P-p-p-pick Up A Penguin
Trip Start
Oct 15, 2007
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45
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Trip End
Aug 24, 2008
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Punta Arenas,
Chile
Thursday, January 17, 2008
The hostel into which we had booked looked from the guidebook map to be within reasonable walking distance, so we set off, found our place to be, and got ourselves checked in. The lady of the house was in her pyjamas, bouncing her daughter on her knee; her other half was in more conventional dress, and, given the beard, dreadlocks and red, gold and green T-shirt, more likely to be responsible for the building's very West Indian soundtrack. The very West Indian soundtrack which continued, pretty much unabated, for the duration of our stay. The place seemed pretty nice, so we dumped our stuff, took stock of the contents of the kitchen, and ventured out in search of food.
It's odd to find what is and isn't standard fare to be found in supermarkets. We had a few ideas as to what we should try to cook, but some things just aren't available. A simple enough idea, we thought, would be to get some sort of cured sausage, some onions and tinned beans and tomatoes, and, when combined with the chilli, oil, vegetable stock and garlic in the hostel kitchen, we'd have ourselves a hearty, spicy, beany, sausagey casserole and get some bread to mop it up and wine to wash it down with. Tinned beans eh? Tinned beans? Beans in...tins? No, don't be silly! Beans come dried, in bags. Lentils come in tins.
Oh, right, now you put it like that, it makes a lot more sense.
Now we're not talking Heinz Baked Beans in tomato sauce or anything, just kidney beans, canellini beans, that sort of thing. Never mind. Lentilly sausagey casserole it is. Kirsty, feeling a bit grim and snotty, let Jacob cook, and a bubbling brown mass of spicy lentilly stuff was duly produced. We ate through in the hostel's communal area, where another guest was giving Natalia (still in her pyjamas) some French lessons, with a bit of English thrown in. We found ourselves learning a few Spanish bits and pieces, mostly through our knowledge of French, but as the day's topic was the names of family relationships (Mother-in-law, Great Uncle, etc.), it wasn't of much use.
Jacob's linguistic curiosity was piqued by the teacher's accent, but as he could only hear snippets of English he had to ask about its origins. "Britain" was the slightly confused reply, so further probing was necessary...her Mother's French, her Father's English, she lives in Germany and spent the first years of her life in Venezuela. A-ha. So your accent's from Britain is it?
Her name was Natasha, and she'd been living at the hostel for a while since breaking her leg hiking in Torres del Paine. She'd been through quite a lot, poor girl - she was in sight of the campsite when the wind caught her off balance and she rolled down a steep bank, almost into a freezing glacial lake. The closest hospital was, it seems, only a small step up from being an agricultural vet, and she was moved to Punta Arenas where she received better treatment, on the way receiving a bit of a scare when she was unable to get through to her health insurance people to confirm that she wouldn't have to fork out for everything herself.
This sounds very uncharitable, but over the next few days we began, independently at first, to wonder what she did for a personality before she broke her leg. We knew she was called Natasha, we knew the complexities of her national identity (because we had quizzed her on the subject), and we knew about her injury. Fair enough, you don't necessarily find out a great deal about somebody from sharing a few mornings and evenings with them in a hostel...but Natasha talked a lot. We knew how far she was from which campsite when she fell, how many people of which nationality came and offered to help her, how long it took to get to which hospital, what her physiotherapist had told her...
Sorry, that really does sound terrible, but there is a finite number of hours of injury commentary which non-medical professionals can withstand, and that number is usually not much more than one.
The following day began with more reggae. Everything at Erratic Rock in Punta Arenas begins with reggae. Reggae tends to accompany everything too. Afterwards, whatever it is you've finished doing, you should maybe just sit down and chill out with a bit of reggae. Breakfast was reggae bread (with home made rhubarb, orange and reggae jam), reggae cereal with either milk, yoghurt or reggae, and...sorry, enough, enough, but you get the idea. Natasha regaled us with stories of the leg.
After some showers, internetting - time to get back onto the Couch Surfing network as we were due to be heading to the big city - and general mucking about in the hostel, we got ourselves some empanadas and intriguing looking cakes from the bakery downstairs. The bakery folks were a bit peculiar to be honest. Upon asking for our pasties we were greeted with some puzzled looks, and we had to resort to pointing and gesturing, which is so very demeaning for all involved. Eventually they gave us what we wanted, repeating back to us pretty much exactly what we had asked as they handed us our order.
Munching upon our hard won pasties, we walked to the bus station to buy ourselves penguin tickets! Punta Arenas is pretty close to a few colonies of Magellanic Penguins, and buses out to the reserves leave fairly regularly. Whilst waiting for our bus, we ate the intriguing looking cakes. Their appearance was their only intriguing feature. The texture and flavour was very readily identifiable as being crap bread. Iced crap bread. Kirsty's contained some sort of gunge, but it didn't taste of anything, so despite the difference in shape, it was pretty much identical to Jacob's.
Penguins are brilliant. The reserve was arranged as a series of duck-board (penguin-board?) walkways with low fences. We were propelled along the boards by the most ridiculous winds anyone has ever encountered. Punta Arenas has chains around the main square so pedestrians don't get blown into the traffic, but the reserve did not benefit from the shelter of being in the city centre. This was right on the Straits of Magellan. As Jacob's Mum said when we reported on the day's weather, throughout history generations of mariners have been wary of the winds around here, so we shouldn't have been that surprised when Jacob needed to tie his hat (and his wife) down. Even so, it was a day when the natives commented on the strength of the winds.
The penguins looked even dafter than penguins normally do: Magellanics are a rather small variety of penguin which somehow gives them a bit of a cutely comedic air, but with their heads down, running across the dunes to their burrows with a stiff headwind, they're quite wondrously silly. The hide at the top of the beach was...bracing. The wind coming off the sea was funnelled through the tiny viewing slits, vastly increasing the air pressure. Gave something of a new meaning to "eyes in the back of your head". We think there were a load of penguins on the beach, being cute, but it was quite difficult to see straight.
Around the walkways however, there were loads of the little guys, pottering about their business, largely oblivious to their audience. Some even had a burrow right at the edge of the duckboard - we were suddenly aware of a beak and some beady eyes poking about next to our feet.
Once the whistling of the wind inside our heads became too much to bear, we walked back to our bus, and set off for Punta Arenas. Back at the hostel, we cooked ourselves a vast spanish omelette and drank a vast bottle of wine, and after an evening of Jacob doing e-mailly things whilst Natasha talked to Kirsty about her leg, we suddenly remembered having bought an enormous chunk of beautiful looking highly indulgent chocolate cake. No, we wouldn't normally have forgotten such things, but it was a very large bottle of wine. We chomped through the cake while Patricio, our Rasta landlord, sat in the corner smoking fragrant things and occasionally grinning at us.
The following morning, at about reggae o'clock, we woke up and set about breakfast and stories of the leg, popped round the corner to a cybercaff (as the connection in the hostel, although included in the price, was woefully slow) to sort out accommodation for our upcoming visit to Easter Island, then visited the Maritime Museum. Not that interesting to be honest. There was no real organisation to the place, and unfortunately, the lack of readily available maritime artefacts did mean that anything remotely connected to seafaring was included. There was a film taken on the last square-rigged ship to sail around Cape Horn, which was quite interesting, but the commentary from the young sailor who made the film was incredible: he actually appeared to be able to speak whilst drawing breath. A mode of speech, seemingly, from before the invention of punctuation.
After that, we happened upon a fair of some description in the middle of town. We couldn't really tell what was going on though. There was a bit of public speaking going on as we approached, but things seemed to be winding up. There were stalls of the usual bits and pieces we had been finding in Chilean markets, but with the unusual addition of a couple of small enclosures of animals. There were sheep, a cow, a few goats and alpacas, and a couple of armadillos. Yes, armadillos - crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside, you know the sort of thing. It appeared maybe to be something to do with promoting local agriculture.
As we were about to leave, waiters and waitresses appeared bearing trays of nibbly things. Mostly they consisted of chunks of grilled marinated meat, some of which involved rhubarb. We hung around, collecting free samples of whatever came our way, then set off on a very important mission.
Now, most of you don't know this, but until this point in the journey, we had been conducting what has become known as "The Monstrous Experiment". It sounds bad because...well, because it is. We had heard from various sources, some of which first hand, that if you don't wash your hair, eventually it stops needing to be washed. The theory is fairly simple: shampoo doesn't just clean the dirt from your hair and scalp, it also strips away the oils naturally produced by the body which, if left alone, would stop it from drying out. So, if you don't strip them away - just rinse the hair thoroughly once a day - gradually the oil production slows down and rinsing is all you need to do.
The theory doesn't sound all that silly, and, moreover, Kirsty knows a couple of people who have done it and seemed happy enough with the results.
Hmmm.
For years, Jacob has found that if he doesn't use some form of fairly heavy-duty medicated shampoo, his scalp starts to shed. He was wondering what would happen without any shampoo at all. Well, both of us found after some perseverance with this that our hair was, well, OK, but certainly nothing special. Jacob found that the bits of his scalp mixed with the oils which, although no longer as abundantly produced, weren't being stripped away, and left horrible white deposits on the hairbrush. Recently we had taken to brushing our hair in the shower to loosen things so that the rinsing would have greater effect, and in so doing, Jacob had snapped the hairbrush in half.
Things had clearly become worse than expected.
We bought a very cheap new hairbrush from a Claire's Accessories type shop in the mall, then noticed that there was a specialist 'Perfumeria' (beauty products shop) directly across from our hostel, so went in there and treated ourselves to a decent brush. Back at the hostel, Kirsty looked at the nice new brush, at Jacob's hair, and thought how revolting it would become as soon as he used it. Indeed, thought how revolting the whole experiment was.
After a bit of agonising, we went back across the road, agonised a bit longer over exactly what to get, then took our shampoo and conditioner back across the road for the best showers of our lives.
Kirsty went first, and upon her return to the bedroom, although she had resolved not to say anything at all so Jacob could form his own opinions, couldn't help gushing about just how fantastic it was. As Jacob washed away the folly of the last three months, he couldn't help but agree.
Over the course of the experiment, the look and feel of the hair itself had ended up being acceptable, albeit a little coarser than it had been, but it never quite managed to be nice. Jacob has, over the years, attracted comments from total strangers about how glorious his hair is. This is probably due in part to the novelty of finding a bloke with such long hair, but also due to the fact that it clearly hasn't gone unwashed for upwards of three months.
In conclusion, despite the fact that we desperately hoped that this might work, we have exhaustively proven that which many of you probably suspected. Not washing is pretty grim.
Equipped with beautiful shining new tresses, we went out for a celebratory feed. Punta Arenas isn't that big, and its selection of fancy places to dine is not that extensive, but a couple of places in the guidebook had caught our eye, particularly one called El Remezón, so off we went. It took quite a while to find as it was not, as is the convention for restaurants, wearing its name above the door. It looked like it may have been a big house. On the way back up from the docks (we walked quite a way), we crossed the street for a look, and, still uncertain, we only found out that it was the right place when a waiter came out to greet us and we saw the name embroidered (in small letters, mind) on his apron.
Obviously not somewhere that feels the need to advertise. Hopefully a good sign.
A good sign it indeed turned out to be. We began with the customary pisco sour, the ubiquitous aperitif of Peru and Chile, but this time flavoured with local berries. Although we both had pretty respectable king crab cannelloni for our mains (this is king crab country), the starters were the real star. Jacob had 'Land', Kirsty had 'Sea'; each of these was a tasting platter of five small appetisers, themed accordingly. Sea included king crab, krill, octopus, tuna and salmon; Land contained beaver carpaccio, pickled goose, a stunning peppered lamb dish (like a carpaccio but the name was quite difficult to catch), beaver confit and llama pâté. It seems beaver is also a local speciality, but its fame hasn't spread quite as far as the king crab.
Jacob fancied a cognac to round off the meal, but they didn't have any, so, after a fair amount of cajoling from the waitress, tried a Chilean brandy instead. You probably haven't really heard of Chilean brandy before. There's quite a good reason for that. Still, it's pretty cheap, so it's not all bad.
Back to the hostel, where we sat and nattered for a while, and Patricio chilled out with some reggae. He pottered off to the kitchen, returning with a large bundle of green foliage, which he proceeded to pick from its stalks, shred up and roll into little cigarettes. "This is Rasta house!" he grinned, handing one to Jacob. Oh well, when in Rome...
Kirsty toddled off to bed a little later. Jacob sat up a little longer with Pato, talking about music. He plays sax.
Now then boys and girls, what sort of band do we think he might be in?
The following morning, we packed up our bags and went out to the supermarket to get some easy to cook food and a bottle of wine; the food for our late arrival in Santiago, the wine for our Couch Surfing host. Again, standard supermarket fare seemed to be different to what we would have expected: pot noodle type food seemed to be completely absent from the main supermarket, but we got some from a little corner store.
Fully set up, we went back to the bakery and negotiated some more pies and cakes. We went back to the hostel and ate the bakery fare, finding today's cakes a bit more flavoursome but nothing to write home about.
Having fed and collected our bags, it was back to the bus station to get our shuttle to the airport. On the way, we passed a road sign for 'Anubis', which was the name of Pato and Natalia's daughter. Jacob had assumed that was because Anubis was an Egyptian goddess and so there was the Rastafarian connection, but maybe there had been a local influence too.
We arrived in plenty of time and managed to arrange Jacob some legroom. Phrasebooks tend not to include useful things like that, so we carefully picked out the relevant bits and pieces from other phrases and we seemed to make ourselves quite well understood. The airport's internet café closed as we walked up to the door, so we tried to phone Phillipe, our Couch Surfing host in Santiago, to let him know the plane would be delayed by about an hour.
His number didn't work.
We looked through our guidebook for other numbers to see what form they generally took, checking to see if there was something we needed to do which would totally obvious to a local but which tourists wouldn't know. Nope. We tried various combinations of dropping and adding zeroes and ones, but the only time we managed to connect to anything at all was when we somehow phoned the Chilean Antarctic Research Institute, just down the road in Punta Arenas. Bugger. We'd just have to show up and hope we weren't too late.
We boarded, we took off, and we looked forward to finally actually seeing something of Santiago.
