27 February 2005
Back
While there was an intermittent Internet connection (for email only) from the ship, it was highly expensive, and when back in Ushuaia and Buenos Aires I had too much to do to sit in an Internet café and type.
But I've come back fizzing with energy and eager to write for the first time in a very long time. The combination of the white silences of the Antarctic and the buzzing of Buenos Aires (where I did far too much shopping) has left me full to the brim with information, impressions, and images and I want to get them down on paper before they spill. I have a backlog of other pieces to write, and I should be back in China in a few weeks, so I'll have to work fast.
At first the tour group on the ship seemed to constitute the usual argument for eugenics, but as knowledge grew there turned out to be the typical division between the dull but tolerable, the surprisingly quirky, and the entertaining, with a short list of those to be avoided at all costs: the American ladies with the completely two-dimensional world picture who thought everywhere in Europe was like anywhere else; the twenty-somethings who thought getting off with each other was something which should interest every one else; the elderly American who thought she had arrived socially when invited to a private dinner by one of the officers, and who was sure the two younger people, also invited, must be at the wrong table; the Canadian dullards who had travelled with one particular company every year for the last ten (as they would repeatedly tell anyone who would listen and indeed anyone who wouldn't) and who wouldn't accept that the ship belonged to a different company altogether; the stylish but recently divorced Canadian woman, greying yet glamorous, who wanted to make sure everyone knew how large her property on a British Columbian island was (although her husband was living there now), who seemed to think everyone else was there to dance attendance on her, and for whom it was nevertheless possible to feel sorry as she clearly no longer had a purpose in life, and was having difficulty coming to terms with no longer being in a suite but sharing a triple cabin on the lowest deck; and finally the British woman resident in Canada whose nasal accents penetrated even the thickest crowd guaranteeing that everyone knew of her narrow-mindedness (the remark "We travelled overland to BC with our children, just for one week--all the time they allowed us" spoke volumes. It was easy to imagine the children in question wishing the days to fly by.)
But this nonsense was easily swallowed up in the vast beauty of the Antarctic, and the novelty of zooming around in zodiacs and in sub-zero temperatures, skirting icebergs to land on beaches packed with penguins and their chicks.
On this I hope I'll have more to say when I've said it for publication. Note the extra smudge of red on the map above: Argentina and Uruguay (a quick day trip across the Rio del Plata). Antarctica, despite being the planet's third largest continent, doesn't appear.
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