Hugo Schwyzer

The Thursday Short Poem will return in one more week.

We had a wonderful time on our South America/Antarctica trip.

Our first stop was Chile. The Antarctic tour group was to gather in Santiago, but we flew in a few days early to explore on our own. Though we enjoyed the Chilean capital immensely (some of my German ancestors worked in Santiago and Valparaiso in the 1840s), our real purpose in coming early was to visit the Chinchilla National Reserve a few hundred kilometers north of the capital. We’re devoted to chinchillas, of course, and most of the remaining wild chinchillas live in one of two Chilean reserves. (Chinchillas were once found throughout the Andes, from Chile all the way up into Colombia, but they were always most numerous in the south-central Andean region.)

I’ve put up a few pictures from our visit to the reserve. We were there during the daytime, so we didn’t get to see any of our nocturnal friends out and about. The Reserve does have a comfortable, spacious, well-maintained exhbiit in which day and night are reversed, so we got to watch a few of the “babies” doing their thing. We did learn a lot about what chinchillas eat in the wild, and were struck by the differences that now exist between captive and wild chinchillas — differences that have emerged in the space of far less than a century. My wife, a native Spanish speaker, chatted with the naturalist on site; we’re brainstorming ways now to fund more habitat protection and rodent research in Chile.

From Chile, it was off to Ushuaia, Argentina — the “southernmost city in the world”. We boarded our cruise ship, the Clipper Adventurer, for an eleven-day journey. The itinerary took us to the Falkland Islands and then down to the Antarctic Peninsula.

There were perhaps 100 passengers on the boat. About half were Americans; two-fifths of the rest were English or Canadian. Though there were two younger guys traveling on their own, my wife and I were by far the youngest couple on the trip. (Indeed, we were certainly the only married pair whose aggregate age didn’t exceed 110.) Though we enjoyed meeting many of our older companions, we were a little bit taken aback by the lack of physical mobility of many of our cruisemates. Somehow, I had gotten it into my head that this would be a more rugged expedition, with more opportunities for long hikes and vigorous climbs on land.

Still, it was a wonderful time. I don’t like cruising; I hate the sense of being confined. (And crossing the Drake Passage left with me a bad case of mal du mer.) But the glories of the Antarctic were worth being sick for a few days. We won’t be taking any more cruises any time soon — there are few parts of the world that are like Antarctica, only accessible for normal folks via cruise ships.

I fell in love with the Falkland Islands. We made stops on Carcass Island and New Island in the Western Falklands, and it was on the first of these that we got our only chance on the whole trip to do some extended hiking on our own. We met quite a few local inhabitants, all of whom are dedicated to keeping the Falklands as pristine as possible. Many of the islands, particularly in the western half of the archipelago, are nature preserves — with marvelously abundant bird life. Whatever one thinks about the dispute between the UK and Argentina over the ownership of what the latter calls Las Malvinas, it’s hard to imagine any nation doing a better job of environmental stewardship than the British are doing. And in the end, for me, that’s the only issue that matters. Which flag flies is irrelevant, as long as those charged with protecting the land keep it as undeveloped, clean, and wild as possible.

We finished our trip with a few days in Buenos Aires. There we were finally able to walk and walk and walk, and after being cooped up on the boat for nearly a fortnight, we nearly wore out the soles of our shoes traversing the “Paris of South America.” Eating was a challenge, of course; though the cruise line had been notified that we were vegans and were able to make preparations in advance, it was tougher when we were on our own in Chile and Argentina. (Most restaurants get the idea of vegetarianism, but veganism remains a radical idea — so radical, it often is graffitti-ed on the walls.) We did our best, but I’m quite confident a certain amount of dairy and egg product made it into our systems one way or another.

The hardest part about the trip home was missing all the Super Tuesday results. We flew home from Buenos Aires via Santiago; when we boarded our flight out of Argentina, the polls in Georgia were about to close. We had a few minutes in front of CNN in the Santiago airport during our transfer, and the first states in the east and the south were just starting to be called. The one thing that we were already able to grasp before boarding was that Mitt Romney was going to be unviable as a Southern candidate. Needless to say, when we were picked up at LAX yesterday morning, my first question for the bewildered driver was “Who won California?” He had no answer, but did tell me that Shaq was traded to the Suns. (We all have our priorities.)

More on politics later. It’s good to be home.