Reading: In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

“The wind sighed through the municipal araucarias.”

For years I didn’t read any travel literature. This is rather strange, given that I was aspiring to write a travelogue of my own. But I didn’t want to pollute what I hoped would be a style, my style; I assumed my memory was bad enough that I could avoid the undue influence of the great travel writers by neglecting them for a time. But this boycott wasn’t meant to last as long as it did; writing a book took much longer than I had anticipated. (Should the next one prove to be so time consuming I shall have to arrange to be reincarnated).

The problem is that once having begun my ascetic eschewing of the pleasures of Theroux and Newby and Kapuscinski, it seemed predictive of failure to renege. And so the years went by. I restricted myself to novels and biographies, and memoirs that did not involve passports. (Of course this is silly).

Not long ago I realized that Guantánamo has been out for months without my taking advantage of what I now hope will only be a narrow window of time in which I am not actively working on my own travel literature. (If I want to continue to read my favorite books, I am going to have to develop the self-confidence to believe that I will not let myself be overwhelmed by them).


What to read, then? It dawned on me that I haven’t read Bruce Chatwin since the 1980s. Despite his premature passing and limited output, he is a titan amongst literary wanderers. He is a pioneer in the conjuring of a sense of foreign place not only by direct observation but also through the deft incorporation of all sorts of ancillary threads and diversions, so that, like his bushwhacking from place to place as he seeks trails on the ground and through the forest, his writing also diverts along forking paths through the history and literature of the places he visited, giving a fully crafted but altogether alternate sense of past events. Never more so, perhaps than in In Patagonia.


Chatwin’s Patagonia is purple and orange and sulphurous. It is chilly and damp, as befits an outpost of the British Isles. This it apparently is, a sort of loser’s ground for expatriated sheep farmers and adventurers who, once in Patagonia, settle for sheep farming. Butch Cassidy and his gang flee Utah to hide out here. It is a part of the Americas wilder and more remote, even, than their wild west. They farm. Bored, perhaps, they go back to armed robbery in the Argentine-Chilean borderlands. The tales Chatwin tells of them are typical of his unparalleled nose for backstory, his ability to find the choice historical nugget that gives a place meanings unrevealed by classical history.


Once he crosses south into the wilds, Chatwin scarcely meets a Chilean or Argentine latin, just anglos clinging on to their bagpipes and wooly sweaters and Wellington boots, fragments of a distant transatlantic culture. There are a few miserable indigenous folk serving as transient sheep-shearers, and a new wave of Italian Peronists agitating to seize lands long ago cleared and fenced by sturdy brits. These upstarts have a much less legitimate claim to Patagonia than the generations of Welshmen, but the latter, stolidly failing to learn Spanish, remain forever outside the dominant political structures of Buenos Aires, to the far north.

Ushuaia, at the end of the world: "The blue-faced inhabitants of this apparently childless town glared at strangers unkindly."

"I left Ushuaia as from an unwanted tomb...."


It is a gloomy picture, but only very rarely, and with the most stringent economy, does Chatwin tell us how he feels and what he thinks. (In contrast, my eagerness in Guantánamo to exploit my own misery, the chuckles easily extracted from the reader by recounting the blisters, aches and pains and psychological discomforts of hard, solitary travel, feel cheap). Once, two thirds of the way through, he lets the words of a fellow traveler, a Miss Nita Starling, also wandering the world, sneak in to speak his own thoughts. “It is beautiful,” she says, “but I wouldn’t want to come back.” “Neither would I,” allows Chatwin.

Nita Starling, horticulturalist: "For seven years she had traveled and hoped to travel till she dropped. The flowering shrubs were now her companions. She knew when and where they would be coming into flower. She never flew in aeroplanes, and paid her way teaching English or with the odd gardening job.... She quite liked Tierra del Fuego. She had walked in forests of Notofagus antarctica."

Although virtually every singles ad ever placed online expresses the evidently desirable desire to do more traveling, it is a convention of travel writing that the motivation for a particular trip must be related. There must be a thing being escaped from, or a goal toward which one is rushing. (Perhaps the singles ads really mean “I need someone to travel with—for nobody in their right mind travels alone--” another way of demanding that those of us who do so should explain ourselves). Why else would one walk out the front door, away from the comforts of home and hearth?

One measure of the brilliance of a travelogue is the economy with which this question is disposed of, since the real answer, at least for me, tends always to be: why not? In The Happy Isles of Oceania, Paul Theroux dispenses with his failed marriage in a single paragraph on one of the first pages of his weighty kayaking epic, through the long course of which we never again ask what the hell he is doing paddling about aimlessly through various pacific island chains. Another measure might be the flimsiness of the pretext: In his very first paragraph, Chatwin, who wrote another book titled simply What am I Doing Here?, recollects from his English childhood a square of hairy skin that his grandmother kept in a cabinet of curiosities. It had been sent from the tip of South America by an unknown but legendary relative, Charlie Milward, a seafaring man who, perhaps by way of explaining his own wandering, had once written “Liverpool or Middlesbrough are not places to raise your spirits to a high pitch.” Little Bruce longed for it, this tiny tuft of wooly mammoth, or brontosaurus, and In Patagonia purports to be the quest for its origin.


Before Chatwin steams away from the cold gloomy mists of Patagonia at the book’s end, he hikes to the cave where Charley Milward had discovered the preserved corpse of a mylodon. Upon finding a few remnant hairs, Chatwin admits: “I had accomplished the object of this ridiculous journey.” But by this time he has covered so much fascinating literary, historical and anecdotal ground that we can only disagree strongly with his choice of adjective.

Somewhere, a village is missing its idiot...

Some future brain-surgeon from Finland was so impressed with the majestic Moai of Easter Island that he decided to take an ear home with him. The Guardian quotes the Finnish consul in Chile, who we imagine usually has a pretty relaxed time of it. One pictures a difficult day spent sucking down pisco sours, while pondering the fundamentals of Finno-Chilean solidarity. She suggests that "it was a sudden, impulsive crazy idea. He is sorry and surprised that it has caused such a stir. He really regrets his actions." Sorry and surprised that it has caused such a stir? I'm sorry and surprised that she didn't try to claim that it was not really such a big deal since, after all, there are 799 ears left.

Okay, you thought we were stern-faced before? Now we're really pissed

Reading: Clandestine in Chile by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez

Some years back, while on the walk across Cuba mentioned a couple of posts ago, I finally delved deep enough into One Hundred Years of Solitude to become completely hooked, at last emerging out the back of the novel in shock and awe at the supreme talents of the master. In mid-read I met, in the city of Ciego de Avila, another American traveller-writer, and when I explained to my embarrassment that I was reading it for the first time we discovered that both of us had suffered repeated failed attempts to get through it, separated by many years, before gobbling it whole and joining the ranks of those who consider it among the very greatest novels. Since then I have met other readers who likewise dipped a toe in that murky pond many times before at last being caught up in the swirling whirlpool of Macondo. I'm not sure how to account for this, other than to imagine Garcia-Marquez refusing to write a single word with the intent to entrap and entice the reader into turning the page rather than to recount the history of his imagined clan.

It is difficult to imagine the toil and struggle required to produce the perhaps aptly named One Hundred Years of Solitude. Not so the journalistic Clandestine in Chile: the Adventures of Manuel Litin, a slim volume of 114 pages, which Garcia-Marquez distilled from eighteen hours of interviews with Litin. One imagines the writer banging it out on a newspaperman's schedule, but it is a measure of the author's enormity that the relaxed, documentary first-person story of the exiled filmmaker's secret return to Pinochet's Chile keeps you on the edge of your seat, despite portraying its narrator as a relaxed, carefree and foolhardy hippy who sometimes seems unaware of the potential consequences of his dangerous dance through the terribly altered country. And while Clandestine in Chile is far from the top of Garcia-Marquez' long resume of literary accomplishments I found myself, reading it, just as embarrassed not to have picked it up before as I was to have only gotten to One Hundred Years of Solitude at the creaky old age of thirty-five.



In 1985 Litin returned to Chile in disguise to make a film about the dictatorship and its ongoing impact on his country. In his introduction to his account, Garcia-Marquez leads with a documentary filmmaking truism: he imagines that the "making-of," the film about making the film, risks being as interesting as the film itself. "When Miguel Littín told me what he had done and how he had done it," he writes, "I realized that behind his film there was another film that would probably never be made."

The requirements and conditions of filmmaking are so absurd that in fifteen years of working as a soundman on documentaries I cannot remember a single shoot reaching its conclusion without some episode prompting the comment that "we should be filming ourselves." On some films one has this feeling all day, every day, prompted by episodes like the beseeching of a Philippine peasant to hoe the exact same furrow, "in the exact same way as before," over and over again, in fact six times. This repeated request is so inexplicable as to result in fifteen minutes of bemused discussion between the peasant and the translator. All the while copious amounts of smoke and fire are puffing out of the ears of the producer like steam from a kettle. The problem resolved, the crew demands lunch.

The tension between the subject, who invariably wishes to be as hospitable as possible and is generally interrupting his or her day in order to share themselves and their life, and the filmmakers, who desperately hope that their presence will not provoke any change whatsoever in the daily life they hope to capture with honesty and authenticity, has throughout my career been the stuff of endless hilarity. I have been on countless shoots where I have witnessed some variant on the following conversation:

Subject (having just been filmed collecting his pigeons in the pigeon-coop after being forced to re-release them three times in a row): So, what would you all like to do now?

Director: Well, what would you do now? Nothing you wouldn't do normally. What would you do if we weren't here?

Subject: I'd probably make myself a cup of tea. Or take a nap.

Director: A nap's no good. It doesn't make good TV. Tea? The thing about tea is, it isn't very active. We would really like to see you, you know, it would be nice if you were doing, if you were doing,... doing something.

Subject: Like what?

Director: Well, what might you be doing? Could you be hammering something? Maybe hammering a board onto the pigeon coop?

Subject: I could do that if you want , but I think that would terrify the birds.

Director: Well, not that, then. What could we do? What other sorts of things do you get up to?

Subject: Tea sounds nice.

Director: Don't you worry, we'll get you some tea. For now we need to just concentrate on getting this next shot.

Director (to cinematographer): Phil, Phil, we really need some B-roll here. Can we do tea? Can we make making tea look exciting?

Phil the Cinematographer: Of course.

Director: But is it active enough?

Phil: Don't worry, we'll cheat it; I'll make it look good.

Director (to subject): Okay, here's an idea. What if you made some tea now? How would you go about it?

Subject walks over to stove, turns on a burner, picks up kettle and walks to sink and begins filling it.

Director: Wait! Wait! We're not ready. We need you to empty the kettle and start over...

Me (the soundperson, to the director): That faucet is really noisy. Would you mind asking him not to do any speaking at the actual moment that he is filling the kettle? That will make it much easier to edit.




After that prolonged digression into the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, let us return to the resolutely unfunny Chilean dictatorship. Garcia-Marquez, intrigued by the idea that Litin had made a documentary in Pinochet's Chile using three different foreign crews, none of which knew of the existence of the others, nor, for much of the filming, even of the presence of Litin himself, sets out to write the "making-of." Litin, disguised as a bourgeois Uruguayan businessman, spent much of his time in Santiago directing the cameramen via subtle hand signals, waved from dozens of yards away across plazas and parks to one trusted assistant, who "translated them." It was a brave and heroic, but also foolhardy and somewhat absurd undertaking. It seems almost implausible to me that any great amount of the footage could actually reflect his vision, but it is the filmmaker's personal journey through the once familiar territory of his beloved Chile that is truly fascinating.



In the midst of the drama of trying to get a film made under such harrowing circumstances, it is Garcia-Marquez's observations on identity and exile, as experienced by Litin, which make for the most poignant reading. Of wearing a suit and attempting to assume the persona of just the sort of latin-american oligarch he pities and despises, the narrator says "changing personality is a daily battle in which, wishing to continue being ourselves, we keep rebelling against our own determination to change." Sitting alone in a restaurant in Valparaiso, still frequented by an elderly couple who had known Litin and his wife when he was courting her there, Marquez-Litin watches the couple and observes that "occasionally they would look over at me without curiosity, without the slightest inkling that we had once enjoyed each other's company at the same table. It wasn't until that moment that I realized how long and devastating the years of exile had been. Not just for those of us who had left--as I had thought until then--but also for the ones who had stayed."



Those who left, like Litin, are the old guard. He discovers that within the country is a new generation of dissidents struggling against the savage Pinochet dictatorship, youngsters who scarcely know his name or the names of Allende's murdered colleagues. He shuttles around like James Bond, changing hotels and taxis dozens of times, wearing a blindfold on visits to the secret hideaways of the resistance while trying to come to terms with the ongoing dictatorship and his sense of loss and abandonment. He lingers and lingers, captivated by the prospect that a dissident general in the junta is on the point of offering himself up for a clandestine tell-all interview. Meanwhile he cannot shake the feeling that the junta is, if not on his tracks, at least aware that something is up. It is the moment for flight, and for editing the film, but we can tell that Litin wishes terribly that he could stay.

I met a Chilean on that trip through Cuba, one of the few exiles who decided to stay in Havana rather than return after the final, long-awaited demise of the General. It was too different for him, the new Chile, too full of shopping, infected by a general obsession with money, how to get it and keep it. "Nobody wants to remember what happened to us," he told me. "It might interrupt commerce." Litin, of course did go back, to work, making films, but after reading Garcia-Marquez' account the one I would most like to see was the one he made in 1986 when he was persona non grata.

Reading: Casas de Playa Ancha by Myriam Waisberg

When I last saw Anne in New York, just as she was leaving for Paris to go watch hundreds of hours of Antarctica footage, I told her that I might have a few days layover in Santiago de Chile after shooting on Easter Island. "Did you know it is the most polluted city in the world?" She asked. "You should go to Valparaiso, instead." So, after a smog-sucking night in the capital, I did.

Stuck in a bowl in the Andes, as if in the bottom of an eggcup, Santiago's six million inhabitants are smothered under a thick smog pancake of their own creation. In contrast, Valparaiso, Chile's foremost port, has only three hundred thousand people, and it enjoys a cool Humboldt current breeze, blowing all one's exhaustion inshore and away.

But it is not the sea air that makes Valparaiso paradisiacal. Founded on the only tiny bit of flat land trapped between cliffs and its natural harbor, the growing population was soon forced up onto the forty-six absurdly steep hills that seem always to be trying to push that original triangular wedge of land into the sea. The result is a riotous visual spectacle of a city splayed out over a coastal mountain range.

In the same way that Los Angeles has expanded out onto ever more inhospitable and improbable patches of desert, Valparaiso has grown over the last century and a half to occupy every outrageous crag and outcrop of what once must have been seaside cliffs. Imagine repainting the architecture of New Orleans in a particularly acidic tropical palette, replanting it all on the most severe of San Franciscan topography, then squeezing it all together like an accordion, and you begin to grasp Valparaiso, where structures of all shapes and epochs clog the breath-stealingly steep cobblestone streets. As is the way in hill towns, no two facades seem to rest in quite the same plane, and from below the hills are a jumble of tilted surfaces of every imaginable hue.

In Casas de Playa Ancha, Myriam Waisberg chronicles the development of two hillside tracts of land that became, for a time, the most prestigious real estate for the emergent middle class of boomtown Valparaiso, just after the turn of the last century. An architectural historian, Waisberg collects in her book the original plans and sections of some two dozen mansions designed in a style I like to think of as Caribbean Gothic.

Such buildings are best known to me from my travels in Haiti, and I was drawn to Waisberg's book after leafing through it and seeing numerous line drawings that one could easily imagine finding in the flesh in the streets of Port au Prince or Jacmel. It was only after buying it that I discovered in the back, in an appendix relating the international historical context of the Playa Ancha mansions, a line drawing of the Oloffson Hotel in Port au Prince. The setting for Graham Greene's novel The Comedians, it is one of the foremost remaining examples of Haiti's Victorian gingerbread architecture, on the terrace of which I have drunk innumerable punches and made innumerable friends. Perhaps it is these fond associations that account for this aberrant diversion from the modern in my architectural tastes.

The "Olaffson" Hotel in Port au Prince as it appears in Casas de Playa Ancha. Another remarkable coincidence, as Waisberg only provides five drawings to illustrate the historical context of the Playa Ancha houses, three from Auckland, New Zealand, and two from Port au Prince. All illustrations taken from the book without any permission whatsoever. If you feel you are the legitimate owner of any pertinent copyrights and these reproductions are an issue for you, contact me through my profile.

Developed around 1900, with the bulk of buildings going up just after a devastating earthquake in 1906, Playa Ancha was planned out on a grid, but little sense of this structured layout is sensed by a wanderer of the streets. As Waisberg writes: "The intention of applying a plan based on the grid did not hold up to reality; it is generally difficult to perceive, thanks to topographic conditions characterized by profound channels cut by streams, and the accentuated disparity in the level of the land, which resulted in the persistence of historic trails that had followed the curve of the contours." (My translation). This turned out to be quite an understatement.

Despite being warned that I would be robbed, a favorite sport of Chileans (the warning, not the robbing), I wandered up to the once splendid neighborhood of Playa Ancha to track down a few of the spectacular buildings in Waisberg's thesis, which was first published almost 20 years ago. Those which I found are universally in need of your love, help and termite eradication skills. I did not carry a list of addresses with me, nor the book, lest I be mugged, but I am certain that some of the houses Waisberg studied have gone forever. Dotted amongst the mint, purple, ochre, lime and orange houses were ominous vacant lots and remnant mansions as badly in need of a fresh coat as any structure in Havana, where paint sometimes cannot be had for love or money. But the spectacular bones of many remain, awaiting plaster, power tools and teak oil. And a few hundred thou in plumbing. Those still standing are spectacular, but even if these rest were to crumble, their passing would do little to sully the glory of Valparaiso, whose charm rests in the constant collision of old and new, humble and grand, steep hill and sharp valley, painted and unpainted, water and land.

Artilleria #156, architectural scheme
Artilleria #156 today; it is a restaurant hanging off the edge of the cliff

Waisberg's photographs from 1988

A view of the same house from below, with the funicular-style public elevator that takes passengers to Playa Ancha

Abandoned by its middle class for jobs in the capital and the up-to-date horrors of nearby Viña del Mar, a Dubaiesque beachfront excrescence just along the coast, Valparaiso and its cable cars and public funicular elevators was left to the aged and infirm to wither and die with them. (Despite its brash hordes of loathsome high-rises jostling for ocean views, Viña del Mar remains Chile's most prestigious resort. When I told the locals of Easter Island, some of whom had never been to the South American continent, that I intended to visit Valparaiso they said "oh, no, don't go there, it's dingy and old, and you'll be robbed. Go to Viña, next door, it's much nicer.") Generations of university students have also temporarily lived in Valparaiso, writing on the walls before moving on, but despite the neglect the city is finally enjoying a sort of touristic rehabilitation, with, at least, Chileans visiting in droves. Here and there the occasional sushi bar or polished cafe has brought a touch of swank and income to the ground floor of one of the old houses, but the city is quite big enough to absorb a few mooks wandering the streets with maps and cameras without feeling as if it is turning into a museum. The occasional sea-captain in whites and braided cap is still to be found descending the endless cement staircases linking the hillsides with the port, and a stone's-throw from the docks in the petite flat market district dusty glass storefronts still display, without any irony whatsoever, hasps and coils of rope and fishhooks and oilskins and other marine frippery. There is little I could say in higher praise of a seaport town than this.

"Marine frippery." Note the Chilean burgee

I'm looking at real estate. When the floods surge in the coming great melt, Valparaiso's container port may sink underwater, but my termite-ridden Victorian mansion will be high and dry. And painted fuschia, with eggplant trim.

Another Blurry Bird Photo

One of the most exciting, scarce and spectacular shorebirds of the world doesn't actually run about on beaches the way you would expect from a sandpiper, or a plover. The beautifully named amalgam of the two, the highly sought after Diademed Sandpiper-plover, lives only in Andean bogs, soggy high-elevation mountain plateaux generally three or even four thousand meters above sea level. The bird, as Alvaro Jaramillo puts it in Birds of Chile, "appears to have very specific habitat requirements, details of which are unclear. Absent from bogs which appear perfect to an observer, perhaps due to overgrazing.... Its movements are unclear."

Melting ice feeds the raging torrent

Just this sort of lack of clarity is precisely what makes for a grand birding adventure. Being a glutton for punishment, I decided instead of driving straight to the beach that I would waste a day of my layover between Easter Island and Belize and go for this legendary species at the El Yeso dam, three grueling hours of dirt road driving up into the snowy Andes to the south-east of Santiago de Chile. The braided streams and soggy tundra at the head of this dam's vast lake are one of the lowest elevation locations at which the sandpiper-plover has ever been seen, a mere 2600 or so oxygen-depleted meters above sea level. Coming from the smog-clotted streets of Santiago I knew it would be doubly tough to breathe.

El Yeso Reservoir, just downstream from the bog

The drive up to the dam seemed endless, despite a very successful stop where I found Chilean Mockingbird, Long Billed Meadowlark, Spot-billed and White-browed Ground Tyrants, Scale-throated Earthcreeper and Mourning Sierra-finch--I know, you are salivating just hearing the names! Once I arrived beyond the vast lake formed by the dam it was obvious at a glance that the only plausible habitat was on the far side of a network of rushing glacial streams, icy-blue rivulets of freezing water that had only recently been snow and were now tumbling down the valley to feed the mighty lake. Numerous horses were nibbling there, however, which I considered a bad sign. To have any chance, there was nothing to do but plunge in, so once again I found myself wading through thigh-deep water in search of obscure birds. Before me, surrounded by snow-clad Andean peaks, was an expansive triangular valley dotted with the grazing horses, all ankle deep in soft muck. With chilly, shriveled toes, my boots squelching, I walked across muddy, peaty clods of grass, which sank as I stepped on them, becoming so many reflecting pools of oozing bogwater. There were fabulous birds (Greater Yellow Finch, Crested Duck, Gray Flanked Cinclodes, Gray Bellied Seedsnipe, Baird's Sandpiper, South American Snipe, Gray Hooded Sierra Finch, White Sided Hillstar, whew, okay, take a deep breath...) but my feet were freezing and not a Diademed Sandpiper-plover was to be found.

This stuff makes for really moist walking

After three or four hours of this absurd bog-trotting, suffering from incipient World War One style trench-foot, finding myself well downstream of all the river crossings I had previously braved, and looking back out over the valley at a much more daunting series of frigid hip-deep fords between me and the car, I started to tire of the whole enterprise. Clusters of birds which had only moments earlier been exciting and new flushed at my feet--a dozen snipe here, eight or ten sandpipers there, a handful of perfectly camouflaged seedsnipes disappearing in amongst the gravels. The Diademed, I was sure, was a write-off, one of those species that for me, at least, would remain mythological. I had trudged back and forth across countless sodden acres without flushing anything like one, and the Baird's Sandpipers which, about the same size, had brought me a rush of adrenalin only an hour before, were now a distracting annoyance as they bolted up out of the marsh in hordes. On the opposite hillside the car was invitingly visible, but with oh so very many obstacles to be swum between me and it. On the floor of the passenger seat, I knew, was half a bottle of mineral water. Although my feet and trousers were soaked, I was parched. In defeat I turned back, trying to remember where the shallowest crossings had been on the way over. Then, as I was edging my way through the mud beside a tiny lagoon, just at the foot of the mountain, an impression of rufous in motion caught the corner of my eye, like the quick swish of a foxes tail. I looked quickly sideways over the narrow body of water. Nothing but wet pebbles, gray, black and red. Then one moved. In one smooth and masculine motion I brought the binoculars up to my eyes. Two! Abundantly incontrovertibly splendidly Diademed Sandpiper Plovers. There they were, trapped halfway between scurrying away, revealing themselves, and sticking tight, but uncomfortably nearer than their luxurious sense of personal space permitted them. I edged closer, one step at a time, ecstatic. I know this isn't nearly as good for you as it was for me, but in return for your patience, dear reader, I bring you this lone, blurry photograph.



The mythical and legendary Phegornis mitchellii