From Tip to Top (eBook)

CHILE AND ARGENTINA

12–17 NOVEMBER 2022, PUNTA ARENAS, CHILE

The flight from Santiago began its slow but steady descent, wheeling left across the Strait of Magellan, the windows on the right side tilting upwards to give me a glimpse of the snow-capped Andes.

The Andes! Again, and at last, so close I could almost touch them – the same feeling I had two and a half years previously when mask-wearing soldiers stopped me just outside Puerto Natales to say, politely, no, I could not go further. ‘Covid,’ they said, as if I needed telling.

Now, with the curse lifted for almost everyone everywhere, I was back, a bundle of excitement and anxiety. Excitement because this was the resumption (resuscitation?) of the ‘great retirement project’, riding a motorbike from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, alone and without the pressure of any deadline to get to place X by such and such a time or date. This would be no race, no ‘lads together having a blast’ expedition. I wanted this to be a journey of encounter and exploration, a journey partly along the famed Pan-American Highway – or the Panamericana, as it is known in much of Latin America – but one with the freedom to go this way or that as the mood or the moment took me.

But there was also more anxiety this time. Maybe it was post-Covid angst; maybe it was appreciating better than the previous time the anxiety I was causing in others – in my wife and children and among my wider family and friends – by doing this. But my selfish self was still doing it. Maybe it was the gnawing realisation that, nearly three years on, I was in my seventieth year and no longer had the strength or fitness I had as recently as 2020. I had by then developed a touch of arthritis in the joints where my thumbs join my wrist. Sometimes I can’t twist the lid off a jar. My doctor has me on statins (a low dose, but heart pills nonetheless) and also something for blood pressure, and when I told him about the trip, he commented, ‘Ballsy,’ half admiring (I suspect), half thinking (I also suspect) that there’s no fool like an old fool.

So what made me think I would be able to upright a toppled BMW R1200 GS Adventure, a vast machine by any measure – weighing over 250kg, luggage excluded – when, inevitably, somewhere along the way to Deadhorse, Alaska, it would indeed topple over? I didn’t know, but I’d find out!

The Magellan Strait waters looked unusually calm from a few thousand feet up, but the bent-over trees around the airport reminded me that this is a place of extreme winds, the great south wind that blows, and blows and blows, seemingly without end. It was late spring in the Southern Hemisphere, but the ground below was visibly burnt and bone dry, showing little evidence of winter growth for grazing sheep.

When I came through the airport, there was no sign of Eliana, who said she might be there to meet me and bring me into town. Eliana runs the El Patagónico Hostel, on the way into Punta Arenas. I stayed there last time for no reason other than that hers was the first bed-for-the-night sign I saw. I thought then that I’d be there for two weeks, the initial period for which the border was due to be closed. In the almost three years since then, Eliana and I had kept in touch via Facebook Messenger. She’s a hoot is Eliana – friendly and kind, funny and playful. Her hostel is an Aladdin’s cave of stuff – stuff everywhere that hasn’t been opened or used for yonks, broken-down stuff and other things that will probably never be used. It’s like living in the centre aisle of Lidl.

I jumped into an airport taxi, and on my arrival the hostel door burst open. Eliana threw out her arms to give me a great big hug, laughing a laugh that said, ‘Well, isn’t this just gas?’

‘Peeeeeeter! Cómo estás, amigo?’

‘Grand, just grand. Great to be back!’

Inside, everything was much the same as before, except that the massive TV – it must be at least sixty inches across – that in March 2020 was blaring out the end of the world from its wall mounting now lay flat across the breakfast table, smothering it almost entirely. ‘Muerta?’ I asked. ‘Sí, muerta,’ she said. Never mind, I thought, feeling sure that it would be kept nonetheless … finding a home with the two dead cars out back and the other bits of debris, a bicycle, some class of Husqvarna compressor and lengths of timber and plastic. Later, out there, Eliana showed me a small corner that had been cleared and wooden pallets that had been laid down to give an even, solid surface while leaving enough space for two plant beds along a rear and side wall.

‘Tomates?’ I asked.

‘Sí, maybe,’ she said.

On the way to my bedroom, at the turn in the creaking stairway, there was a three-foot pound-shop Santa Claus, smiling and wishing me a feliz Navidad … and I got the eerie feeling that he had been there too when I stayed here first in March 2020.

After I unpacked my rucksack and caught my breath, I went back downstairs. Eliana had news for me: beaming, she told me that she had a new man. Two and a half years before, she was still in mourning for her then recently deceased husband – ‘my best friend’ she would say, eyes welling up. She said she thought of him every day but would try to lose herself in her hobbies: painting, photography and birdwatching.

‘Alex!’ she announced to me, simultaneously summoning the new man for presentation. He was a little stocky (Eliana herself is small in stature) but broad-shouldered and muscular. He had a big smile and shook my hand warmly. He told me that Eliana had spoken a lot about me. I asked whether they were married, pointing to my wedding ring to supplement my appalling Spanish. But, no, they were just together, they said. ‘Living in sin,’ I pronounce, and they both laughed uproariously.

‘Es un hombre muy excelente,’ Eliana said proudly of Alex, adding that he was her ‘compañero de viaje’, her travelling companion, and that this was how they had got to know each other.

I went for a stroll to a nearby supermarket to acquire vital supplies, such as wine. It was strange to see spring flowers in suburban gardens – dandelions, millions of them everywhere, but also peonies, laburnum and yellow broom, sometimes fashioned into bright hedging. When I returned with the wine, Eliana invited me to join her and Alex’s late-afternoon Sunday lunch of empanadas and pickles. The wine went down well, and I went to bed wondering what tomorrow would bring.

*

When in late March 2020 the Chilean government announced a curfew, it was clear that my plans were scuppered. I had just interviewed a local Chilean Irishman, Patricio Corcoran, who ran a food distribution company and three mid-sized supermarkets. I suspected that he had warehouses, or at least access to one, and might be able to store my bike for a couple of months, as I then expected I would need.

Patricio was quietly proud of his Irish heritage. In his office he kept two old British passports belonging to his grandfather and father, both of which show Irish birthplaces. His grandfather, Charles Peter Corcoran, was born in Co. Cavan but lived in Dublin. Patricio’s father, Arthur Bartholomew Corcoran, was born in the city in August 1919 – a difficult time in Ireland, politically and economically. So when the Chilean sheep-farming company La Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego recruited among the Irish and Scots for pioneers who would emigrate to Patagonia, Charles Corcoran signed up, taking with him his one-year-old son, Arthur.

When I met him, Arthur’s son Patricio was the embodiment of the successful immigrant. He and Sylvia, his wife of forty-three years (she’s a Blackwood, with lineage going back to Scotland), had three children and ten grandchildren. Apart from the food business, Patricio also owned a farm near Punta Arenas, which had some 2,500 sheep (the local average was closer to 5,000) and 500 Angus beef cows. The calves were matured on another farm near Puerto Montt, north of the Patagonian Ice Field, from where they were sold for slaughter.

Patricio was something of a local contact for the Irish embassy in Santiago, which put me in touch with him. My plea for his help in March 2020 was answered with an immediate and generous yes, and so I left my wonderful, almost-new bike on 31 March in a Corcoran Express warehouse, under a cover and with various bits and pieces stuffed into two bags and hoisted on a pallet up onto the top shelf of the huge building.

Now, two and a half years later, I really didn’t know what to expect. The bike’s battery would surely be dead, but could it be revived? And the tyres, had they deflated, and had the rubber cracked and perished? The petrol and oil would have to be drained. I’d have to get the whole bike serviced, surely.

I emailed him. ‘Patricio! Am finally in Punta Arenas. Would it suit if I called around at 11 tomorrow morning?’

‘Peter’, came the reply, ‘your bike is ready. We have to pick it up in a garage I sent them. 11.00 am would be great …’

Down one of the roads near my hostel, Alejandro Lago runs a workshop where he services machines used by an adventure-biking company specialising in...