Something from the other side of the world

The last few days I have been skiing every day, having interesting rides with interesting people up and down the mountain. A few more highspeed crashes (have to work on my stepturning!)
I have mainly been walking up the mountain though with the pink sunrise, crack of dawn, orange and salmon hues, peach paints the jagged monte Olivia with its blinding white teeth. Sometimes I ski with my head down, puffing away, thinking about technique and strides, weight over the ski, kick, push down and back, hips forward... and then I look up and realize that really none of this matters. Recently I was talking with a good friend of mine and I told him that if I wasn´t amazed with the world at every instant, then I was not paying attention or not fully using my senses... Moments like these...

But I would like to talk a moment about something that is happining in Canada. Again, I am amazed by the world, in this instance it is negative. Toronto. G20 summit. Protests, riots... riot police...news.
What is the news about. The news covers the people dressed in black breaking windows and lighting cars on fire. I have my doubts about these people. I think that they have been placed there by corporate people and governments to distract people from the real issues. (which would not be abnormal, it has been done and proved before).
But really, none of this matter, whether they were placed there by people in whose interest it is to distract people from problems, or whether they are anarchistic (which in itself is impossible given true roots of anarchism) or whether they are simply hooligans is absolutely unimportant.
It is absolutely embarrassing that the powers that be, the media and every person who swallows this ridiculous propaganda is paying so much attention to these few people. In doing so we are complicite, indeed we are guilty of the very crimes that are being committed behind those closed doors, we are taking a side. We are protesting about a small childs screams instead of noticing that it is screaming because it has been left out in the cold and abandoned.

From this moment on I refuse to talk about the few people throwing molotov coctails or breaking windows. Instead I will engage in conversation about massive privatization, corporate socialism (my term to describe the action of governenments using taxpayers money to bail out massive corporations). I will talk about government overspending on security, on paranoia and racial profiling, on restriction of human rights to protect capital. I will talk about corporate negation of human and environmental rights. But please to not ask me to be distracted by videos of petty vandalism when people are dying in the street of hunger.

That is all
(Please excuse this apparently irate diatribe...In reality, I am not fuming, I am simply being firm in what I consider to be a horribly disproportionate evaluation of current events)

there she goes...

Yesterday I got a lift up to the refuge with a snowboarder, about my age. He is the son of Chileans and, like all Argentinians and Chileans, he was keen to point out the differences between the two - in this case he favoured chile... its curious, there seems to be an national inferiority complex for both countries, but it becomes complicated down in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia because of the mixing of the two sides and the fact that nothing belonged to nobody, even 50 years ago... it was just Patagonia.
Santi, the full time instructor was up there and after i did some work on technique and a few sprints we went for a ski together... he skating slowly, and i huffing it on my classic skis with no track... Like the two other days that I had been up, the snow sparkled heavily on the trees and the mountain faces and the first climb out of the refuge gave a magnificent view of the celestially white teeth of Monte Olivia and the harbour with the container ships, and there across the Beagle Channel, on Isla Navarino (Chile) against an increasingly pink sky the jagged peaks of Dientes de Navarino.
Yellow light: here,in winter the sun comes up at 10am and goes down at 5pm and never goes much more that a few fingers above the peaks - it sheds a beautiful yellow ray on everything - like sunrise or sunset...but all day.
Santi and I came bombing down a big descent and as we came back into the "stadium" (I´ll call it that, its just a big field with a tracked loop and the refuge) he pointed out the place where the snowboarders and skiers from the ski centre just above, come down in the evening - gliding right into the city. So after our ski, we went back up, this time through the deep powder and the trees, to the track that they take - BACKCOUNTRY on CROSS COUNTRY SKIS! It wasn´t as hard core as it sounds, but it was good fun.

Rain, the slap of tires on wet pavement and a gentle drizzle. Grey. Is this it? I wake up thinking that it simply must be snowing on the trails almost half a kilometer above. I watch the england-slovenia game (although Slovenia is my mother land, I cannot negate that England plays a good and exciting game wins deservedly and keeps me pinned to the television and not thinking about the rain outside!) After the game, i grab my ski stuff, a yoghurt and an apple, throw everything in my bag and start the walk that so far I have done with a sort of ancy sensation that I´d rather just be skiing. At the base of the mountain where the switchback road starts, it is still raining, more like drizzle, not even, a cloud, we are in a cloud. Fewer people are going up the mountain i suppose because of the weather but after a few minutes a car driven by two guys my age (I found out later) picks me up. The car, which I assume belongs to one of the parents, is freshly smelling of weed! These guys are really good guys. They ask me what im doing, they seem grateful and surprised that I speak spanish. One of them used to xcountry ski and asks me if I will compete in the Marchablanca - yes.
So in Canada were you there for the olympics? did you compete there? - A laugh... no, Im not anywhere near that level - And how old are you - 22 turning 23 - and you are just travelling the world, instructing - not really, just travelling, this is a way to be able to ski - Amazing what you are doing! Amazing! when dyou turn 23 - July 4th - Awesome, man, you won´t be working the next day, we will pick you up at your hostel for a party!!
I am not sure if they will... and im not sure that I want them to, but great guys! The sort of people that might be looked at with scorn, snowboarders, potsmokers, perhaps unemployed living with their folks... i don´t know... but I´m not stupid a can tell a good human being when I feel one...
While changing and getting my skis ready (I refused to put klister on and opted instead to do doublepoling and other poling exercises and intervals) in the refuge I drank a few mates with Aimé the refugiera. As I finished my intervals Santi, el Mudo and a guy from the local team came...
I then did some hill work, that is down hill - took a massive highspeed crash (seems I´ve forgotten how to step turn at highspeed) All this in a tshirt and tights and rain. About a hundred metres above you could see that the trees were blanketed in snow...almost almost almost!

Yesterday Aimé, Lucas (her partner) and Santi and I talked about the club, their low prices, the low interest in crosscountry skiing and the sparse resources... this is not the gatineau park...lots of problems!!! I would like to stay out of the politics of this place... because there appears to be a lot of politics (some people thinking others are snobby...etc.) but it would be great to help raise interest -
Interesting how people (the rather repulsive middle class) don´t mind paying almost 2000 pesos (around $500) for a season pass at Cerro Castor (the downhill ski centre) yet the very members of the xcountry ski club balk at the suggestion of raising the season pass price from 80pesos to 160pesos because they say people will stop coming... it appears the base is not good...

and so on...
It feels amazing to ski every day!

Long time no post...

It is really about time that I wrote something. So here goes:

When I arrived in Ushuaia it was warm, 10 degrees maybe. But in the past few days it has been snowing loads and I bought some 1980s or 90s classic skis/boots/bindings/poles... the poles are too heavy but everything else is actually quite nice quality.
I have spent my days, these past few weeks wandering around this town, at times throwing myself at the enthusiasm of World Cup season in Argentina and at other times running into the mountains to escape this ravenous, unthinking fervour for national sport, that, like someone once said, is so similar to blind support of national militaries... it really defies logic.

I have made some good friends here, we just sit around drinking mate and talking about everything (the cold, world cup, historical blindness of Argentinians with regards to the Falkland islands - a very touchy topic, cultural norms...)and me just waiting, and waiting for the snow to come. Before it came, I would run up to the bottom of the ski centre, the bottom of the chairlift, hoping that at this altitude there would be snow - no.
Finally the other day after 24 hours of snow, my friend Steve and a Falklands Islands charter yacht skipper Chris, and I went up to the ski centre - me with my boots, Steve with his split board and Chris with his backcountry skis. We all trudged up the run, full of feet of powder, and they drank mate with the refuge man at the bottom of the glacier while I trudged down again. For me this was a way to calm my nerves, as I had been getting ancy because as great as running and aimlessly sitting around infront of the worldcup games drinking strong espressos or round after round of mates is, i wanted to ski!

The cross country ski trails are about a 35-40minute run from my hostel (where I am paying 300 dollars to stay for the month, breakfast included). So when I started to walk up with my skis the other day I was happy when a father and his two daughters stopped at the base of the hill and offered me a lift up the 5km of switchback. Now that I left my skis in the cabin though, its not so obvious so today I stuck my thumb out - equally as easy.

I am recovering slowly from an injury I sustained while playing football (soccer) with a friend of a friend. football is life here, it is part of the culture. All the guys who played, it was like a game of pickup hockey in Canada - that is, lots of slightly overweight middleaged men who actually play quite well - and after? we all went upstairs, many smoked and almost all drank... ring any bells!!!??

On my way down from the ski centre that first day of snow, I stopped in at the xcountry ski refuge and met Pote (Estéban) the refugiero. Having never met him we chatted for 2 hours, drinking mate by the window, by the wood stove watching the snow cascade out of the misty sky. He is a mountaineer as his in Ushuaia for that only. He says that people are materialistic and shallow here in Ushuaia. Houses are dilapitated because nobody really wants to be here, they want to make money and drive their fancy cars back to their houses in the north... He says in the north, people are poorer, kinder, more generous, warmer...and far less materialistic... but im not trying to rag on the Fueguinos (people from Tierra del Fuego). So far my experience has been beautiful and especially the families and the people who xcountry ski are fantastic!

More later... now, to bed

uneditted short story by Liam Walke

The Ristretto

He walked up Avenida Errazuriz from the Costanera where the Magellan Strait was real, a windy blue against the sunlit clouds. Left on Nogueira and thats when the rain started. It was one of those rains forced out of the black and driven down into the sidelong yellow sun; that pulses, abates, and then seems to attack again. He thought about the seam, there must have been a fissure between this rain that had just reached his face, making him pull a black hood over his wool covered head – between the rain and the snow. A seam... or two. One seam is simple to explain he thought to himself: one substance, one thing, one material stops at the moment or spatial point when another begins... but this border, because he was inside the border, where both snow and rain swirled around, driven here and there, giving form to the wind.
Thats right, he thought, as he reached the Plaza de Armas with its stately buildings, its stone and cement facades; dear colonial memories – thats right, wind is the arm of the artist, the delicate creative hand, snow and rain the paint-dipped brush and sun the colour, blackclouds the inverse canvass upon which reality is drawn, instant to instant.
His mind had drifted though, he was trying to work out something else in his head: two seams. Or better, a wide ample corridor, like these spacious avenidas, where one thing peters out , diminishing to nothing, while another starts, crescendos and eventually takes over. Rain ends, snow begins and sooner than later he thought pulling his collar up against the buffetting wind, sooner than later this rain will end and all that will be left in the sky for my eyes will be snow. I will simply fall out of the border into a new pure reality. But he thought again... no this is all so subjective and absurd because what is the difference between rain and snow. The smallest, the most infinitely tiny fraction of one degree of temperature. And imagine! The topographical and anthropologic and mamalian (at least) history of a planet was decided upon that! Ice ages, glaciers, avalanches, extinctions! He spun with the snow... is that the difference then, from one side of the seam to the other, one gzillienth of a degree? But so much more complex than that, he thought, squinting into the parabolic lane leading past Nogueira and the treed Plaza de Armas with its several hundred year old trees dominating the mosaic of stone slab and tile paths crossing like capillaries over the square – the white of an eye. The parabolic lane white, wet and flashing with the entire sun.
Yes, better to not occupy one´s mind with frivolities, mere mental gymnastics. Better to think of the task at hand. All he wanted, all he had wanted all morning; the whole reason to leave the house was for a good espresso in a warm cafe. He drew his hand out of his pocket into the cold, pulled his jacket and sleeve of his right hand up to look at his watch. Sunday, 11:21am. Street and sidewalk wet. A pidgeon. Nests, way up, especially as he got away from the central plaza, nests of powerlines emenating in four directions, heaving in the heavy and changeable winds. One, he realized as he reached Av. Cristobal Colon, was hanging, released somewhere, lloosened like a severed limb. Not one cafe was open, not one store. Ah yes, the farmacy is open, Cafe del centro, closed, and five minutes ago Cafe Colonial, closed... he shook his head. Turning right onto Av. Colon, down toward the straits where a rainbow painted the black clouds with ROYGBIV( thats what they always taught us in school, he thought, smiling weakly to himself) down the empty wide avenue, the snow started again, no rain, just frigid wind and white swirls like in those artsy films, no wait – like in holleywood blockbusters when it rains giant chunks of fluffy white and they blow the cotton around with a giant fan! Imagination. But is the fan and the fake flakes any more absurd than this? Here he was at the end of the earth, empty streets, not a soul, Europe, snow falling from his feet into the sky and blown in every direction, driving down in between his collar and his neck, landing frigid on warm skin. Sun, at midday hardly risen and blinding off the thousand windows and the wet carless streets – ok two policemen sauntering the street in their green and their wooly russian hats. And not one cafe open! What do these people do!?
His awe was overpowered by a feeling of sudden and absolute absurdity. Back to the Costanera Magallanes and past an open casino like every casino in the world, tinted glass, slots..etc. another cafe, History Cafe, barred, shuttered. Left down Errazuriz and the sign came into view, the ocean calmly violent behind it. Hotel Ritz. A false climax of ridiculum. But he didn´t know then, then it was the height.
A run down white facade of cement, paint cracking from overexposuere to the salt and the relentless winds and to the right, orange construction fences. To the left that sun! Blinding the road. Absolute irony that sign was. Was it possible, he thought standing in the funnelling breeze, that I am the only person in this town? No, that can´t be, but am I the only person who finds this reality unreal and impossible? We are back to the cliched and laughably basic question, he thought smiling not quite laughing to himself, of what is reality? Everything had been bizarre quite literally from the blue sky (when it was visible) to the blue sea, but most especially his sense of time; that time that passes so slowly in the present but by some curious refraction or a weird and stupid law of physics compresses imperceptibly. He thought of something that Abraham had explained to him about time and existance like a worm... and he modified it in his head. We travel down this “line” we call him, thinking that we should be able to then see its entirety strung out behind us, from some vantage point above, like a god. But really when we look back we are looking back at a cross-section of the worm with no sense of depth, or time, no linear qualities, simply events superimposed upon eachother. This made sense to him now, but he was straying from his point again... but it doesn´t matter, he thought, I´m just thinking to myself, I am allowed to go “off topic”... but what was it, ah yes, what is reality? Maybe it is just any combination of any number of events or facts or things superimposed on one another. From some angles of experience and circumstance they must look like they line up to constitute something that the observer would deem worthy of the term “reality”. Yes. But from another angle another set of events and pasts this superimposition looks contorted, disproportionate or simply “unreal”. He thought of some Dalí paintings he had seen in a museum in Europe and he revised his thought process. No, sometimes its not just unreal but “surreal”, this is pleasing to the senses. He gave a satisfied hmf. Yes. That must be it.
Naivity. How he described his train of thoughts after the episode that he saw as he turned the corner onto Bories after an hour of vacilations and white and black, yellow, blue, colonial mansions, birdsnests of tangled wires, manicured parks and garbagy squaller blown around by the wind.
The wind was coming up again. And so was the cold snow. And so was the flag. He now recalled, as the two police officers in their russian hats passed him for the third time, that he had been whistling some stately sounding invented tunes and hearing brass in his head. This explained it. Reality. It had all been subconscious and the band had been playing while he wandered down Pedro Montt past the victorian wool-boom mansions.

Now. Voices. Snow. Robot. Move heads down. Hands up. Flash of dull light on the blades. The robot paused, massive in the soaking street in all the eyes and ropes holding back the phantoms and the trees from its sacred pole. The trumpets! The trumpets! The brilling brass and the beastly clicks. Those trilling trumpets the bombing basses and a tear. One tear in one eye, lonely, singular not plural. Wet eyes everywhere the beast has been, this machine is turning heads to a pole. One. Two. Three. Four. I declare a war. No. Not yet. Please. But save this country, boys in black, save this country lads, when they do decide its just to fight.
For now, the snow flows out of the sober sky. I mean undrugged and full of shades that blow the fabric around. Eyes. Thump, thump. Feet march the splashing wet pavements and the boys in black are empty and everyone is full.

He watched all the emotion in their eyes, it was flowing from a dry source, being sucked out of the boys in black, the beast that worked with the swinging saber and the fat mans baton. Empty. It all ran like poison into the spectators until they could no longer bear it, full, satiated, bloated with what they were supposed to feel, until it poured out their eyes in a salty mess. And their mouths in otherwise uncomprehensible verbal spasms. The old man to the left, maybe a grandfather or a shop owner, or an erstwhile gaucho with his black beret, or maybe all of those things or none of them. His face was worn by the sun and the wind and his eyes were wet. He seemed to grow, not in stature but in saturation and suddenly as the flag reached full height it escaped him. An orgasm of emotion he could not hold any longer... the old man ejaculated “VIVA...” but that was it.
He finished it but our traveller did not hear. Our wanderer´s ears shut, it was too much, no more trumpets no more stupidly dressed frilly xylophone man, no more falsely happy (or truthfully happy) marches. But he did not close his eyes. Silence and snow. And two hundred red hands with their thousand white knuckles. Here and there he could sense a struggle to maintain in step. Those leathery boots. With a vociferous voicing, a scanty, stout and boisterous verbiage (is this possible?), plainly he could see (but not hear) the beast turned, and marched across the top of the Plaza de Armas. They were playing, legs up, bayonnettes to the sky. But no sound was coming from the burly men and their brass bells. Not his “reality”. It could not be he thought as he watched their calculated formation make an over-complicated manouvre, a navy 180 degree turn at the corner of City Hall to double back to the flag. All this sensorial distortion in one day. Not one cafe open! And now this!? This calamatous culmination of stupidity, an apex of absurdity, something that could not possibly be happening. The flag was flying, city hall in front, plaza de armas behind, depending on your vantage point. The black machine with the hundred white heads and the organized cacophony of clamorous marches and clicks and taps of its many guns and arms. He stood reeling in the street, shivering.
Expression is like a circle, went his thoughts. No, emotion is like a circle that is, if it only has two dimensions. If not it would be a sphere – but no, thats foolish, anyway we need (we?) to define our terms (our?). This is only a model. So that circle maybe the ends don´t quite meet but this was it, in front of him, a demonstration of the circular nature of emotional extremes. Machine of boys in black, no expression and no emotion. Drones (He excused himself this horrible cliche, so often thrown around without much meaning at all – but he allowed himself its employment because his was well thought out...his tenuous conclusion.) They were empty of emotion and their faces showed it. But the spectators are saturated with emotion, perhaps as a direct result of the object´s emptiness. A sort of super-saturation that incites otherwise socially unacceptable behaviour, that happens without the notice of those present. That is, he drew himself up, back straight, shoulders back, that is (with an aire of finale) they are also expressionless, blank drones (another cringe) like those holleywood zombie movies. Expressionless but brimming with emotion, but no sign, only in the cracks with a tear of a verbal spasm or weakening of knees. Tongues lolling out of their heads and eyes gazing up to the flag. Essentially, that the empty and the full of emotion are both expressionless, the line refracts and bends around to almost – save for the one tear – touch. And why is something empty able to provoke so much emotion? Because...because...wind blew snow around, and bits of garbage, white garbage like giant snowflakes. They are all actors in a play, a giant theater and each knows their part, spectator, character, musician, music...etc. And me? he thought. What am I if “all the world is a stage”? He stood there, hands freezing. A light fixture, but only one, and almost imperceptible to the other observers of the spectacle. But I must also actuate some sort of distortion in the present reality, I must change it because... etc.
The street was still full of the robot and its admirers, and they were still empty when he turned his back to head east on Bories.
Fog was it? A mirage? No. It was a few people and a lit sign that peeked out from under a brown awning. Open: Cafe Tapiz. Back to reality he said to himself with a smile. Wait...reality? A coffee.
He opened the door to the warm smell of strong espresso and chocolate. Bag down, jacket off, “what can I get you?” “a ristretto please” he said automatically, then looked up, “yes, a ristretto please.”
He took out his raggedy notebook and began to write. When he finished, he stood up, stretched and sat down again at his desk, the sidelong sun split by the cross on the single pane window, from which a draft was coming, much stronger in the beastly gusts. The wood in the window traced with delicacy and perfection the lines that divided his room into four unequal quadrants. When he finished reading what he had written, he reached out, grabbed a now cold ristretto and drank it in one shot. Then he began to rip pages out of the notebook. He tore up his week and threw it in the plastic bin at his side. Otherwise it wouldn´t be worth it.

new unedited poetry

Disturbance

In a moment this will all shatter
With my thoughts,
Those planets;
The dreamy orbs glittering rainbows
Like farewell flags, twinkling masses
Of galactic mist will
Melt into the scepter mountains
That sit like giants by the water,
Never thirsty.

It will all sizzle away in a
Cerebral synapse – POOF!
But the blue-bleeding ocean machine
In the sky will just effervesce,
Yes! Bless with cerulean rays
A circle that shatter with my thoughts



Dawn: or a reminder that wakes us from chronic repeating amnesia

What is not:
A pragmatic sun
Is incognisant of our carpe diem,
It does not set out to conquest,
Only to wake again
To the almost imperceptible beings
Cracking eyelashes
And petals, chirruping in song

Not a battle cry,
Not a fighting march,
This simply is.
Not rare,
Neither un-coveted by the senses,
It does not exude resilience

What is:
This is presence…

The dawn is an explosion,
An exaltation
Of birth.

It is an exhalation
Brimming with fortresses
And birds.

The after twilight hour
Fills with scalpels of
Subtle blizzards of light.

New love calms
The bucking morning with
Mists and mirrors and
Aviators talk to me,
When they see
My warm breath
Disintegrate in the light.

Repetitive reincarnation

Puerto Natales to Puerto Eden and back

We finally left Puerto Natales the 21st of May and sailed through the impossibly narrow Paso White flanked by granite and ice, towers of rock. We had a nice tailwind the second half of the day and we were doing 7-8kts for a few hours anyway. The next day was pivotal... good weather, as in, light winds forcast for the next 36 hours. So we motored and sailed from 8am to 5pm the following day, about 31 hours straight and we covered 140 miles putting us within a comfortable two days of Puerto Eden (a trip that we thought would take us 2-3weeks was going to take under a week. Plans only changed a bit:

* * *
Diary entry from May 25

While radioing the passing Navimag ferry on our way to Canal Wide (to find out about schedules for my return to puerto natales) we made the faux pas (sp?) of staying on channel 16 (which is the channel used only for hailing a boat, you are then supposed to go to another channel to talk). When we finished talking though we heard a familiar voice hailing the Persimmon... It was Bob again!!! we must have passed him on our night sail and he was some 20miles behind us. As a way of waiting up for Bob we decided to do the remaining 15 miles to the closest anchorage as opposed to our original plan which was to continue another 10 miles... we also decided to go to Glaciar Pío XI, Latin America´s biggest glacier, measuring more than 3.5km wide and 50 meter tall face. It flows like an icy tongue out of the Southern Patagonian Icefield. That night Bob didn´t show up until 2am so I only saw him this morning at breakfast - everyone was genuinly happy to see eachother... but in the end Bob decided not to come to Ventisquero Pío XI with us. If that were the case I would have been able to sail with Bob for a day or two but instead we arranged to meet in Puerto Eden in two days.
The sun lifted, shedding a curtain of yellow light all over the mountains and the wind blew lightly out of the north. Sailing would have taken us days so we motored straight into the wind. The first few hours were relatively uneventful if you don´t count the white white cony and humpy mountains, whose perfect reaching peaks found refuge in the pancake clouds. From 18miles (thats around 32km) we could already catch a glimpse of the glacier!! thats how big it is, the size, they say, of Santiago!!! At about five miles out, when it looked like surely we were at its doorstep as we threaded our way dodging crystaly ice in the water, giant aqua blue bergs and small dark pitted groulers, the efervescant sun spewing its own royal blue through the prisms of ice. This is when the dolphins came. There were at least 10 dolphins, some babies as well. For almost an hour as we motored to the gargantuan face through the graveyard of fallen ice walls, floating in an ever more serene channel, the dolphins swam with us, showing off; jumping 2, 3, 4 at a time, fully breaching out of the water to show their entire bodies, weaving, splashing cutting lines around the entire boat, swimming on their backs and on their sides to show white bellies.
All this with the backdrop of an ever growing (only for our own eyes) glacier. We hit a few growlers on our way in, shuddering the boat to a halt... soon after we arrived at the wall, the ever-low sun began to set over this continental filed of ice, this slowmotion river, a tummultuous mass of icetowers that flow down from the conical and sharktooth mountains for thousands of years. I climbed the mast and I could hear the thunderoush treacherous cracks of ice and could see small chunks, and at the end a shack or cottage size chunk, cleaving off and tumbling into the glassy water, throwing up waves, like mini tsunamis.
The left edge of the wall had a blue spot that I have never seen, this magnetic blue that drew my eyes into the layers of thousand of years of ice. A blue, a holy, unroyal story, untellable and absolutely uncomprehensible but fully alluring. I was sucked into a cavy crachy layered mess of blue, a glassy, steepled moving castle, no a mobile city of ice that has watched everything for millenia!!!
The funny currents, created by the meltwater (I presume) we could see move the glassy crystally shards of ice, blue and orange now with the parting sun, crimson on a mirror float and flow on a swell. Froim time to time a crack and a few chunks of ice would come of the wall and crash into the water beside the wall´s pitted foundation. Mario and I got off the boat to stand on a floating piece of ice. Alone, on a piece of floating frigid water...nothing around but currents and water and a golden sun in the swirling mirror of the city of ice... At night I made potato gnocchi and a simple tomoto sauce with grated romano...mmmm... and then a clear sky in winter, in patagonia... and a full moon...life does not get much better than this!!!.
...

When we got to Puerto Eden, Bob was already there and we hung out a lot, playing chess and baking brownies (for Bob´s birthday) and talking about life and pacifism (and its effectiveness, or ineffectiveness) about free will, vegetarianism, about Ulysses (which i was reading on the boat) and literary criticism... HEAVY SHIT! but lots of fun. There was a bit of drama at the end, shortly before I left but we all left on a good note. I thanked them all for everything and for challenging my opinions, which I realized had become a bit stale and I believed them just because I had always believed them.

* * *

Puerto Eden has few people, maybe 50 or so. 6 of them are pure blood Kaweshkar indians... probably 20 are police and armada and the rest are fisherman. We brought our laundry for a woman, Doña Patricia to do, and we just hung out, not really chatting much, just there, in her house drinking mate and here and there saying something of little consequence. She kept inviting us back to hang out. In our search for diesel, which we finally found, we went to the house of Manuel Maldonado, and after this I confirmed to myself that this was stepping back in time. This man´s house, among the squalor of rotting boardwalks and abandoned shacks, and little habited houses that have no telephones, could exist in Las Condes (the rich neighbourhood of Santiago) He has satelite internet and longdistance phone as well as satellite tv. He has all the trappings of a modern "home". After talking a lot with the police guys (a bunch of really cool, down to earth guys that were welcoming and interested) I found out that Don Manuel is the defacto owner of the town. He owns a fish farm in Puerto Montt and the means to transport everything that is fished in Puerto Eden to P.Montt to be sold. He buys everything that has been fished at 2000pesos the kilo and sells it in Puerto Montt at 7000pesos the kilo...
Like a step back in time.

* * *

Now I do not want to dwell on this but my last 24 hours after a surreal goodbye to my crew and captain, were tumultuous and costly to say the least. I was assured by my friends at the police station in Eden that I would not have to pay the "gringo" price on the ferry. (The Navimag charges foreigners the 300 dollars US from Puerto Eden, which is the price from Puerto Montt ie. they charge about 4 times what they should.)
I got on the ferry and the policeman talked to some guys he said would talk for me and I was brought to the room to pay. I explained that I had no credit card(a white lie) and only 40,000 pesos (about 80$, the truth). They after speaking with the captain they kindly made an exception for me. After writing an authorized reciept the captain asked for my passport. I asked him why but didn´t really think twice because chilean authorities are more than anal when it comes to foreigners´movements within the country. As night fell he returned my passport to me and I spent the rest of the time hanging out and playing chess with some young guys fromt he armada. When we arrived after 24 hours of navigation I was told to go to the bridge and was met by 3 intimidating International Police force officers. They wanted to know what I was doing in Chile, where I was going, they searched all my bags. Let me say I was angry and I let them know that they were being unreasonable in treating me like a criminal and that it was not fair. They phoned their headquarters to check up on my visa and seemed to be surprised to see that it was indeed registered. Then they asked me where I was going, I said Ushuaia, they said how, I said by bus, they said so you have money, I said in my bank (BIG FUCKING MISTAKE!) They said thank you and went to talk to the captain. They then escorted me to the office and told me that I had two options, pay the remainder of the 300$ or not and have my name in all the police stations so that I would be unable to leave the country. At this juncture I truly lost it, because I felt cheated and tried to explain that I would not have even gotten on the boat had I not been offered the discounted rate, I can not afford this. They lied to me and on top of it all they were patronizing me. In the end, after considering a few options that could have got me off but also could have ended in much more serious legal consequences I decided to swallow my pride, and my sense of justice, and my rationality and just pay the money. The man at the desk was very surprised when I came in very calm and appologized for my behaviour and gave him the cash.

I´m just glad thats over, but it was a bit of a nasty note to end on... next step... I don´t know... I´m waiting for snow in Ushuaia and meanwhile going to try to get back in shape after my sedentary month and a half on a boat!
Until next time...