| Submitted by: Ehud ReiterUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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Bunks were quite comfortable bunkbeds in reasonably-sized rooms (3 bunks to a room), class A seats were reclining seats in a small compartment (13 seats) with a view, and class B seats were reclining seats in a large `container' (80 seats) on the truck deck. The class B container was next to some trucks carrying sheep, cattle, and other animals, so those of us fortunate fortunate enough to have better seats cracked innumerable jokes about how the ship's livestock section included a `human pen'. Besides the sleeping areas, the only indoors space available to non-cabin passengers was the dining room - there were none of the lounges, snack bars, TV rooms, shops, etc that are found in most US or European ferries.
I had been unable to get a bunk, since they were mostly reserved for truck drivers, and had instead settled for a class A seat. When I got on the boat I quickly unrolled my sleeping bag on a choice bit of floor space, as I prefer sleeping on the floor to sleeping in a chair. Many other people, particularly in class B, had the same idea, and some brave rain-loving souls even staked out semi-sheltered spots on deck to sleep in. Some of these hardy souls were a bit taken aback, though, when they discovered that while they had been sleeping on deck, their seats had been sold to people on the stand-by list!
Friday: I didn't get much sleep (partly due to a loud snorer in my compartment), but the beautiful scenery soon revived me. The boat was meandering through various channels, many of them narrow (and rock-filled!), on its way to the main North-South channel. I had once taken a boat trip on the coast of Norway, and the scenery here reminded me of that - narrow channels, lots of forested islands, mountains plunging directly into the sea. The main difference was that while most of the Norwegian coast is settled, and every little valley and island has its Viking history, the Patagonian islands are uninhabited except for a few fishing villages. A true wilderness area, in other words, one of the few places on this globe that has not yet been `exploited' by man. As I watched the islands go by, I wondered what it would be like to jump overboard (in a wet suit, of course), swim to a random island, and live a Robinson Crusoe type life, completely out-of-touch with the rest of the human race. I talked a bit to a nun and a teenage girl who were going to a religious retreat on one of the islands, and I half-thought of making an instant conversion to Catholicism and then asking if I could join them ...
I spent a few hours around lunchtime talking to Jim and Linda, a couple who were returning to Britain after a job in Tuvalu, a South Pacific island nation. They laughed when I told them I wanted to stay on one of the islands, and said that they had spent two years on a remote island whose only contact with the outside world was a monthly ferry, and they were looking forward to being in a place that had bookstores, telephones, and an occasional new face that they hadn't seen before!
The weather during the day was typical Patagonian - clouds with occasional bursts of sun, frequent bursts of rain, and odd bursts of hail. Gray, in other words. Kind of like Scotland, except that the rain, when it came, was a lot stronger than Scottish drizzles. The human passengers could at least go inside, but the livestock, sitting in their open trucks on the open truck deck, had to suffer through the rain and hail. When we stood on deck we could see the animals shivering and huddling together, and sometimes hear their pitiful bleating when the weather got really nasty. It seemed crazy to me to subject animals to this kind of treatment - if nothing else, sick or dead animals are presumably worth a lot less than healthy ones - but it seemed to be standard practice on the Tierra del Fuego.
Saturday: The snoring wasn't so bad this night (or maybe I was just getting used to it), so I actually got some sleep before waking up at 5AM to see Puerto Eden, the boat's only stop between Puerto Natales and Puerto Montt. Puerto Eden has about 300 souls or so, and is the biggest village on any of the islands. The boat did not dock, but just stopped in the middle of the channel while small boats came out from Puerto Eden to load and unload cargo and passengers. It was quite fun to watch, especially because some of the Puerto Edenians were Indians, the last remaining descendants of some of the fierce tribes that once ruled Patagonia. I waved good-bye to the nun and her teen-age charge as they got off the boat, and then went back to sleep.
When I got up, I discovered that the boat hadn't budged - it was still sitting in the channel off of Puerto Eden, and remained there until 12 noon. Apparently we had to wait for a high tide in some channel (I suspect the captain was being extra-cautious because of the recent accident). I asked some people if it was possible to go ashore and explore Puerto Eden, but the small boats had all left, and there didn't seem to be any other way to leave the Tierra del Fuego. It was a nice day, though (i.e. occasional drizzles but no heavy rain, and even a bit of sun now and then), so I hung around on deck with various other tourists. After the boat started moving, it hit a windy patch and we all stood around on deck and tried to see how far we could lean into the wind without falling over.
I had lunch with some of the Chilean truck drivers, and they clearly thought (although they didn't quite say so) that all of us Western tourists were crazy. Why on earth were we paying $100 to spend 3 days on a boat, when a bus to Puerto Montt (through Argentina) cost $50 and only took 36 hours? Was there some odd element in Western culture which made us enjoy spending 4 nights sleeping in a chair? A difficult question to answer ... I should mention that, excluding the truck drivers, 90% of the passengers were foreign tourists, and the handful of Chileans generally had good reasons for not taking the bus (e.g., they were moving house and needed to take a trailer full of furniture).
Lunch, by the way, consisted partly of a stew with rather odd chewy bits of material in it. It wasn't bad, just strange, but I made the mistake of asking one of the truck drivers what it was. When he responded 'cow stomach', I gulped and pushed the bowl aside, much to the amusement of my companions. Sometimes its better not to know ...
I spent the afternoon hanging around with Susan, a fellow traveller I had met in Puerto Natales. Susan and I had roughly equal competence at Spanish (not fluent by any means, but able to converse with people if we could convince them to slow down and speak clearly), and we had fun trying to figure out a poem in one of Susan's books. We eventually decided it was too difficult and asked a Chilean to explain it to us, but he told us that he couldn't understand the poem either! I told Susan afterwards that I had decided to stick to non-fiction in the future ...
In the evening, the boat entered the dreaded and aptly named 'Gulf of Sorrow' (Golfo de Pena), the only true open-ocean part of the trip. The crew passed out sea-sickness bags to the tourists, and I headed up to my favorite semi-sheltered spot on deck (it was, of course, raining heavily again). Juan, a Chilean oil engineer from Punta Arenas, had discovered the same spot, and we sat and talked about politics as we watched the boat go crashing through the waves. Chile had just recently made a transition from dictatorship to democracy, and Juan was saying that although he didn't actually approve of Pinochet, the ex-dictator, he had to admit that the man had done gone things for the economy. I'd heard quite a few other Chileans make similar remarks, and it set me to wondering - how do you evaluate a bloody tyrant who overthrew a democratically-elected government and killed and tortured hundreds of political prisoners, but who also saved his country from economic chaos and raised the living standards of millions? In college philosophy class I would have said the killings outweighed any economic gain, but now I'm less sure, since the vast majority of people I've met in my various wanderings around the Third World seem to care much more about economic well-being than about politics.
It's absolutely clear, though, that however one evaluates Pinochet's career as dictator, he was certainly acting badly at the time of my trip to Chile - making numerous veiled and not-so veiled threats of staging another coup (especially when corruption investigations started getting too close to him), and generally causing lots of unnecessary problems for the fledging democratic government (which, I should add, consisted of some of the most decent, capable, and honest politicians that I saw in any Latin American country).
Enough politics. I must say that this moment of the trip is the one that most clearly sticks in my mind. My memories of gliding through beautiful sun-lit channels are already starting to fade, but I can still vividly recall seeing the twin smokestacks of the Tierra del Fuego silhouetted against the crashing waves as the ship fought its way through the misnamed `Pacific' ocean, while Juan and I kept up a deep political discussion as we huddled for shelter from the rain and hail. I could really feel the boat as a little self-contained world afloat in a hostile sea, trying to battle its way through the elements to safety ...
Sunday: I wasn't too badly affected by the boat's rocking, but I heard lots of running in the hallways (presumably to the toilets) at night, so I assume the seasickness bags saw a bit of use. By breakfast time the water was getting a bit calmer, but I still noticed that far fewer people than usual had come down for the meal ...
The weather improved somewhat, and we spent a few glorious sunny hours sailing through inter-island channels. Some dolphins kept us company for a bit, and the waters were full of ducks, the skies full of birds, and the islands full of trees and mountains. We waved at a few fishing boats in the distance, and at one container ship that passed pretty close by. This is the part of the trip that the tourist brochures all talk about, I'm sure, although, as I said above, it's not the part that most sticks in my memory.
I spent the day, as usual, drifting around the boat chatting to the various people I had met. As I grow older I seem to be doing more of my travelling on boats (always ferries - I've never yet found a cruise that both goes somewhere interesting and is within my price range). I guess I really enjoy the atmosphere; plenty of room to move around in, plenty of opportunities to hang around and meet people, nice scenery by and large, and more `atmosphere' than is usually found in buses, trains, or planes.
I spent the evening talking with my friend Susan and with Carlos, an engineer from Spain (Susan and I had once again combined forces to achieve better Spanish fluency). Carlos was interesting to talk to because he knew a great deal about Patagonia and its history, but he also complained a lot about the trip. I guess that while the backpackers (such as myself) had more or less known what to expect, and in any case were used to roughing it, Carlos was a well-off professional, and did not appreciate spending four nights in a chair. I gathered that he had only seen glossy tourist pamphlets before signing up for the trip, and had been shocked when he saw what living conditions were like. So, a warning to readers - I took quite a few boat trips in Chile, and while they were all beautiful, they were also all very primitive accommodation- and facility- wise, except for passengers in cabins. Be warned, and get a cabin unless you're used to roughing it.
Day 4: The last day of the trip. We arrived at Puerto Montt harbor at about 9AM, but once again had to wait a few hours for high tide, and didn't actually dock until noon. I felt kind of funny as I walked off the boat. On the one hand, I was certainly looking forward to days without rain and nights spent on a bed. But on the other hand, I remembered all the magic moments of the trip - watching the boat battle through the South Pacific waves, looking for birds and dolphins in the sunlit inter-island channels, and just hanging around and talking to Susan, Linda, Jim, Carlos, Juan, and all the other people I had met on the trip - and I knew that the voyage of the Tierra del Fuego was going to be one of the most unforgettable experiences of my trip to South America.
Postscript: I hope I have succeeded in giving the reader a feel for the voyage of the Tierra del Fuego - the most uncomfortable, but also the most beautiful, boat trip I have ever taken. For anyone who is tempted to do the same trip, I should say that 1990/91 was the Tierra del Fuego's last season in Patagonia. The boat has been sold, and, according to rumor, will shortly appear somewhere in Italy. The Puerto Natales - Puerto Montt run will be taken over by a new, and (so I have been assured) better equipped boat. But if anyone happens to go to Italy and see a medium-sized RO/RO ferry with two smokestacks, an open truck deck, minimal facilities, and a few scars on its hull from Patagonian rocks, please let me know - I wouldn't mind riding on the Tierra del Fuego one last time ...
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Travel in Chile is quite easy by Third-World standards. You can drink the water and eat the food without worrying about getting sick (the most common dietary problem among tourists seemed to be `fruit overdose' - when Americans and Europeans realized how incredibly cheap and good fruit was in Chile, they sometimes tended to eat just a bit too much. As I discovered, eating a kilo of cherries or grapes in half an hour is not advisable, no matter how good they taste!). Theft and violent crime is rare, and most travel services are reasonably efficient. Most of the population is of European descent, so the tourist can `blend in', and does not stick out out of a crowd. Prices are cheap by Western standards (although not as cheap as in the countries in the northern half of the continent), and I ended up spending about $25/day, not counting international airfare. Many other backpackers did fine on $15/day. Fluent English speakers are not common, but many people in the tourist business do speak a few words (I strongly recommend trying to learn some Spanish, though, as your trip is likely to be much more interesting if you can talk to locals, read newspapers, etc).
Chile is not for everyone. If you want to visit exotic peoples with exotic cultures in exotics surroundings, you'd be much better off going to Central America or the Andean countries (Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru); if your interest is in beautiful tropical beaches, head for someplace near the Carribean (e.g. Mexico or Venezuela). But if you're like me and have always most loved remote unpopulated areas with snow-capped mountains, lakes, forests, and fjords, then go to Chile, and I only hope that you fall in love with the country as much as I did.
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Rec.Travel Library
The World
South America
Chile
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