Hello and greetings my children! Are you sitting
comfortably? Sorry, I’m feeling a bit hyper today. Two cups of coffee and a bar
of chocolate and I am wonderfully wired. I’ve had a splendid last couple of
weeks though. The science in the Southern Ocean finished about two weeks ago
and we swiftly turned north towards Montevideo. Rather amusingly we managed to
hit some bad weather on our way back which made the return journey much more
fun. I think at certain points we were actually making negative progress!
It was brilliant though. I went up to the navigation bridge
a lot and squealed loudly every time we started to tip over into a really deep
trough. I must be deeply fun to sail with. Our instruments were recording the
waves as being 10-12meters high; just think about that! That’s like being on
the top of a 4-5 storey building and then crashing down into the basement every
few seconds! It was faintly hypnotising to watch our progress from the bridge;
to see the slow gathering of the swell, the delicate veins of white
foam criss-crossing the leaden grey-black surface of the waves. Feeling the bow
of the ship lifting as it hit the upswell, beginning the climb and then sitting,
weightless and poised at the crest, staring down into the depths of the
next trough. Then a sharp descent into
the watery maw just before the ship ploughed her way, snout first, into the
next wave with billows of white, roiling water crashing and thundering their
way onto the deck.
I made my way up to the Monkey Island with two of the
scientists to watch our progress on the final day of the big blow. Happily the
air temperature was finally warm enough that we could stand outside for hours
which felt like a hysteria-inducing luxury after so many weeks of only going
outside for essentials. We hung our heads over the parapet, enjoying the rush
of fresh air and the steep drops before tumbling to the deck, shrieking with
laughter, to avoid the walls of spray that would be wafted up towards us.
And then suddenly we were in Montevideo and it was time to
say farewell to all the crew and scientists that I had sailed with. This crew
change had a particular piquancy because it was the last time that I would sail
with any of them. I finish in August, just as they will be rejoining the ship
for the refit (that’s to make the ship ready for sea again after a year of
work) and to take her across to Denmark. So it was rather a sorrowful farewell,
although I suspect that for them the occasion was coloured by the fact that
they were getting home after four months at sea! Still, they’ve been wonderful
to sail with and I will miss them every time I trundle down into the hold to do
circuits and every time I watch Terminator II!
Montevideo itself was wonderful. It’s the capital city of
Uruguay and it sits just where the River Plate disgorges itself into the
Atlantic. In my head, it was a land of gauchos, steak, Graham Greene and men
wandering around in white suits and panama hats whilst looking shifty. And it
really didn’t disappoint. A lot of the architecture is in a lovely Spanish
colonial style that looks as though it hasn’t received much in the way of
tender loving care in the last decade or so. The doors are tall and narrow and
the windows adorned with wooden shutters flaking paint after years of exposure
to the sun. Most of the upper stories have iron wrought balconies, with
occasional faces of inquisitive cats or dogs poking their heads through the
bars.
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| Faded glories in Montevideo |
Like most visitors to Montevideo, I went to the meat market for many of my meals.
Apparently, many years ago, a ship was carrying a pre-fabricated iron wrought
railway station to South America. The ship unloaded in Uruguay but the new
owners failed to pay their bill so they were never allowed to collect the
railway station. So it sat at the dock in Montevideo for years until someone
realised that it might not be needed as a railway but it would make a great
covered market. So now it sits by the entrance to the port, housing several
pop-up restaurants and a few souvenir stands.
The pop-up restaurants
were glorious. They consisted of a central workstation with hot coals and a
grill in the center to cook the meat or seafood and a counter for the customers
to sit at. I ate three steaks in two
days. I’m actually pretty proud of that although when it came to dinner time on
the second day, I just lay in bed whimpering and telling people that I didn’t
want to eat anymore. The steak was easily the best that I have ever had; they
were deliciously tender and wonderfully flavourful. These were happy and contented
cows! And there were these bowls of thyme, chilli, garlic and olive oil
standing on the counter tops, which when spread liberally over the steak made
it something to die for. Excuse me, I just have to go and dribble a little bit.
Seriously, you should go!
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| The Counter at the one of the MeatMarket Stalls |
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| Meat Market from Above |
I made liberal use of the wifi in the coffee shops in order
to video call my other half. It was lovely to see his face even if it did come
complete with a pang of homesickness! Sadly the dog was resolutely ignoring my
voice as it came out of the phone. She knows enough not to be fooled; hearing
my voice doesn’t mean I’m there (and therefore no treats will be forthcoming)! I didn’t
skype my parents because as my father pointed out with impeccable logic, they
already KNOW what I look like. If any of you ever think that I am slightly odd,
I would just like to point you towards my parents. Yep. They sent me a lot of
chocolate though, so I should probably show them slightly less lip. I love you
Mum and Dad!
And I visited a few museums. The first was the Pre-Colombian
Museum of Indigenous People which was interesting although regrettably most of
the signs were in Spanish so I perhaps didn’t get as much out of it as I could
have done (This is my own fault entirely, for not being good enough at Spanish,
btw). Still, there was a fantastic display of festival masks on the top floor
which were wonderfully creepy, so that was very enjoyable.
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| Incredibly Spooky Festival Masks |
But the best museum by far was the Andes 1972 museum. If you
are ever in Montevideo, you MUST go there. I imagine most of you know the
story, but in 1972 a team of Uruguayan rugby players went missing when their
plane flew into the Andes and vanished in bad weather. Chilean, Argentinian and
Uruguayan rescue missions were scrambled to try and find the crash site and/or
any survivors but all forty-five people had simply disappeared into the
vastness of the Andes. Seventy-two days later a Chilean farmer found two
men trying to gain his attention across a river. He threw them a rock with a
piece of paper and a pen tied to it. And he received in return a letter
explaining that they were some of the survivors of the flight that had crashed.
They had walked for ten harrowing days to try get help for the remainder of their friends. The farmer, Sergio Catalan, rode for four hours and then travelled
another hour in a truck simply to get to the nearest town with a police station
to get help. Shortly after, the survivors were rescued from
the crash site, the Valley of Tears, in the Andes.
At first, it simply seemed miraculous that the sixteen
survivors were still alive. And then it hit the news; there was evidence that
human remains had been consumed at the crash site. A huge media conference was called and the
survivors told their horrific story. That without food, water and minimal
shelter other than what could be fashioned out of the remains of the plane, the
survivors had been driven to eat the bodies of their fallen friends. They were
out there for seventy-two days; to do anything else would have meant their
deaths.
Certainly, when I read the book “Alive” about their struggle as a
fairly grisly (what can I say, I’m a medic!) ten year old, that was the bit
that I focused on. But as I walked around the museum, I realised that this was
by no means the most remarkable part of their story. Trauma, dehydration and
hypothermia would have been the biggest killers in mountains where the night-time
temperatures dropped to sub-zero. The fact that they survived at all is the
remarkable thing, not what they were driven to eat in their extremis.
And then I reached one of the final information boards. A
father of one of the boys who had died soon after the plane crashed had made a
statement to the press. I’m paraphrasing, but he said that when he was told that the flight had crashed into the Andes, he had known that there was no way that his son
could have survived given the conditions. He then said “...if it
had to happen, I am glad that there were forty-five of them. Because it means that
sixteen families were able to welcome their sons home tonight...we have nothing
to reproach these boys with...” The magnanimity and compassion inherent in
those words is astonishing. And I think that is what this museum emphasises;
that even in the ugliest and hardest of times we can behave with compassion. Even
when things are at their most bleak, there is hope.
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| Wading birds fishing the fresh water of the River Plate as it empties into the Atlantic |
