Expedition Patagonia, Part I: Dad and the Pacific Ocean

On Santiago de Chile, wine, and carry-on luggage

The day passed in a whirlwind of airports, connection buses, bad coffee, and the mission of Locating Dad at the enormous Madrid airport. Dad doesn't know how to share the location on WhatsApp, so he sent me instructions instead: “Go toward gate K69 in Terminal 4, but downstairs, past the Q Modena shop, then 200 meters straight, then right”.

I thought he meant to meet at gate K69, but no. He meant exactly what he meant.

When we linked up, dad inquired how much my carry-on weigh, eyeballing my faithful Mosko duffel suspiciously. I said, about 12 kilos, and dad said, “HA! Amateur; mine is precisely 8.5”.

I was out-carryon-ed by my 74-year-old father who doesn't travel much. We proceeded to eat some wilting sushi and found our gate.

Boarding the Santiago flight was fairly uneventful; I asked dad if he'd like a glass of wine at the restaurant during the layover, but he said, "only aristocrats, degenerates, and russians drink wine in restaurants", so we got some bottled water instead and settled in.

Dad got the middle seat and refused to move for 7 hours, so I took the aisle. By this point, dad had already been traveling for 8 hours (Vilnius-Riga-Madrid), and I was worried if he was exhausted/sufficiently hydrated/hungry/uncomfortable. I asked him if he would survive the 13-hour flight to which he replied, pfffrhmmmfff - hmmm.

Dad had a strategy, he shared, that he learned at the army when guarding some remote post and accepting, fully, the futility and pointlessness of the given task as well as his utmost helplessness in the situation: "adopt the facial expression of a docile farm animal; never protest, and compose music in your head".

When I woke up, we were flying over the last bit of Brazil, and dad was playing solitaire while trying to sneak glances through the window. When the sun rose, we were traveling over the Andes Mountains. Dad's "docile farm animal" stoicism evaporated; he was clearly Intensely Stoked and kept chirping and pawing at his phone camera, and eventually, the lovely young man at the window offered him to swap seats, and dad tried to play it cool and say no, thank you, very politely, but then relented, swapped seats, and spent the remaining hour glued to the window saying ok, no, ok, ok, it was totally worth flying here just for this, and then, somehow, the entire 44th row of sleepy, grumpy people started smiling.

Leaving the plane, dad said "gracias, signori" to the crew, and I said signori was Italian and the Spanish version was "señores", and dad grunted, "bloody Romans and their dialects", and demanded a Coca-Cola at once to get his sugar up.

Santiago greeted us with sunny skies and watery lattes; after another couple hours, we boarded the final flight to Puerto Montt. Dad was obviously exhausted, and his big toe hurt (damn new boots); but then, he opened his eyes and yelled, I SAW A VOLCANO - can we get a beer??- IS THIS THE PACIFIC OCEANNNNN, and when we landed, proceeded to teach our Chilean cab driver how to say "good day" in Lithuanian; and, somehow, although I was a barely functioning zombie by that point, his stokedness seeped right into me, and we had some beers and dinner at the hotel – all while staring out at the PACIFIC OCEANNNN!

You see: I’m taking my dad to Patagonia.

Being born under the Soviet occupation, my father has always fervently wanted to travel. But leaving beyond the Iron Curtain was strictly verboten; a bespectacled music professor with an undying love for faraway lands, Paris, and Brahms, dad made several attempts to escape. His most daring one was when he was fifteen; he had devised a plot to hitchhike and stowaway on trains all the way to Georgia, then sneak across the border into Turkey and from there, onwards to Greece and, finally, Argentina. My fifteen-year-old father and his best friend agreed to meet outside their hometown at midnight; dad packed a book, some fishing line, and plenty of warm socks.

But his friend chickened out and never showed up. And when dad got home, his dad – my grandfather – caught him sneaking and taught him a lesson by ways of a leather belt.

Still, dad did hitchhike to Georgia, and Kazachstan, and kayaked down rivers and built forts in his youth. But his spirit got broken along the way; drafted to the Soviet army, my dad and his glasses and his poetry never fit in, and by the time I arrived, he was lecturing at the Music Academy, drinking heavily, and retreating into his books more and more.

Books, you see, were his way of traveling. When I was a crawling baby, he gave me my first book; allegedly, I chewed off half of its pages, but my dad took it as a mark of genius and started reading to me instead.

The most vivid stories I remember from my childhood are those of my dad reading Jules Verne in the voice of utmost fascination, particularly The Children of Captain Grant where an expedition boat sails along the 37^th parallel South to recover castaways mysteriously lost at sea, ending up in Patagonia...

That was it: Patagonia.

To me, Patagonia has always remained the most magical name of all. Perhaps because it was so for my dad; he would tell me about the Andes Mountains and the Straits of Magellan, and Tierra del Fuego, and the fire in his eyes was something I never forgot. Patagonia, the promised land, the faraway land, the dream of wilderness and adventure.

I was a horrible and unruly teenager; my dad drank more and more, as if giving up on things, and we drifted apart.

Twenty-odd years later, I ended up traveling Patagonia by bike. I remember calling my dad on Skype and telling him I was in Tierra del Fuego. His voice was funny. Back then, we still didn’t speak much.

Over the years, dad continued to retreat into himself. His friends started dying, including Vidmantas Bartulis, a composer who dad adored; they were great friends, and now, Vidmantas was gone. So many others were gone, too. Dad found himself increasingly lonely, but now, he was writing his own books.

And so, thirty-odd years later, I’m taking my dad to Patagonia. He's turning 75 in February, and his heart isn’t what it was. When I told him I’d booked the flights to Chile, he giggled shyly, shaking his head. Chile?..

As the day of departure drew nearer, dad had been calling me daily. He reckoned this was no mere holiday, nay - we were going on an Expedition; he had various questions: will there be mountain lions? Is he too old for this? Can he do shots and skinny dip in the Pacific Ocean? Where do we get maps? His knees are a bit funny, is that OK? Where will we sleep?

He has invested in a decent pair of hiking boots and assigned himself the role of the Navigator; I am not to question his authority on this, nor do I plan to. I’m just the driver.

We're flying with small carry-ons (it's an Expedition, remember, and besides, dad finds checked luggage horribly distasteful and deeply bourgeois).

He says he hadn’t slept properly in three days; I told him it’s OK, we’ll have a full night’s rest in Puerto Montt, but he’s brought a book, just in case. And warm socks.

I can see the grey sliver of the Carretera Austral from my hotel window.

Tomorrow, we ride South.

Puerto Montt – Chaiten, Where We Miss The Ferry and Arrive in The Dark

We left Puerto Montt just before 10 am on a bright, sunny morning on the Carretera Austral. Total distance: 340km, our goal: Chaiten, a small town at the foothills of a snow-capped volcano. The car rental procedures were amazingly painless; our valiant Expedition Vessel, however, is not the expected 4x4 SUV, it’s just big two-wheel drive with road tires, but it's got a nearly 600 km fuel range, which is good news. Oh, and it starts with a button! I've never driven a car that starts with a button and each time it does, it amuses me to no end.

Anyway, we hit Ruta 7 and followed the Pacific Coast, dad glued to the window telling me about the tide - it was leaving - and the fjords, which were Absolutely Spectacular, and then we were boarding ferry #1. On this stretch, the Carretera Austral is broken by islands and peninsulas in several places, and there's no access but by boat.

On the ferry, I asked dad if he was feeling jetlagged at all.

"Jetwhat?"

"Jetlagged, dad. It's when you fly a real long distance, like we just did, and there's a big time difference, and your body needs to catch up, and you feel exhausted because your circadian rhythm gets all messed up."

"Nonsense".

Ferry #1 took some twenty minutes; at lunchtime, we found ourselves in Hornopiren, a somewhat Norwegian-looking little town with pastel houses and dirt roads, and then Patagonia threw us the first curveball: the next ferry was at leaving 6pm. Five hours to wait, but what a place to wait it was! We ate freshly caught fish for lunch, then hung around the tiny pier where the road disappears into the water, watching people, the comings and goings of seagulls, fishing boats, and the town dog.

"Where are we going to sleep tonight?", dad asked me at some point.

"A kind of a cabin".

"Like a small house?"

"Yes".

"There's a funny English word for it", dad giggled. "It starts with a "B".

"BnB?"

"No."

"Um...bed and breakfast?"

"No, no, it's a real funny word. Bongo-lungo something. It has to do with criminal elements".

"Bungalow?"

"Yes, that's the one!", dad said.

"What's it got to do with criminal elements though?"

"Oh, they always find dead bodies in bungalows".

"???"

"I mean, in detective books. American detective books. There's always a dead body in a bongo...bungalow", dad explained, matter-of-factedly.

There was an older Argentinean couple at the pier, and I said, hey dad, you should get one of those gaucho berets, like the one this elderly gentleman is wearing; it would look great on you.

Dad agreed that the beret was cool, but threatened mutiny if I ever compared him to "elderly" anything ever again.

Ferry #2 took three hours, carrying us slowly along the fjords ringed with snow-capped peaks. The air is so incredibly clean and crisp here that you can't help but calm down completely and revel in the fact that there's barely any trace of human activity except for a lone fishing boat and a few scattered tiny cottages by the sea; seagulls were our only company as the ferry chugged slowly across the deep blue water. The sun started to set.

I messaged our cabin (or, according to dad, Murder Bungalow) host saying we'll be much later than expected; the lady replied, "oh, no worries, this happens all the time. Auntie Carmela will wait for you". I felt terribly guilty to keep auntie Carmela up so late because I miscalculated the five-hour-wait ferry fiasco, but there was no helping it.

Darkness soon engulfed us; as the ferry approached the loading ramp, we realized there wasn't a single light on the pier - it was pitch black dark by then - and the ferry crew was communicating with someone on the ground using torch signals. The ferry's ramp hit the road at a funny angle creating a V-shaped ditch where the ramp touched the road; subsequently, a loaded bus promptly got stuck in the V-shaped hellhole, and the crew tried to stick a bunch of wooden planks underneath it to help it along, and then the ferry backed up and tried again and this time, the V shape was a little better, and we rolled off without much trouble.

Ten kilometers later, we boarded the final boat in pitch-black darkness. Ferry #3 took half an hour, this time under the stars, and a sliver of a crescent moon greeted us on the last leg to Chaiten.

Here, the pavement ended and dirt began. Our little semi-SUV, I remind you, has road tires, so we were skidding and swimming all over the place as I was trying to keep up with a Defender ahead who picked good lines; for a stretch, we raced together through dust, darkness, and dirt, and my dad went a little pale and inquired whether I was taking him to the Murder Bungalow or had simply decided to kill him there and then?

Fifty glorious dirt kilometers later, we rolled into Chaiten and were greeted by a cheery and chatty Tia Carmela who let us in; she had a black-haired girl with her, probably around six years old, and the girl was very eager to show us the fireplace and the wifi password, and could we leave the keys on the table in the morning?

#######

It's midnight; we were on the road for fourteen hours, and I'm exhausted and ready to crash, while dad measured out two fingers of rum and went outside investigating the skies to see if he could spot the Southern Cross.

The air outside is rich with the scent of fir trees, sea salt, and something glacial.

I feel it in my bones: the journey across Patagonia has begun in full swing.