Dana at dock

Dana at Dock AKA My training begins – a posting with too many superlatives.

This is a photo of Dana at sea... we are still at dock, so her sails are not up, but she is just as beautiful!

If I were just a wee bit more superstitious I wouldn’t put this post up but, but, but… I really am here, living on this boat, and I am so very much in awe that I just have to. If I mess things up, if I get kicked off after my training week, well, I do. You can read about it later.

Wow!

Wednesday I met with Sven and was accepted as crew onboard his amazing boat, Dana.

Wow! Just wow!

Talk about being in the right place at the right time. This boat is beyond fantastic and Sven could have his pick of any crew at all in the world. I just happened to be in Puerto Montt, of all places, when he was passing through and managed to ask to chat with him with exactly the right mix of assertiveness and humility. I am honoured, and awed, and grateful, and disbelieving, that I have the fortune to be here.

As soon as I was given the opportunity, lickety-split, faster than light, moving on air, I moved from the hostel I was staying at to Dana.

I am overwhelmed. I am afraid that I will be out of my depth. I am worried that I may not rise to the challenge.

I feel terrible about potentially deserting my kids, going off, out of e-mail range even, for weeks at a time, but, at the same time, I am determined to do my very very best to pass my training week here and succeed in being taken on as semi-permanent crew. It is, undoubtedly, the chance of a lifetime for me.

I will be here on the boat for a week, now, on dock, helping out with odd chores, and then for a month, while Sven goes home, I´ll go south to do some hiking, and then we will (hopefully, my fingers are crossed so hard they are almost bleeding) meet back here again in early April and set sail. That is the plan.

Lisa, the other crew, will, I think, help me out, and Sven is intimidating, but, I am pretty sure, a great leader. It will all be good. It will all be fantastic!

‘No boat comes perfect so find a boat and make it perfect.’ This is a piece of advice given by one of the other captains I had considered crewing for. I like it. I think I can do that here. I think, if I am careful, I can make this boat perfect. (For me.) It is an amazing boat; large, clean, comfortable, open, and very well equipped. It was hand designed by Sven purposefully for long distance cruising. It is his ‘adventure platform’ and comes will all the bells and whistles. And the itinerary is a dream for most people (including me). It comes with another woman on board (which is a plus). The common language is English (also good). There will be little responsibility yet awesome sailing. All I have to do is learn to cook, and, I think using the onboard 1000 Classic Recipes and and Fred’s dictum, ‘If you can read you can cook.’ I ought to be able to manage to do that. (I was upfront and admitted that I am not a good cook but was accepted almost instantly anyway.) This boat is spotless, beautiful, comfortable, well-organized, well-run… The captain has lots of money and spares none of it. The other crew is very sympathetic. My plan is to start out very permissive, to be a pleaser, to do whatever I can to make the situation work. This same plan has, I know, failed me in past, but I don’t see how I can do otherwise. It is both the nature of the beast - being a guest in someone else’s expensive and amazing home – and my nature. I just have to make sure that it doesn’t come back to bite me in the tail. I don’t think, here, however, that that will be a problem. I think here the captain is strong enough and sane enough, intelligent and well-balanced enough, that it will work, that he will make it work. He wants, obviously, his life on this boat to be congenial, and if his crew are happy and hard-working this makes it a more positive environment for them, and by extension for him, and, by all appearances, he is the sort of leader who will successfully troubleshoot problems and come up with effective solutions, not only on how to fix physical problems on the boat but also on how to deal with any ‘personnel’ problems. We will see.

I am sitting in the pilot house now, sipping a pre-supper glass of red wine, listening to classical music on a top notch sound system, while in the galley below the soup I have made simmers away.

I am overwhelmed but optimistic.

Wow!

And, even if this is the only week I get on Dana, this week at dock, even then I will be happy to have been here.

Me, like Mary

Me, like Mary AKA Mount Osorno

Me, like Mary

To get to Mount Osorno, the tourist information person tells me, by which he means the ski resort 15 km up a steep switch-backy road (el. 1230 m), there are only two choices; you can rent a car (expensive) or you can take a tour (also expensive). The local bus doesn’t run there. I choose instead to take the bus to the junction and then hitch hike up the hill. A jeep with three rangers picks me up almost immediately and deposits me right at the top of the road then turns around and heads back down. The place is deserted. It’s sort of spooky. Not a person or vehicle in sight. (How will I get back down at the end of the day?) Undaunted - well maybe a little daunted - I head off on the obvious path that winds up and around the side of the volcano. I feel like the boy in 127 hours. No one knows I am here. The vista is amazing. The path is loose gravelly scree, tricky to walk on. If I slip and fall of the edge of the hill my body may or may not ever be found. It is windy out. I hike for about an hour, up past a little side crater, and come to a bench at a lookout spot. (Yes. Civilization still exists.) All of a sudden I am like Mary of Santiago. I am at the top of the world. All around me is space. It is an almost clear day and I can see a range of hills that are maybe 10 km away and, in the other direction across the lake, Puerto Montt, where I am staying, 50 km as the crow flies, and, I can imagine, though it is a bit hazy, the island of Chiloe beyond that that is twice as far away again. It is hot here and windy. The air smells of melting snow, a familiar smell in this alien environment. I stand on the bench, face to the sun, arms extended. Here, with space all around me, and time once again suspended, I feel Mary’s peace. I want to bottle it up somehow and store it for later, like plums, so I take a photo of myself. I assume that I look a bit hot in the photo and a bit disheveled and a bit disconcerted but that is all a ruse. I am actually glowing, beaming, exuding joy. It is wonderful. I wish only that I could somehow do justice to the openness of this place. 

After that I hike a bit further and go round a corner to find that I am at the top of the first chair lift, the bottom of the second one. The place has come alive. A young guide is getting a zip-line ready for the day and a crew is working on a long winding wooden mountain bike boardwalk and both chair lifts are running. I take the second chair lift up (to el. 1670 m) and then hike with a British couple even further (to el. 2000 m) and we share their nuts and my water and I am looking way way down to where I was, at the top of the world, a few hours ago!

My well defined path...

Note hikers silhouetted against snow. 

The whole ski resort, closed now of course because it is late summer, is above the tree line. No glade skiing here. The variety in rocks is amazing though. On a beach you expect to have a range of different rocks because they have likely been washed downstream from different locations hundreds of miles apart, but here, on this volcano, all the rocks have certainly been ejected from the same hole in the recent past. Yet there are samples of pumice, banded tuff, porphyritic rhyolite, vesicular basalt, and more. (Sorry, I don’t get to use my undergrad vocabulary often.) Alien, but amazing.  

On the way home I stop to see some waterfalls, help a French woman fix her camera, and then meet her again in the evening at 'my' hostel. Tomorrow we are going out to lunch together. Yes. It is all good. 

Bouncing Back

Girl on boardwalk at Frutillar

Hostels are so social. I can’t imagine why anyone travelling on their own, lost and alone, and without a plan, would want to stay anywhere else. At breakfast my first morning I am sitting beside a 70 year old Dane who has been to Chile many times. ‘Go to Bariloche,’ he says, ‘Stay in the Hostel Inn. Take the cable car to the top of the hill and then walk for a few hours. Go to Petrohue. See the waterfalls there. Take the ferry to Chaiten. Stop along the way at the hot springs. Visit the island of Chiloe. How long are you going to be here? Do you have plans already?’ I admit that I have no plans and tell him I have to be back at work in September (hoping that this is the truth) and the look in his eyes is a sight to behold. He starts telling me about bigger and better waterfalls in Argentina, worth a three day stay, and a town in Uruguay that I just can’t miss, about the bus through the middle of the Andes, and where the best salt flats are, a ten day hike in Torres del Paine... As he talks and talks I scribble away in my notebook. There is so much to do here. How on earth did I think I had time to go on a boat?

I start of slow. I walk from one end of Puerto Montt, the fish market, where bushels upon bushels of octopus and giant crab and sea-urchin are being cleaned and prepped for the many on-site boutique restaurants full of tourists to the other end, the mall, where there is a food court with a MacDonalds and a KFC filled with locals. 

I do a day trip to Puerto Varas, where it is, admittedly, quite grey, but I walk 3 km along the waterfront boardwalk and then head to the lookout point gorging on handfuls of ripe juicy blackberries. 

Next I head to Frutillar for another waterfront walk where the abundance of food choices boggles the mind; great greasy fast food that always comes, even the hot dogs, with lavish amounts of guacamole and salsa, amazing German tortes just like those from the home-country, slickly packaged ready-to-eat Chilean smoked salmon… I manage to pick a few treats  and pack them in and feel the wind lift my hair and my spirits start to rise. 

I still don't have a plan. At all. But I am in no hurry. I have nothing if not time. The freedom is relaxing, invigorating, intoxicating. It is the total opposite of the stifling claustrophobic anxiety that encases me at home. I am very happy here, now, in this moment. It may not last. Who knows? But for now, for today, all is good. 

SPLAT

Splat - the sound of myself falling flat on my face.

OH MY GOD.

               

I started to correspond by e-mail with John, my captain-of-the-year, in December and, more recently, spent hours skyping with him. He is an old sea-salt, has done numerous circumnavigations, sailed across the Pacific 7 times, weathered many a storm but avoided even more. What could go wrong?

I flew 10 hours from Toronto to Santiago and then took a 14 hour bus ride further south. I am, not quite, but almost, half way round the world.

I get to Puerto Montt as darkness falls and John is there to meet me at the bus stop. We take the local bus along the coast to where his boat is moored and dingy out to it.

WHAT HAVE I DONE.

  

First evening. At first glance this boat makes HS’s look like a luxury liner. I am horrified. The inside is smaller and dirtier and smellier, more cramped and disgusting than I could have imagined. The stove doesn’t work. The head doesn’t work. The fridge doesn’t work. The radio doesn’t work. John has been here for almost a year looking for crew to sail with him, as this is not the type of boat you can sail on your own, and nothing is ready to go. The floor isn’t level. Every surface is covered with rugs and mats and I am sure they are all dirty. AKKK. I didn’t think that I was a clean freak. I can’t imagine what the morrow will bring. I dread to see what the outside of the boat is like. How do I get myself into these situations? (Oh yes, I answer random ads on the internet! Ah. Well. Maybe I have finally learnt that this is not a good thing to do.)  I consider girding my loins, taking a deep breath and holding it for six weeks, accepting that both I and everything I own will be filthy, and finding a really really good shower when all is over. I don’t know. If I could walk off tonight I would. But to try and manoeuver myself and my gear back into the zodiac and back to land, and, then, where would I go? It is dark out. I decide to sleep tonight here and suss the situation tomorrow. It does not look good. It does not look good at all.

Next morning.  The inside of the boat is a disaster. It is SO packed with stuff that there is no room to breath. Think the TV show ‘Horders’ and then add stuff. ‘My’ closet has in it everything from snowshoes to snowmobile suits, but no room, my bed is covered in boxes and boxes of tools and bags and bags of sails. His quarter berth is a minuscule mole hole, a tunnel burrowed among a gazillion things. The whole boat is FULL - 17 sails and 2000 books and stuff and more stuff and more stuff with no room to walk or sit or, did I mention, breath. I crawl out my hatch to survey the outside of the boat and, if possible, it is worse. The cockpit is FULL - car wheels and fuel containers and god only knows what, literally filled about three or four feet high all held down with bungee cords but not a single square inch of available space anywhere. I can't imagine how it would even be possible to sail on this boat, let alone enjoy the experience.

OH MY GOD.

“I’m not staying,” I tell John, “it won’t work for me.” He looks crestfallen. He tries to convince me into doing a trial weekend, you know, as soon as he has the engine and the radio working again but I remain firm. “No,” I say, “Sorry, but no.”

So I say goodbye, make him take me to land, and check into a hostel for three nights but I don't have a plan. It seems to make sense to stay here for a while having traveled so far, but, I was planning on sailing for six weeks so... I don’t have a clue what to do. I am, obviously, clueless. I will need a few days to settle and see what's what. I think I might buy a back pack, ditch things I can leave behind like the six extra pairs of shorts Ben told me not to bring and send stuff home that I can't like the pants I borrowed from my mother, and hitch hike either south or north. But first I will find a map and a guide book and spend at least a day here reading. Who knows. I feel very deflated. I don’t think I will ever set out to go sailing with an unknown captain again. In fact I may never sail again at all. 

WHAT WILL I DO.

I think I'll start with a nap.

Santiago

 

Santiago:  founded in 1541, downtown core with neoclassic  architecture  and winding streets, capital city for centuries, currently a modern metropolis and the largest city in Latin America with a population of 6.3 million. I am overwhelmed. There is no way I can do justice to this place in a single blog entry after having merely wandered its streets. (However, there is even less way that I can post blog entries about my other life, my life at home.)

I arrived safely at Santiago airport after a 10 hour direct flight from Canada. I am on my way to go sailing. I like having the wind blow me around. I like the traditionalism and tranquility and cleanness of sailing yet cannot ignore the fact that I have flown so far to do so, polluting the atmosphere with jet fuel, possibly contributing to non-reversible climate change that will prevent my grand-children’s grand-children from having the luxury to sail, or even, should things get bad enough, fly.

I make it to my hotel on a public bus, check in, then immediately go back out into the heat – dressed now in shorts and sandals, sunblock and sunglasses – and book a seat on another bus, two days hence, to take me from here to the port I will be sailing from. After that I negotiate the subway downtown and successfully find the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, my stated goal for the afternoon, only to find it is closed on Mondays. I like this in a way, it gives me permission to mosey about, almost aimlessly, with my camera. Like the woman in Carol Sheild’s Encounter, however, I find myself searching for something to remark upon and finding the most remarkable thing is the unremarkability of it all. Even in the old downtown I pass a Starbucks, and a Burger King, and two Bank of Nova Scotias. The red, blue and yellow playground equipment tucked into a city park looks like it could come from Toronto, maybe does. The colonial architecture is distinctly non-North-American but so similar to so many other European and South American cities I have been to that it hardly gets a note. Even the Farmacia’s, the palm trees, the many shoe-shiners and peanut-sellers, do not strike me as exotic.

Drawn to water, as ever, I check my map and head towards the Mapocho River. I am expecting to find the reason the city was built here, the original transportation system, but instead there is a mere silt filled stream that one could kayak down if they didn’t mind bumping and grinding the whole way. I take my first self-portrait and continue on. What gives me the right to choose to travel here? It is a huge privilege. What are the associated responsibilities? I head to the top of the hill to see the statue of Mary looking out over the carpet of city below. I wish I had her serenity, wonder if it is the open space around her, or the time that she has, that has given her her perspective. ‘I hope you find what you are looking for,’ my friend Pam commented before I left. I hope I do to. Maybe on the boat, with space and time about me, I will find at least a bit of Mary’s peace. At the moment I feel, instead - as usual - as conflicted as the ‘graffiti girl’ I saw on a random wall far below.

At 7 pm, the sun still high in the sky, I decide to head back to my hotel. The subway trains, running every 2 minutes, are full, and the platform is lined with employees in neon-yellow pinnies who help jam even more people into each car. I stand and watch this process for a couple of cycles before participating. 6.3 million. Wow. 

Our tour visits the cemetery where coffins are stacked so high that there is a sidewalk half way up.

My second day in Santiago I go on a three hour guided walking tour in the morning through 5 markets and the cemetery and it is so fantastic that I sign up for the afternoon one which focuses on architecture and neighbourhoods. By the end I have been given a smattering of Chilean history, politics, culture and current issues. I am starting to feel at home here. It is with a certain reluctance that I board my bus and leave. 

Running Away

Rick, my life coach, says I am running away. He says I am running from my fears. He doesn’t think I ought to go. He says that part of our life’s purpose is to learn about ourselves. He says that if I go away too often then one time when I come back there will be nothing left here. I guess he doesn’t realize how little I have here now. I feel I ought to be able to make a life for myself here, but, for whatever reason, I am not. What I have is not enough. I could perhaps, like, if I were someone else maybe, succeed. But me, here, now… I am not succeeding. I am not thriving. I am barely surviving. It scares me. It is not what I want, what anyone would want. It is not healthy on several different levels. But, as though depressed, which I currently claim not to be, I seem unable to ‘snap out of it’. I am definitely not learning anything useful here/now about myself. Rick says that my running away is a drug, a crutch, an addiction. We sit and talk for hours, literally, but he doesn’t realize, perhaps, how sick I am.

I have hot and sour soup with Geoff. He starts off by asking about work. Well, a job was posted at MCS for the coming semester but I didn’t even get an interview. (Seriously?) I feel kicked in the teeth. He asks about the cottage by the river that I am first on the waiting list to move into. The list has just been scrapped. It is all a mess. 

So I am boxing up my stuff, again. I will be moving out, again. But not moving into anywhere. Given my age and culture this intrinsic instability is trying. How can I be 50 and of no fixed address? 

I will go. I have run away before. More than once. Quit my job. Left my lover. Gone. Overnight almost. But this is the first time I will have left without a destination in mind.

Rick thinks I should stay. ‘The hardest thing to do is stay,’ he says. ‘But,’ I ask, ‘just because it is the hardest thing does that make it the right thing?’ (I have no self-esteem. I have so little, in fact, that I am amazed I even exist. How can it be that I have not been completely transformed to dust and drifted away insubstantial and unnoticed? I am a ghost.) ‘You are a wonderful person,’ Rick tells me, ‘You have great qualities.’ But then we laugh because we both know I am currently incapable of believing a word of this. It would be easy to stay. I could carry on, doing nothing, keep the status quo going until I die. (A wee bit of me is hoping to find something astonishing when I go, a person who can excel at life.) To be fair to Rick I think that what he means when he says staying he means staying and working on things, bettering them, as opposed to staying and continuing on on the same fruitless path… but that, I firmly believe, is simply beyond my current capabilities. I don’t know how to express my gratitude for the gift of time that he has given me. 

A sprinkling of snow is glittering in gentle sunlight as I head to the river and the hills across the ice are visible yet muted, like a watercolour painting. The world is three lazy strips of grey, purple and white, so beautiful my heart aches. How could I possibly want to leave this place?

‘You don’t really want to run away,’ Rick states. ‘Yes,’ I contradict him, emphatically, ‘Yes. I do.’