Author Archives: The Chronicler

Post Interregnum

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C19 isn’t over but the interregnum is.  Or at least our interregnum is.  We’ve hit the the road once again.  Stepped from the front door, turned west with no defined plan, other than to keep moving, see where our bicycles can take us.

Interregnum: defined by the OED as a period of suspension between reigns or successive governmental periods; whilst not strictly accurate, is a useful metaphor for our current predicaments.  

Twenty five months ago we, like many others, made a hasty and expensive retreat from a European journey.  Our kit was duly cleaned, sorted and stored with an anticipation that we would be able to pack it back up again that autumn.

And we all know how that panned out.

So one interregnum later we start to pack, only to slowly realise that we have slithered down the learning curve.  What should have been a relatively simple pack – we’ve done it several times – second nature – took all day.  For sure some items had mysteriously migrated to another place, a sealed tube of seam-sealer had magically evaporated, a decision was needed on stove type and do we always carry a corkscrew, bottle opener and a sieve?   But these weren’t the real causes, just mere procrastinations.  

It was the cerebral existential questions. Can we thole the angst of negotiating for road space?  Will the knees survive the gymnastics of tent life?  Do we still have the instinct to find a safe, legal, wild-camping?

Can I still do this?  Do I really want to do this?  

Set against these imponderables was a weather forecast of easterlies, that in the Scots vernacular and this time of year, translates as ‘manky east’ – ‘stunning west’.  It would appear that two years of pandemic stasis has produced a couple of dithering ‘fair-weather’ tourers.  Time to climb back on the learning-curve, time to go west.

A quarter hour away from that initial step away from our front door and all the foreboding angst has evaporated.  Tail winds, bright sunshine and a bicycle that has acquired its own momentum, gliding along an old railway line.  The same line we’ve ridden innumerable times in the interregnum, but now it’s as if that pandemic interlude has been warped in a bubble, an interruption that will exist as a memory, held in suspended animation, but is now consigned for storage to a shelf labelled: ‘Time out of Time’.

CalMac – Caledonian MacBrayne – that loved and hated institution that runs most of the ferry services in the west of Scotland.
Jura
Kilnave Chapel, Islay
Barra

The Navigator – editor and tech in chief – apologises that WordPress is getting the better of her right now. The content is here, but the layout is not the best. Another thing that has to be relearned.

Some Things Change, Some Things Don’t

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It’s been ten years since we last cycled this way, so it’s going to be interesting to see what might have changed.

Ten minutes away from the airport, and we’re pushing against the rush hour on a motorway shoulder… seen this movie before. Add two minutes and we’re stuck in the back of a warehouse peering through linknet fencing to where we think we should be…. played this game before. Correct this aberration only to find that we’re now bumping along a dry river bed… I’ve got the t-shirt already. We can see the hotel, it’s got ten stories, it stands like a beacon…. on the other side of a multi-lane highway that has an impediment of crash barriers in the way…. sorry, read the book already. It’s good to know that some things don’t change when it comes to Biking Spain.

For the ‘Osborne’ bulls still grace the hilltops and artists still paint on blind corners, Tio Pepe still lounges by the road’s verge and people still take their parrots for walks.

And yet, and yet…. all that angst between airport and town will soon be solved when they place the final span of that wooden bridge, another obstacle solution on the Cadiz-Athens EuroVelo route. But the biggest change in these ten years has to be App mapping. Once it was a paper Michelin map that had its fair share of wishful thinking, where the simplest solutions were to cycle the main thoroughfares and hope not to receive too many ‘waggy-fingers’ from the Gardas Civil. Now, with Google and its variants we’ve found deserted tracks through knurled olive groves, navigated around vast stretches of farmland and crossed rivers on exposed ferries, only occasionally ending up in flooded culverts or down narrow alleys looking down a flight of steps and into the Mediterranean Sea.

A ‘deja-vu’ that I’m happy to repeat.

In Another Place

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Search engine ‘Shetland Islands, then scroll down to ‘what people ask’ and click on ‘do the Shetland Islands exist?’  It’s a fair question, for too often they are plagued by a necessity for economy, the assertion that blue sea space is wasted space.  Like lands abandoned, a prisoner in a cell, locked in a box, up in the top right hand corner of every UK national map.  That, or it’s wedged into the cleft created by the Aberdeenshire and Easter Ross coasts.  Most will know that the Shetland Islands are to the north of the Orkneys, which in turn are somewhere off the coast from John o’Groats. fullsizeoutput_3e0b

But How Much Farther North?

Stand on Stromness’ pier and travel the equivalent distance of Edinburgh to Inverness and you will find the puffin burrows at the southern end of the archipelago high up on Sumburgh Head.  Now travel the virtual return trip to Perth and that will take you to the final lighthouse and a clutch of geo-superlatives, to Muckle Flugga and Britain’s ‘most northerly’ pub, bus stop, check-out, post office, petrol pump, chip shop… etcetera, etcetera. fullsizeoutput_3de2

The Other Land’s End.  Another Ultimate Thule. 

The adage that when in Lerwick: “you’re closer to Bergen than to Edinburgh” only emphasises the innate feeling that you’re in another country.  Of course it’s erroneous, yet when I’m chatting with another cycle-travelling French family and they ask as to where we’ve come from, I instinctively say “Scotland”.  So confirming my socio-typical assertion that mère, père, et trois enfants on a bike trip will invariably be French, but also that my subconscious is drifting in a foreign place.

In Another Place.

fullsizeoutput_3e43And yet that feeling of ‘new place-other world’ is only emphasised at every turn.  A place where puffins are ‘tammie norries’ and ‘curlie doddies’ are clovers.  Where the anti-littering campaigns have slogans like “dunna chuck bruck” fullsizeoutput_3dedand the chip shop doesn’t offer deep-fried pizza but serves mussels from the voe right outside and not from the pickle jar on the counter.  Where a craft IPA beer is black and the Victorian homes still have wrought iron palings.  Where honesty-boxes abound and traffic offers excessive respect.  Where trolls cross the road and there’s more wood in telegraph poles than living trees.  Where the ratio of Nordic Cross to Scot’s Saltire flags is infinite to one and the ferry’s car deck smells of fish and not diesel.

That same overnight ferry has deposited us in rush hour Lerwick, with a weather window of opportunity.  The promise of at least three days without rain, and given our locality and the capriciousness of this Scottish summer, we should be grateful.  More importantly, that ‘window’ would appear to be wind-free, or at least what passes for ‘windless’ on a group of islands that’s never more than a short walk from any shoreline and the Atlantic Ocean.  A place that’s near treeless and where the plants, ponies and panoramas all cling close to the ground. 

fullsizeoutput_3ddfTrue, it is near wind-free, a climo-phenomenon that simply allows the cloud to settle down and clamp to the sea, that flushes out all colour leaving a pastel of greys to be the dominate colour wash, graduated shades that merge sea through shore to sky.  So it’s as well that the old croftlands and the road verges are such a dash of contrasts. IMG_1295fullsizeoutput_3e23 Virulent splotches of magenta thyme interspersed with yellow streaks in clogged ditches of Monkey Flower and Flag Iris.  Eyebrights creep through the sheep-nibbled sward, leaving solitary sentinel Orchids, and Angelicas that are exploding like umbrellas from tissue pokes.  All are a reminder as to how a genuine wildflower meadow would once have naturally looked, pre- a drench of selective herbicides.

We’ve been south to wander through the 3500 years of habitation that is Jarlshof, not that any Norwegian Jarl ever lived in a house there.  That name comes from the ever-effervescent imagination and creator of Scots-myth, Sir Wattie Scott.  Then to traipse the sea cliffs in the company of the long-lensed twitteratzzi photographing the ever-gregarious ‘Tammie Norries’ and a wren that’s endemic to the isles.  It’s trinomial name somewhat more bulky than its minimal stature…’Troglodytes troglodytes zetlandicus’ or in the local parlance, ‘Rindill the Runt’.

In Another Place.

Now to head north on the final stretch of the National Cycle Route 1.  fullsizeoutput_3de0It, not we, started in Dover and will complete it’s travel up North Mainland; across Yell; then north through Unst to Muckle Flugga.  Where it will accumulate that collection of ‘most northerly’ superlatives, of which the most intriguing could be ‘the most northerly flowering cactus in a bus shelter’.

Bobby’s Bus Stop.

 

fullsizeoutput_3e00At the age of six he wrote to the Shetland Times bemoaning the demise of the old wooden shelter that had been deemed unsafe and demolished.  The council reacted and replaced it with a shiny new one.  A short time later a wicker table and sofa materialised, then a microwave, followed closely by a carpet, the telephone and curtains.  fullsizeoutput_3e09All anonymously.  Today the montage creations are the work of a group of volunteers, who curate a rotating celebration of themes.  Moon landings; sheep; Queen’s Jubilees; Fake (g)nus and that real, living, flowering cactus. fullsizeoutput_3dfb

In Another Place.

fullsizeoutput_3e17And from gnus, fake or otherwise, it’s not an overly obvious jump to golfing.  It’s UnstFest and the organisers have created a golf course; an 18-hole peripatetic course.  You peregrinate, the holes don’t; although in this isle of low mists and wandering trolls, you wonder.  The holes might be short, but travelling between them is long, for the course encompasses the whole island.

In Another Place.

fullsizeoutput_3ed5Turn a corner and the road sign warns of ‘crossing trowies’…. malevolent spectres, or a resurrection, a manifestation of a 70’s icon?

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In Another Place.

Stop for a beer.  It’s IPA… India Pale Ale, a beverage that once was the lubricant for the lower orders of the British Raj; a bitter brew that traditionally couldn’t score much above an ABV 3%; hence the ‘pally-ally’ or ‘peely-wally’ appellation.  That’s all changed; now it comes with a kick, but a ‘black’ pale-ale does still seem like a contradiction, whereas the logo of a Shetland pony and the name ‘Blindside’ seems almost appropriate.  IMG_7354It wasn’t just the cartoonist Thelwell who considered the Shetland pony to be a self-opinionated devil incarnate.  I fully concurred with this beer bottle’s subliminal message which I took to be… “never approach a Shetland pony on its blindside: you’ll only get a hoof in a delicate place”.  That, and they don’t come with handlebars or brakes.

The actuality is somewhat more prosaic. This beer’s story refers to the visit of the NZ All-Blacks in ’17.

fullsizeoutput_3df5We’re on a tent camping trip, and whilst the Scottish countryside access code allows for wild camping, it seems churlish to avoid the established sites.  In part because they come not only with a hot shower, but with an ethos that’s been lost in much of the rest of Scotland.  Local community-run campsites operating an honesty box system.  One even has a note stating that the warden won’t be back until a week on Tuesday and that the bantam eggs are £1.40.

In Another Place.

fullsizeoutput_3effHaving taken the obligatory ‘most northerly person in Great Britain…(possibly)… photograph, visibility was somewhat reduced.  Maybe there was someone clinging to the skerries that house the Muckle Fluga light and so potentially negating our momentary claim to fame.  We turn south. 

fullsizeoutput_3e01Back along twisting roads that roll between moor and shore… repeatedly.  Hill lochs with ‘rain goose’, treacle-black waters, fishers’ bothies and respectful drivers.  The latter that are becoming a very noticeable occurrence.  A long curve lies to front, a car approaches from behind, it remains some considerable distance back…. the sight lines elongate…. still it won’t pass.  Maybe they’ve spotted one of the ultra rare red-necked phalaropes or they assume that they’re still driving a ‘single track with passing places’ road and therefore still spooked by the incongruity of such a diminished width of macadam.  Still they don’t approach, so to the gravel verge we head, still no reaction.  Finally a frantic convulsion of arm waving seems to elicit the required response.  Trouble is we are now tyre deep in peaty glaur, and more importantly, stopped…. on an up-hill.  Still, I’m not complaining for these courtesies will soon evaporate if the next ferry is due to leave in five minutes.

In Another Place.

fullsizeoutput_3d99And finally down to the metropolis that is Lerwick.  Capital of the Shetland Isles, with it’s 7000 inhabitants, cruise ship hordes, and wrought-iron railings.  It took a few moments to realise what was different, unusual, not-missing….  all the stone-built late-Victorian mansions along King Harald’s Street still retain their original garden wall railings.  By contrast, look at any comparable building’s wall head in any other British city and you’ll notice the oxy-cut rusted tooth set in a leaded hole; all that is left from the war effort to convert fence palings into aeroplanes.  Unfortunately, Spitfires were made from aluminium and not pig iron.fullsizeoutput_3da5

In Another Place. 

Stuck high up in a box or wedged into the Cromarty Firth, transferred to a different sea; and yet the islands can unashamedly call it’s diminutive town a ‘capital’ and I find it unquestionably accurate.

Is it the fact that you arrive out of the bowels of a boat or the plethora of Nordic Cross flags in places where a Scot’s Saltire Cross might fly?  Or ‘da’ dialect that’s so tantalisingly similar but so evidently different?  Or that island status, one that all islands share; with their watery perimeters, that makes them feel like places apart?  No passport control, and still it still feels like a place Not-Scotland, and yet it’s all so British, albeit with a light patina of Scandi-Norsk washed over it. 

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Which leaves one unanswerable question: why has it taken me several decades to find my way to this ‘Another Place’?

Footnote: Late last year the island’s MSP Tavish Scott raised an amendment to rectify the location depiction aberration.  Now all official government publications have to be geographically correct.  The islands will sit where they’ve always sat, but now freed from that virtual prison, officially and visibly at the hub of a circle that encompasses all Scandinavia, The Faroes, Iceland and Scotland.

Travelling in the Present Tense

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Most times we travel in the present tense. Moving down a street, through a village, across a country in the here and now; all the meaningful interludes in the plaza, at the market stall, by the side of the road, are but present moments in time. For both ‘us’ and ‘other’ there is no past and little future; no yesterday and little tomorrow. All is two dimensional. Little depth. Which can be liberating, for I come with no form, nobody can know my history; there’s a freedom from responsibility, an escape from reputation. But when you make a return visit, depth, and the third dimension floats into place. The photo’ archive, that recording eye, is a potent reminder of what was. Now to find what is.

Such is the case and our return to Uruguay. 

Some things change; some things do not.

We first visited thirteen years ago. Then, it was possible to agree with the adage that on your first day you would see your father’s first car, that an Uruguayan has a Thermos surgically attached to their elbow at birth and that they will take umbrage when the Porteño resident of the Argentine capital refers to Uruguay as their 49th barrio.

Much has changed since we first visited. The heavy goods trucks still haul eucalyptus logs, but they no longer grumble slowly past in a cloud of particulates; nor do you get your groceries individually bagged in a voluminous eco-waste of single-use plastic bags. Nor did I see Dad’s Hillman Hunter; however I did find my first set of wheels.  I’m just not sure roseate pink was ever an Austin production colour. Finding the stretch Fiat 500 was an absurd bonus, and I have little use for a grounded plane. As for Yerba Mate and the attached paraphernalia, it still predominates, and you know when the ferry has docked by the pulse of Argentine cars that race past, heading for their designated beach along the coast. 

Julio is still the caretaker of the house we’re visiting, his hand-shake is still a vice-grip, he still arrives with an armful of hibiscus blooms for la señora; only now, he’s eighty-six.

That much is still a constant.  What is different is a significant increase in cycle travellers. For the geek in the know, if you saw a loaded bike with the panniers with those tell-tale reflective patches, you would assume they would be European, almost certainly Swiss, whereas if they were a family then they would invariably be French. 

Not any more. 

It’s been one of the joys on this trip to see the breadth of nationalities, and in particular, southern Americans, out on the road. Once the guidebook’s advice to cycling visitors was to bring all your spares with you, as the opportunity for purchasing parts would be non-existent. Frankly I felt that was a trifle condescending; we’ve had some very imaginative and durable repairs over the years.  However, now with this increased presence has come a vast change in the quality of componentry. There’s some rather nice kit out there. The bent-wood basket probably doesn’t go with the ethos of macho mountain bike, but I did like the design sentiment.

Forbye the more usual combinations of solo males and millennial couples, there was the Argentine father with his four year old daughter on a recumbent ‘tagalong’, followed by her older sister with a pet poodle in a basket and her mother bringing up the rear. Or there was Carlos and Cristián from Circo Trayecto with their clown’s collection of juggling clubs and a unicycle, away to perform in the middle of another crossroads somewhere between The Caribbean and Cape Horn. Or Juan who is hauling a wooden shed around the world, and this chap with a surfboard, riding south from Brazil. And then there is the Kumtrú touring club whose motto is: ‘eat a lot: cycle a little’, and who asked: “have you ever met so many fat cyclists?”. Who then they feed us vast plates of spaghetti.

So we can say with absolute authority, we have never in all our previous tours met so many other cycle travellers as we have this year. 

On occasions we are the “rule to the exception”.

*Note from The Navigator: you may have gathered, we are back in Scotland for a while; the blog may catch up – eventually.

Vignette Viajero #2/2019

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Early May, mellow May, and a southern hemispheric autumn.  A stiff breeze blows from the river and through the elegant dapple-trunked street trees. An early, long light stretches down cobbled lanes, echoing to the soft swish of wind, rasping rattle of wire-tined rakes and the reverberating roar of several two-stroke engines.

A squad of Colonia’s council workers are trying to herd the drifting, falling leaves.  Leaves that are in league with Wind.

Wind the contrarian.

Wind the schizophrenian.

Wind the tactician.

Wind which divides its forces and advances down the same street from both ends.  A pincer move worthy of any storm twister.

I’m wandering up and down the narrow cobblestoned calles, hoping that the parked modern car that was interfering with a possible photograph, or the Instagrammer who had insistently monopolised that pink wall yesterday, have all moved on.  I’m on the hunt for further pictures to add to several ongoing projects.

Wind: that most challenging of the elements to capture.  Given its near-ubiquitous presence on this trip, there’s been notable opportunities.  I’ve had the chances, the ingredients for an elemental drama have been plentiful, only to be found unprepared.  That inverting umbrella, or the dog who’s chasing a surf-kiter (instead of a cyclist) through the water.  Or it might have been the Navigator’s cycling 30° cant and her sudden slew across the carriageway in Tierra del Fuego.  Only had I suggested a re-play there might have been a major difference of opinion; safer to photograph road signage, wall-paintings or ghost-trails.

And then I find myself being pursued by a swirling cloud of herded leaves.

I’ve found today’s project.

Wind awake, turn the next corner to find that the national flag is ripping taut on a high banner pole with an interesting picture possibility.

Uruguay’s flag; in the idioma of vexillologists is: ‘a fly of nine equal bars horizant; alternate white, blue; a hoist canton carrying the charge ‘Sun of May’ resplendent on a field of white.

Pictures, like maps save a thousand words.

Now the challenge: can I align the Sol of Cosmos with the Sun of May?  But the banner’s shadow is creeping across wet rocks, rocks that are being washed by the rising tide and travelling out on to the River Plate.

It was a close call, but I’m still dry-shod and unembarrassed, as only the scavenger dogs got to watch the teetering, crouching crazy gringo.

*Note from The Navigator:

Those of you paying attention will have noticed that we are actually back home now, for a little while.  The blog may catch up with us, eventually.

End of Season… Out of Season

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They’re stripping the sunshades from the promenade pier, the traffic lights have been switched off and the price of oranges has started to drop. The ever-speculative house letting signs have re-sprouted outside homes, whilst the seasonal autoservicios have blanked their windows in fresh newsprint,     and the boutiques are now offering a 50% discount on leather jackets. 

Easter was yesterday, decay is today. The End of Season is sudden. Now is the season of make and repair. Those cobbled monoblocks that had rattled each time we left the supermarket have been lifted, and might be relaid sometime soon. 

*Note from The Navigator: Yes, we’ve been home in Scotland for a little while, but there’s been a few posts pending editing and completion – they’ll appear over the next couple of days.

Evangelistas

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As we well knew, but jokingly disregarded, ‘Evangelistas’ was no conventional cruise ship, at least not in a present day understanding. More a cargo vessel that takes a few paying passengers than the slab-sided, deck-windowed condominium-booze-cruiser, neither steam-tramp nor the triple smoke-stacked liner of a bygone era as suggested by one example of wall art.

Three decks loaded with floats of live horses, liquid oxygen tankers and anonymous tarp’d trailers, cars, vans and long-distance motorbikes. As well as three pedal cycles whose riders’ average age is in the mid-sixties. Not quite ‘Evangelistas’ score; at 47 years she’s approaching her imminent retirement, and on first acquaintance, she looks her age. Careworn in a literal sense, weather-beaten around the edges as any craft would be from plying twice weekly the length of the southern Chilean fiords, but obviously cared for. The weeping rust blisters might be mascara’d in white paint, but the linoleum floor is render polished to a glazed mock mahogany.

We’d packed ear plugs, well versed with experiences from North Sea crossings where every pipe, bolt and brain cell would seem intent upon rattling loose. Only to be politely informed that she’s Japanese built, German powered, Chilean crewed. Solid. Quiet. Proud.

The initial publicity suggested that she was a ‘floating hostel’, which had raised a few interesting doubts. Too often hostels are populated with a certain demographic who adhere to the mantra that ‘others’ will clean the pasta-encrusted saucepan they abandoned yesterday in a festering sink, fatbergs floating in a cold water slick of congealing grease. Whilst they, and a room full of similar ingratiates interrogate their social media accounts. Sitting in an observance of hermetical silence until midnight at which point life reinvigorates the body.

Only this ‘hostel’ comes with no connectivity.

What’s to do for four days?

Four Brexit-free days.

It doesn’t have alcohol either, which might explain why three dinner tables have been pushed together and a 2000 piece jigsaw has all the straight edges in place, a triple language Scrabble contest emerges and a card school materialises.

No connectivity?

What’s to do for the next four days?

Four wind-free non-bicycle days.

Once the chore of consuming three major meals each day is replete (extra points have been awarded for the quality of the breakfast porridge), there’s the rolling tapestry of shorescapes to be contemplated. A slow scrolling reel, an unfurling braid of glaciers, mountains and sea-states that stitch the sky to sea. An utterly empty shore; at night there are no human lights to be seen, just the vast aurora of infinite stars.

No connectivity.

What’s to do for the next four days

Four Trump-stress-free days.

Yet there’s always something happening, little vignettes, minor short stories… five dolphins breach the silent surface heading directly for our bow and then disappear. A flock of bonxie-skuas so engorged on the floating bloated whale carcass that they can only flap frenetically out of the ship’s way, or the solitary albatross carving through the mounting wave troughs. The distant spout of a Minke whale that empties the dining lounge at lunch time, only to then energise an overexcited imagination when a leviathan-like garden of storm-torn kelp slides past. Every stick is a sea otter, every islet a seal colony, every wave disturbance another fauna spotting.

Trouble is – many are.

Other short stories are just as intriguing; there’s the freighter that’s perched on a submerged rock, an insurance scam that didn’t quite go to plan. Her non-existent sugar cargo was supposed to be lost in the fjord’s vast depths; greed and miscalculation has left it perched high and dry, serving as a monument for opportunism. Now a tern roost.

But maybe the most impressive moment of the passage is when the ‘Evangelistas’ slips on an inter-tidal slack water through ‘Angostura White’; a narrows with only two ship’s widths of clearance, one for each side. The surrounding mountains overhanging the ship’s superstructure, every gale-gnarled tree, every lichen-etched rock, chiseled stark on an ever more intimate shore.

Just breathe in.

Still no connectivity.

What’s left to do?

Chat.

When your ear is attuned to capturing key Spanish words in any conversation, it comes as a surprise when the first thing I hear coming on board is pure ‘weegie’ and being informed of the latest major news development from the West of Scotland… the impending management shuffle at Glasgow Celtic FC. Martin is fresh from finding a diaspora of lost cousins who happen to be sheep-men in Tierra del Fuego. Then there’s Jack at 73 years, who has just cycled the Labrador Highway, virtually convincing us to try the same. Or the Oregonian who, on finding out our nationality, declaims: ‘My People!” He’s fresh from discovering that he’s 82% Scots and has 12 kilts issued by the US military.(?)

And that probably captures the essence of the ‘Evangelistas’, a community of the inconsequential and inspiring. And, yes she is an ‘hostel’; but one where people chat, where there’s time to sea-gaze vacantly, where its left to the professional truck drivers to complete the clear sea-blue expanses of that giant jigsaw on the final evening.

One where everybody clears up after themselves.

So Want – So Need – to See Those Towers

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What happens when you combine the omnipresence of digital photography with an iconic mountain setting? When happy-snapping is notionally cost-free and a succession of hillscapes keep developing?

Answer: 197 images.

Cleanliness might not necessarily be next to godliness, but it is close to some compulsive disorders. 197 pictures. Time to tidy up; there’s always time to tidy up, its time to wield the secateurs. The first attempt, the first pruning, the removal of the ‘out of focus’, leaves 197 images. That’s the problem with ‘phone cameras, their depths of field are so deep, even the stirred swirls of my shoe are in focus. The next cropping should have removed the duplicates, the triplicates, the multiplicates, but little seems to be falling into the trash bin, and I’ve still got 197 amazing pictures left. There’s just so much fun to be had fiddling with even the most basic of post-production apps, I just don’t want to give up on any shot.

Looks like it’s time to employ the ultimate arbiter, and ask as to what is their purpose, beyond creative endeavour, what’s the end use? Is it blogpost, ego stoker, aide memoire or fodder for an i-cloud?

It’s part homage, part veneration, part obeisance. Torres del Paine has been lying deep down, but ever-present, back before someone coined the term ‘bucket-list’. (Stream-of-Consciousness alert, or simple lexiconic enquiry: a bucket once was a receptacle for receiving discarded waste… so when did an iconoscape become rubbish?). This place has sat since world mountains and Scottish hills were my consuming interest, when my collection of classic literature had titles like Doctor Patey’s ‘One Man’s Mountains’, Ms Moffat’s ‘Space Below my Feet’ and Comrade Whillans’ ‘Portrait of a Mountaineer’. Of which the latter will require re-reading to confirm if my memory is accurate; did Whillans and Bonnington really haul a diesel generator and a Black & Decker drill up the central tower to drill holes for climbing protection? Even if as a false memory it has been a persistent image, enough to sustain a desire for 45 years. We’ve made it to Ushuaia, now I’m allowed my reward, that ‘chittery bite’ for reaching the windy south. All I want to see are those Towers.

Winter is creeping north, the season is sliding down to autumn, new snow merges into the treeline, a stark chiaroscuro of shade and glare. Roiling clouds stubbornly cling to the outer massif, spinning vaporous shrouds that tangle on the towers. Teasing sensations, speculative suggestions, testing questions. Do the eponymous towers that adorn beer bottles, bus ribs and every outfitter’s window truly exist? Will we get to the mountain only to find an inconclusive answer, only to find it shrouded in cloud?

We’re on a bus doing ‘a day Tour of Torres del Paine’, which should be an anachronism for this cycle tourist and I’m not even going to attempt a justification, other than to note that booking campsites is a prerequisite; this requires planning that then creates deadlines, only to result in angst. The weather has been unsettled for several days, pewter-shine sun blending into counterpane cloud, degradations of gunmetal grey, all interspersed with sudden downpours. Weather ideal for photo-essays entitled ‘moody-cloudscape’ and potential disappointments up at the Towers. They say that it is better to travel in hope than expectation, possibly true, however I Expect! today.

Come the designated morning, a prophetic pink sunrise competes with thunderheads amassing on the near horizon. A discussion between the occasional patches of nascent clear-blue and an ominous weather front is ongoing. Much the same debate is playing with my emotions. Normally when travelling I’m happy to accept graciously what the weather gods wish to hurl my way, but today is different: I so want, I so need to see those Towers.

I know that I could see the Towers, I know that they were there, I could see them faint through the veil of mist, shadow ghosts of luminescent warm stone, but strangely, the camera lens could not. And therein lies a parable for our times: if it’s not on the pixel does it exist? If I don’t have the documented evidence, did we even travel to the Tower?

Factual answer to the posed question. In the end the tidy ethic wins out, the final score settles down at 89 pictures. But has it satiated the Tower’s itch?

Yes.

But.

Only don’t mention it to The Navigator just yet, but we might just have to come back again, for there still appears to be a lingering tickle, that and there’s ample room in the ‘phone’s memory.

Cruising

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The beauty of having a journey that is both discordant and verging on macaronic verse, is you can add any number of extra helpings. One portion-verse crossed Canada from salt-gulf to salt-river, a neat C2C, from Victoria to Quebec City, along a greater part of the Trans-Can highway. However, that same road carries on; no ‘Tierra Finisterre’ signage in Quebec, for there’s the small problem of the Atlantic provinces to the east that will need to be accommodated.

Why stop at there? The geology of the Canadian Maritimes is Torridonian sandstone, which makes Appalachia, the Gaspé and Ben Alligin all one mountain chain, albeit one rendered asunder a few eons ago by some drifting plate tectonics. Of course Iceland, the Faroes and Shetland lie in between, so would probably require inclusion.

Tierra del Fuego to East Lothian, Ushuaia to Haddington. Land’s End to Front Door.

Facts and Problems: Cape Horn is as far south as Haddington is north, which leads inevitably to consideration of a visit to the other far north, and Norway’s Nordkapp.

However, these are but speculative musings and lie in a speculative future. More immediately we’re off on a cruise. Going cruising.

A verb I wasn’t sure should ever be attached to myself. I’ve looked on those slab sided, stack-windowed, floating hulks and thought ‘prison ship’. More for their graceless lines and want of elegance than a snobbish indifference to cultural fact.

Part of our northern journey included a ferry crossing off the northern cape of Vancouver Island. The boat threading its way through a tangle of passages, straits and channels, passing logging rafts, bald eagles and sliding on a mirror glass sea.

The northern ‘Inside Passage”.

So in a collaboration of symmetry, if there’s a similar ‘inside passage’ to be navigated in the south, we want, need, to sail it.

It will be different. No bald eagles, no sleeping on deck, no serene passage for a purple-magenta wind is forecast. The Navigator has already purchased the seasick tablets.

The End of Ane Lang Sang

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No longer do you need to ask: “where are you going to?” For now there are no options left, there’s only one road left and that one comes to a dead end.

‘This Road Ends in Water’

To wit the waters of the Beagle Chanel and the southern Argentine city of Ushuaia. The question now has to be: “where did you start?”

For us there is no easy, simplistic answer. By saying “Valparaiso….” just seems to be selling us short. The Chilean capital’s port feels like it’s just up the road and in our ‘lang sang’, it is.

“Where have you come from?”, is one of the oft asked questions and how we reply is determined by how perverse you want to be and who you’re talking with. I don’t like to appear superior, big-headed, or accused of telling ‘porkie pies’ or being a ‘peddler of fake”. So I suggest somewhere a few days back up the road, pass some pleasantries, comment on the weather if they’re of an Anglo-Saxon persuasion and go on my way.

That all changes when you meet another cycle traveller.

It’s open season for a bragging bonanza. The explanation is simple; anybody on a bike in Ushuaia is either just starting or has come some considerable distance. It certainly won’t be “just two days up the road”.

So does the Silk Road out-score Crossing Australia? Does a Round the World out-trump Four Years on the Road? Does a Traveling Family outstrip a nine year old Nikky cycling fourteen miles home from school every day?

Everybody wins on the bragging board.

So please allow us a moment or two for some ego-preening.

We started in Inuvik and its taken us 91,000 km to get here…. it’s been seven years on the road over the last 15. (there’s actually another 60thou’ in the Antipodes, around Europe and at ‘home’, but we’re not bothering about them, it only confuses the issue).

So the end to a “guy lang sang”, one that’s been composed in several verses. Some have been sung in the round, others are linear, a song narrative that might have sounded at moments discordant, verging on anti-tonal. Today has found a finale.

Maybe it would be a slight… to call it ‘a crashing crescendo’, but the last three days of the ride were a fitting resume for that which had gone before.

A fortnight of flat, treeless pampa days, one of the last being a 222 km epic, suddenly gave way to low rolling hills, lenga woodland, to which an horizon of glacier, crag mountains, sun, wind and rain can be added. To call the transformations a surprise would be an understatement. But as a synopsis for our travels it’s near perfect. Emotional rollercoaster. Serendipity writ large.

Tonight, as I tally the account, I’m left thinking that I really must simplify the story by drawing a map, and wondering – how the hell did this happen?