19th of January 2024
A bird strike on the engine aborts our take off from Santiago and causes a two-hour inspection and refuel delay. Even though the flight time is only four hours, it means I’ve been sat in the same seat for most of the day. I’m certainly going to miss my connecting bus (!) at the other end. The family eating McDonald’s in front, and the children using my seat as a high-hat behind, severely test my Stoicism and surf-induced calm.
On final arrival at a large garden shed at the end of the runway in Punta Arenas, I’m at once conscious that I’m quite literally at the end of the world (there are tours picking up for Antarctica). This feeling adds to the intensity with which I plead with the bus driver for a seat on the final bus to my end destination, Puerto Natales. It’s a three-hour ride and if I don’t get this, the next bus is tomorrow morning. No taxis in sight. He peers down at me suspiciously, as if my opinions on buses are starting to precede me, before finally waving me on. The relief at being allowed to embark is worth sitting with for a while, especially when I see there is a working toilet.
Able to breathe out, I can now take in my surroundings. The first thing I notice is the intensity of the wind. The desolate plains a sure sign that it rarely abates. The grasses wave so wildly that from a distance, fields can look like surfaces of rough lakes. This is grass, gorse, heather and little else territory. And everything that is else, is blasted – the odd sheep or horse tottering across its patch with an aggressive side-parting; occasional bushes with slicked back early 90s dos; the rare tree that’s made it past a sapling, contorted into an arthritic backbend until it’s finally submitted into a lignified crab. A lone hare, its ears pressed so tightly to its head that at first glance it appears to be a marmot.
We’re not long past mid-summer, so this far south the light is reminiscent of Scotland or Scandinavia in June – that discombobulating feeling when the clock runs past 9pm and the sun is nowhere near where you expect it to be. Seen from the distance of the road, the terrain appears to be West Irish, Hebridean or even Cornish. Except it’s wilder; harsher – closer to its Pole. Battered by a far fiercer ocean than even the North Atlantic. The moon, clearly visible in the cloudless sky and glaring light, and waxing gibbous, appears to track us on our circuitous route through this alien terrain. My final thought as I drift off is – ‘I would bloody love to drive my car here’.
I wake around 10:30pm as we approach Puerto Natalas. With no phone signal, no promise of WiFi and only a vague idea of where my hotel is, I’m resigned to hiking it in the semi-darkness. The sea lagoon enveloping the town acts like a giant cat’s eye in the half-light; there are oddly arranged thickets of trees, hirsute in dreadlocks of lichens and mosses.
At the bus station, I am delighted to see that Rodrigo, my taxi driver, has waited for me and he greets me with a warm grin and a firm handshake. ‘I’m so fucking glad to see you, Rodrigo’, I blurt out. He doesn’t speak a word of English, but he gets it. The ride to the hotel is a good fifteen minutes. My gratefulness for Rodrigo increasing exponentially with every passing minute. I tip him handsomely, let myself into my room and collapse into bed.
For the next 11 days, internet will be patchy, if available at all, so I’m going to enjoy an extended period without outside connection.
This will probably be my last post for a while – in case you were at all concerned I’d fallen down a crevasse.
Another Door In the Wall 