this smooth, this beautiful, can be the product of an entirely random, senseless universe.

Forgive the laundry list…time is a precious and rare commodity here.  I rush through the last two weeks in order to focus on the coming days in more detail…wait for it.