wildlife

South Sea Safari

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hostal Coastal B&B, Puerto Natales. 18.42.

I had to improvise a bit today, after my original plan of jumping on a full-day tour of the Torres del Paine National Park and the Cueva del Milodón fell through. Fortunately, you don’t even have to leave Puerto Natales to enjoy some spectacular wildlife, even in the heart of winter. I was also lucky with the weather today, which was largely sunny for most of the day, making photography that much easier.

Many of Natales’ resident birds look deceptively like domesticated waterfowl, which could not be further from the truth. There are crested ducks absolutely everywhere, greatly outnumbering the smaller and daintier yellow-billed teals that are one of the few birds that remain wary of humans around here. The black-necked swans that live out in the fjord are probably the most iconic residents of Puerto Natales, but they were joined today by a few pairs of Coscoroba swans, a swan-like goose that can be found from the Antarctic waters of southern Chile all the way up to Brazil.

It’s clear who holds the reins of power, though. Not five minutes after the coscorobas came in to land, a pair of black-necked swans moved in, and one of them charged the coscorobas, putting them to flight. About the only bird I haven’t seen them attack yet are the tiny white-eared grebes – I wonder if that’s because they can’t see them?

Some of the birds here look familiar, even at a head-spinning distance of just over thirteen thousand kilometres from home. A small colony of house sparrows and feral pigeons have made the town their own, as they have in most towns and cities around the planet, and at first glance the oystercatchers look similar – but these are Magellanic oystercatchers, limited to the southern tip of South America. You can tell them apart by the yellow ring around their eyes. If other human species had survived, would we have been able to tell each other apart by similar signs?

There was one creature in particular that I was hoping to see – and I was not disappointed. After a half hour’s careful observation – having been almost certain I’d seen the silhouette I was looking for across the bay when I set out – I was very nearly scalped by an absolute giant that came soaring in from behind my post on the dock: a southern giant petrel, a genuine monster of the South Sea with a two-metre wingspan and a violent disposition.

The giant petrel will eat just about anything and has a reputation for bludgeoning and drowning birds much larger than itself, including penguins, gannets and albatrosses. It will even squabble with its kin over human waste left behind by passing ships. For this reason, it’s known as the vulture of the Southern ocean – which is probably why I was so keen to see one. Besides the simple fact that they really are incredibly impressive birds to behold.

A more friendly resident of Puerto Natales is the chimango caracara. You couldn’t miss these happy little hawks if you had even the least know-how about birds – they’re all over the place, perched on lampposts, drifting over the streets in the centre of town, wandering the dockyards in gangs of five or six and hopping along the beach in search of scraps. One of them had found the remains of a coscoroba and wasn’t about to share it with any one, flapping at any other caracaras that came its way.

The occasional passing clouds across the sun made for a tricky job adjusting the shutter speed on the new camera, but when the sun did come out, I could not have been happier with the results. It helps, of course, that so many of Patagonia’s animals aren’t that shy at all.

The old jetty is one of Puerto Natales’ most famous sights, and it hosts a large colony of Imperial cormorants in the winter months. Many of them had gone by mid-morning, seeking richer waters further down the fjord, but I must have counted nearly a hundred here the other night.

I went out for another walk after lunch, following the same circuit in the hope that the giant petrel would return. After about twenty minutes, it caught me by surprise once again, rushing so low over my head that I could hear the wind whistle in its giant wings. I hoped it might return the way it had come, but when it did not show itself again after about half an hour, I wandered back across town. I would have gone back to the hostal for a bit, but something made me press on to the other side, further south. That was where the petrel went, after all.

I didn’t quite make it as far as the fishing wharf, because there was a lovely view from the Edificio Cultural Costanera. I had only just packed away my camera when I found myself having to rush to get it back out again as a flamingo came in to land, right next to one just off the shore that I had not even noticed.

At such a close range, I could see just how heavily feathered the Chilean flamingo’s face is. It must be an adaptation to the cold, as these particular flamingos make their home here in Antarctic Chile and up in the frigid lakes of the Patagonian mountains. A far cry from the languid heat of Fuente de Piedra and Lake Turkana, for sure.

They were just the first. Soon, as the sun was beginning to set, a whole herd of flamingos came in to join them, their feathers glowing a blood-red scarlet in the evening light as they came down into the bay.

They made for quite a sight: a great herd of flamingos set against the backdrop of the snowy peaks of the Kawésqar Mountains. I certainly didn’t expect to see them again, having spotted earlier in the day that they had decamped to the other side of the bay since the day I arrived, and until recently, they had shown no signs of moving.

They were pretty quick to move, however, for one thing: a dark, powerful thing on two-metre wings, speeding towards them just above the surface of the water like a fighter plane. The petrel was back – and the mere sight of it put the fear of God into the flamingos. With much honking and splashing, they took off in a mad hurry, even when it was clear that the petrel was simply passing by.

What a spectacle they made as they flew up the fjord! It was like something out of a dream – and they kept turning this way and that, giving me every chance to snap them against the mighty mountains beyond.

It felt like the perfect ending to the trip, even though I have most of the day tomorrow as well, since my flight doesn’t leave until half four. But I come away with so many incredible memories, some of which I have written about and many of which I can print and put up on my wall. That’s how a good holiday should be, right? BB x

Wild and Free

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Café Artimaña, Puerto Natales. 20.30.

The weather is fickle. It’s still pretty cold out, but it’s warmed up enough not to need more than two layers on when leaving the house. The snow has largely melted away in Puerto Natales and the surrounding countryside, revealing for the first time the vast golden fields of Patagonia. It’s always a bit sad when snow melts, like coming to the end of a very special story, but if the forecast is to be believed, it will be back tonight.

I still can’t believe my ridiculous lucky streak in timing this adventure to coincide with the very first snowfall of winter – and all the magic that followed, right up until the last throw of my expedition today. Right up to the wire.

Fabián picked me up just after seven thirty as usual and we set out into the darkness. Beaming his thermal camera to his phone, we spent much of the twilight hour searching for life in the snow. It was eerily quiet this morning. A single caracara was our only find, shivering in the cold at the side of the road.

And not without reason: the temperature had dropped to a biting -10°C, worsened by the all consuming oblivion of a snowborn fog and an icy wind coming up off the lake. Even the lights of oncoming cars didn’t become visible until long after their engines were heard rumbling down the road.

We had quite a scare while looking for Escarcha and her cubs. The thermal camera picked up two glowing dots on the hillside not far from where we’d left them yesterday: one large, one small. One of the trackers went up into the fogbound hills to get a closer look and radioed in to confirm it was Escarcha and one cub. For a painful half hour, there was no sign of the second cub at all – until it came out from behind a rock where it had been hiding, much to everyone’s relief.

Winter may be beautiful, but it is terribly hard on the animals that live here – especially the young. Hopefully, Escarcha’s cubs make it through the winter so they can find territories of their own in this desolate idyll.

Escarcha took her cubs higher up into the gloom, which showed no signs of lifting anytime soon. Fabián suggested an alternative itinerary up at Laguna Azul, on the eastern edge of the national park, so we left the fog and set back out into the brilliant light.

Laguna Azul offers a tremendous view of the world famous spires of Torres del Paine across the surface of its crystal waters, though they were more often shrouded in cloud than not.

The towers themselves are every bit as breathtaking as you have heard. Unlike Petra (which I was arguably less exposed to before I saw it) the Torres del Paine lose nothing in reality, despite the fact you’ve probably seen them a thousand times over on the covers of photography magazines, NatGeo special editions and South American travel guides. Glowing red and white in the morning light, they might be the exposed teeth of some ancient titan, or the thrones of South America’s lord of the skies, the condor.

Fanciful imaginings on my part. Paine is a Tehuelche word meaning “blue”, in honour of the colour of the peaks in the grey morning, or the icy glaciers that lay at its feet.

Fabián’s mission was to find a tucúquere, a Magellanic horned owl, or the more well-known Patagonian speciality, a Magellanic woodpecker. But the forests around Laguna Azul were silent – completely silent. We found another chunchito (pygmy owl) watching us from the top of a dead tree, along with a couple of colourful rayaditos, but the snowy forest showed no other signs of life.

Perhaps they were all hiding from the creature that left these tracks in the woods: an enormous male puma, whose trail we followed for about an hour as it weaved through the woods, occasionally doubling back to investigate the older trails of a couple of younger female pumas.

Out on the lake, I finally tracked down a creature I missed in Peru. We have grebes in Europe, but the huala or great grebe – the largest of its kind in the world – is a truly magnificent bird, reaching the size of a cormorant. Curiously, as I descended to the lake’s shore to get a closer look, it actually came closer to the shoreline rather than diving and emerging much further away, as grebes are inclined to do.

Back in the car, Fabián checked in with his fellow trackers over the radio. Nobody, it seemed, had had any luck with pumas since Escarcha and her cubs went up into the hills. So we stopped for a snack lunch next to the thundering falls of the Cascada del Río Paine, where the meltwaters of the park’s mightiest river came hurtling down a series of cliffs amidst menacing curtains of sheet ice.

We picked a lucky spot. Two handsome condors sat up on the hilltop, sunning themselves in a posture that must have convinced the ancient Inca that the condor truly was a messenger (and worshipper) of the Sun.

The waterfall must be a reference point for the condors in their navigation, because no fewer than sixteen came flying right overhead on their way up the valley, some of them soaring so close you could hear the rush of wind in their enormous wings. They were mostly youngsters, yet to don the full black robes and smart white collars of their elders.

For me, that would have been the perfect ending to a wonderful three days: a close encounter with one of my favourite creatures in the world – again – but Patagonia was not done with us. Not yet.

The radio crackled to life as we were driving back to the south road: ‘La Petaca está en la carretera’. Fabián stepped on the gas, overtaking two trucks in the snow like a rally car and forking right back up the road to Lago Sarmiento.

The fog had finally cleared, having hung over the lake almost all day, and one of the trackers had located Petaca, the dominant female and the park’s most famous puma, following the scent trail of Escarcha and her cubs: her progeny. By the time we got there, she had slipped off the road and into the scrub, but we were still able to spot her without too much difficulty.

Not for the first time, I was disappointed with the behaviour of some of the tourists and their tracker, who came down from the road to move in as close to Petaca as possible. If she had wanted to come back up the hill, she was cut off constantly by this group that kept cutting ahead of her to get more and more photos of the big cat approaching head-on. Fabián was just as ticked off as I was (I really do appreciate a guide who puts the animal first, and not the client). Surprise surprise, the tracker was one of the ones we’d sparred with a few days prior, telling us to back off as they were there first. Go figure!

I believe that the key to magical wild encounters is patience, understanding and a healthy dose of luck. If that had been that, I would have been perfectly happy – we had already seen so much of the pumas over the last two days. I was ready to hit the road and maybe find some ñandúes on the way home.

And then Petaca reappeared.

With the shimmering waters of Lago Sarmiento behind her, she hardly cast a glance in our direction as she padded her way along the hillside toward the road, following Escarcha’s trail.

With no further obstructions to her path, she came right up to the road, mere metres away. At such a distance, you could really appreciate the power in those mighty paws. Here is an animal that didn’t struggle once in the snow like the fox and the geese from yesterday: she almost seemed to glide across the surface of the frozen hill.

I thought the fence between the road and the hill might prove a barrier, but not for this apex predator. In a single move she leapt nimbly up onto the wire and then launched herself onto the other side, just a few feet away.

Having cleared the road, Petaca climbed up into the hills toward the setting sun and disappeared among the frozen scrub. What an incredible encounter! And what a way to finish a superb three days’ tracking in Patagonia!

On the way back, we found the unnamed young male in the same spot he had been when we first saw him on Monday. It felt fitting that the last puma of the trip should also be the first. We might very nearly have witnessed a hunt, as a lone guanaco was headed right his way, until a passing truck spooked it into heading in a different direction.

The tour I had booked for tomorrow into the heart of the park itself and the Cueva del Milodón was sadly cancelled due to low numbers by the time I got back, so this will be my last time in Torres del Paine. Magical, then, that it should end with a view of the mountains at their most impressive, with ominous yellow and grey clouds rolling across its summit, turning the blue mountains of the Tehuelche all kinds of magical colours. Who could not lose their heart to such a sight?

I’ll take it easy tomorrow and explore Puerto Natales properly. There’s so much human history here that I could so easily overlook, and it will need more than a morning, I think. BB x

Diamond Dust

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hostal Coastal B&B, Puerto Natales. 19.20.

Patagonia is transformed in the sunlight. From the moment I arrived, the whole territory has been shrouded in a dense fog ushered in by the snow, concealing much of the land behind a mysterious grey curtain. Today, at dawn, everything changed. Shadows into silhouettes. Mystery into majesty. I have never been more in love with this place than I was today.

And to think there were people online who advised against coming here in winter… I can only imagine they wanted to keep something this precious to themselves. Because I think I can say without a hint of hyperbole that Patagonia in the heart of winter is one of the most beautiful sights you will ever see.

This morning’s quest began where we left off yesterday, at the frozen field where Escarcha and her cubs had gone to ground. Tracks in the snow indicated that they had moved on during the night, but there was at least one puma still in the area: an adult female, one of the offspring of the legendary Rupestre, the former matriarch of Torres del Paine. It was still dark, but following the lurching silhouette of a sight that was becoming quite familiar still set my heart racing.

She seemed to be following the scent trail left behind on the cliff – either Escarcha and her cubs or another puma entirely – as she kept pausing at each overhang and doing the Flehmen response, a technique which allows cats to analyse the scents they detect in extreme detail, ascertaining information such as the age, health and sex of the scent-bearer. Cats are remarkably intelligent creatures and the puma – arguably the most successful of all the cats of the Americas, with more names than any other species of felid and a range spanning from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego – is no exception to the rule.

The female took her leave and wandered off toward Lago Sarmiento, and we turned back in search of the new arrival from yesterday, NN, just as the sun began to crest the hills to the east, bathing everything in a golden halo. NN was where we left him yesterday, and while he popped out of his hiding place for a gnaw at his hidden kill, he promptly returned to the scrub and disappeared again.

Forging a new path, Fabián took us down a new route, past the frozen lake where we had found Lenga and Ñire yesterday and up into the foothills of Torres del Paine. We saw no pumas en route, but they had clearly been here during the night, with fresh prints along the road and across the fields beyond.

The guanacos, on the other hand, were everywhere. Apparently, in this corner of the world, only 4% of guanacos survive infancy, with the other 96% falling prey to the pumas. That figure alone goes a long way to explaining the concentration of pumas here in Tierra del Fuego – and also, the fecundity of the guanacos, since they still outnumber the pumas by at least ten to one. We didn’t get that classic “guanacos against the backdrop of the Torres” shot that Fabián was angling for, but the winter sunlight made for some breathtaking views of the guanacos on the eastern slopes.

Skittish beneath the mist, the guanacos seemed to lose a lot of their nervousness in the sunlight – perhaps because the increased visibility made them less anxious about being ripped apart by an unseen puma at any given moment. We were able to pass by so close that you could see the frost crystals on their ears.

The park’s meadowlarks were just as abundant today as they were yesterday, only this time they played second-fiddle to a natural phenomenon I have only ever heard about but never seen until now: diamond dust. A true polar experience, it is a kind of sub-zero “precipitation” that only forms under a cloudless sky: effectively, a ground-level cloud of ice crystals that seem to sparkle in the sunlight. I really should have filmed it, in retrospect, but some things never look as good on camera (though you can just about see it in the picture below). This was definitely one of those things. It was magical enough to behold, and something I’d recommend traveling all the way here to see in its own right.

Fabián drove on toward a small frozen forest of lenga trees in search of a chuncho – an Austral Pygmy Owl – that he knew to inhabit the area. I spotted it, but I think it’s safe to say he knew which tree it would be likely to be in, as any guide worth their salt would. After all, it happens to grow in a very iconic spot: right in front of the world-famous peaks of Torres del Paine.

Remarkably, the tiny little owl paid us no mind whatsoever, so I could get in so close I could see the yellow of its eyes without the help of my lens – which, of course, did a phenomenal job at close-range.

Back at Lago Sarmiento, a tip-off over the walkie-talkies alerted us to the return of Escarcha and her cubs, patrolling the edge of the lake. One guide and his group – the pike-square of supertelephoto users from yesterday – had jumped the fence and gone down to the lake and enjoyed ridiculously close views as the family passed them by, but at least Fabián and the other guides had the restraint not to insist we all go down to the shore and crowd the pumas. Instead we waited patiently and watched from a distance as Escarcha left her cubs in a safe spot and set out to go hunting.

That is not to say that we were not also treated to a close encounter. Escarcha’s route up into the hills took her right past us, passing mere feet away. Unfazed, she climbed up the snowy slope and disappeared into the descending clouds.

We waited for a while, suspecting from the approaching guanaco herd and the descending mist that she might have been hunting the herd, but Escarcha eventually appeared as if out of nowhere and went back down to hunt among the scrub by the lakeside, presumably for some smaller prey like hare. Fabián offered the choice to stay and pursue more pumas or to search for the other animal denizens of the park, and after some thought, I opted for the latter. After all, I did really want to see a ñandú. So we bade farewell to the others, who all remained with Escarcha and her cubs, and left the heart of puma country for Cerro Guido.

Like many of the places we have visited, Cerro Guido is a private ranch or estancia, but one of many that has realised that wildlife tourism can be tremendously more profitable than regular ranching. As such, a large part of the Cerro Guido ranch is given over to the local wildlife, giving the prairie-dwelling guanacos and rheas – and the puma that hunt them – a perfect haven of their own.

The ñandúes were very visible, albeit always in the middle distance, but the guanacos continued to make for good subjects against the afternoon light.

Another Patagonian mainstay was very much in evidence today: the South American Gray or Patagonian fox, a canid that is actually more closely related to coyotes and jackals than it is to the true foxes we know and love from back home. Just like they do in winter back in England, they were out looking for partners ahead of the mating season in spring, so we saw more than a dozen in all, sometimes alone, sometimes scampering about the fields in pairs. This one seemed to be limping, until we realised it was not walking with an odd gait but rather struggling with the depth of the snow, plunging up to its elbow every few steps.

The caiquén or upland goose was by far the most numerous resident of Cerro Guido, outnumbering even the ubiquitous guanacos. Caiquenes pair for life, though their fidelity is curiously one-sided: if the female dies, the heartbroken male will never pair off again, joining a bachelor group for the rest of his days, whereas if the male dies, the female will usually find a new mate within a few weeks. It’s a neat trick to ensure evolutionary stability in the long term, and – if you choose to look at it that way – a funny reflection of how men and women react to breakups.

I joked about the bus station-looking shelters, only to be told that yes, they really are paraderos – and to rub salt in the wound, a bus rounded the corner and passed us merely moments later. It’s hard to imagine now, but in the warmer months, when ranches like this one are more active, many ranch-hands travel to and from their posts this way. I caught myself wondering (and not for the first time since arriving) how amazing it would be to sack everything off and live here, way out here in the Chilean Antarctic wilderness. I’ve had madder dreams, trust me, and a little more careful thought would surely shake me out of my reverie. But I haven’t given it that much thought yet. It’s just a hunch I had – and a bottomless love for the wildest and most magnificent natural wonders of the world (and, coincidentally, places that style themselves as “the End of the World”).

We didn’t find any nearby ñandúes, and the two that had been relatively close but obscured by a bush on the way in had wandered far off by the time we turned about to make our way out. Not to be disappointed, though, Fabián spotted one near the road after we had left Cerro Guido and I jumped out to track it down.

I’ve not seen ostriches in the wild, or emus, or cassowaries, or any ratite for that matter. So I have no yardstick for truly bizarre appearance of this relatively huge flightless creature, which looks almost entirely out of place in the snowy scrubland of Patagonia. But, like the moa of New Zealand, ratites like the rhea are just as capable of adapting to cold conditions as their cousins in Africa are to the searing heat of the Namib and Sahara Deserts.

The ñandú or Lesser Rhea was brought to the attention of the world by the second voyage of the HMS Beagle, though it Charles Darwin and not the French naturalist Alcide d’Orbigny who is more often associated with the bird. I could reel off more facts about rheas, but really I’d just like to see another and another. They’re remarkable creatures, even in a country full of healthy specimens of the incomparably beautiful puma.

But we still weren’t done. The road back to Puerto Natales passes by a great wall of stone, jutting out of the slope like the outer walls of some fortress. In Spain, a cliff face this vertical would be alive with griffons and known as a buitrera. Here in Puerto Natales, they’re known as condoreras. I don’t think I need to tell you what mighty creatures makes its home here.

I am, of course, talking about the largest bird of prey of all: the Andean condor. Unlike Colca Canyon in Peru, Patagonia (especially in winter) offers the chance to see these magnificent vultures at rest, where the whites of their wings can be much more easily appreciated. As the fog began to clear, we counted well over thirty of them. Fortunately, they’re scavengers to a fault, so there was nothing ominous at all about the fact that their numbers seem to grow exponentially every time we tried to count them.

Fabián joked about looking for a condor feather at the base of the cliff, which would almost certainly have turned up at least one. However, condor feathers are almost as sacred now as they were in the time of the Inca, albeit for less divine reasons: taking one out of the country is illegal, punishable by fines of up to an eye-watering $100,000. I adore vultures and have a collection of feathers I have found in my travels at home, but I’m not mad enough to chance that one.

The sun was beginning to set as we neared Puerto Natales, casting a final golden light over the slopes and the descending mist and turning the rest of the world a gentle shade of blue. There is a huge cave known as the Cueva del Milodón near here. I will try to book a trip out there for Thursday, as it is one of a handful of things to do in Puerto Natales that doesn’t require any high-grade trekking and expensive national park permits. I’ll give it some thought.

I had another serious urge to move here as I crossed town on the way back from the bank to my B&B. Forget the fact that it’s on the other side of the planet, in a place literally named the End of the World. There’s just something magical about this place. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen: like a frontier from the Old West frozen in time, surrounded by an array of animals so spectacular that you could live several lifetimes here and never get bored.

I wonder if they have a school that needs a languages teacher?

Enough musing. Another marathon read today. Sorry. Things will calm down a bit when I start my work placement in Santiago, I’m sure, but for now, every second is diamond dust and needs recording. I already miss this place and I haven’t even left yet. I’m only just halfway through my trip, for Pete’s sake.

One more day’s tracking awaits. Hopefully the weather (and our singularly good luck) holds out. BB x

To the Ends of the Earth

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hostel Coastal B&B, Puerto Natales. 18.48.

I know I’ve found somewhere absolutely desolate when I hear myself throwing the word “beautiful” around like a flail. And that just about sums up Puerto Natales. Desolate. But breathtakingly beautiful in its desolation.

Wind the clock back. I’ve had comfier flights. The journey down to Puerto Natales via an hour’s layover in Puerto Montt was perfectly smooth, but I’ve not yet recovered from the debilitating impact of a fourteen hour flight in an air-conditioned box, so my eyes and nose were streaming all morning. To add insult to injury, my ears clogged up upon landing in Puerto Montt, which was less painful than a nuisance that it was impossible to ignore. It was some relief when the last of the new passengers had found their seats and the plane was up in the firmament once again.

I did, however, get my money’s worth from the window seat. Chile’s Lake District is nothing short of spectacular. Think Cumbria if you will, but on a much, much grander scale, where the lakes are larger than cities and the mountains are merely supporting characters for the real stars of the show: the mighty snowcapped volcanoes, rising up and out of the earth in perfect wintry cones. Some of them were gently smoking from their summits; others forced the clouds to crest their peaks like waves, adding a further sheen to their majesty. This place is very high on my list of options for the last week – if I can only find a way to get down here overland, that is. I think I’ll have done quite enough flying by the time I get back from this cold corner of the world!

After Puerto Montt, the world below disappeared beneath the clouds for all of two hours. It was only upon the final descent, mere minutes from the tiny landing strip, that the snowy wastes of Patagonia finally appeared. If Santiago felt like Spain and the Lake District looked like England or even Canada, this is something else entirely. I have no yardstick for this kind of world. Not even Poland in the grip of midwinter comes close. The indescribable vastness of it all, scored with cross-crossing tracks and frozen ponds, appearing and disappearing at will beyond the snow clouds… it’s almost eerie.

Landing was no small feat either. The captain had to pull up out of the descent just moments from touchdown due to fierce winds, the likes of which I have only read about in books about this place. The ancient explorers called this land Tierra del Fuego after the many fires lit upon the shore by the indigenous Selk’nam, but Tierra del Viento may be a more appropriate moniker – this corner of the world seems to be ruled by the wind.

I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to get from the dinky little airport into town, but that question was answered quickly by the local transfer shuttle service advertising itself loudly in the arrivals lounge, and at $5 for door-to-door service, they’re practically giving it away.

It would had been a shorter service had the driver heard me correctly and taken me to the Hostal Coastal and not the Hostal Austral, which whacked another twenty minutes onto the trip and gave me a proper scenic tour of the backwaters of Puerto Natales. I suppose it doesn’t help that the two words sound similar, and I can’t blame the driver for defaulting to the one that is actually in Spanish. But this B&B is wonderfully homey, if a wee bit of a trek from the centre (we’re talking the minutes, tops, but it’s enough to make me reconsider going out in the cold and the dark for supper).

Puerto Natales is immediately a very different world to the rest of Chile. Even our layover in Puerto Montt had many of the same birds flying by as can be found in Santiago. But not here.

If check-in hadn’t taken a little while, I could have practically fed the chimango caracaras that were perched on the fence outside. I went searching for them later, but a family of fishermen spooked them off. It was a shame, but it was just as well – none of my photos came out right anyway as it was getting very dark. That’s why I came out to look around, really – to get my bearings and play around with the camera settings so that I’m not caught out if we should be so lucky as to find any pumas over the next few days.

Apart from the caracaras, the wildlife here is much more like what you might find in Antarctica. Imperial shags bobbing on the water in the bay and sinister-looking dolphin gulls with their dark feathers and red beaks. White-eared grebes sharing the shoreline with upland geese, steamer ducks and… what the?

That’s right, the guidebooks aren’t goosing you. Puerto Natales hosts a herd of Chilean flamingos during the winter months. Quite why they come here, to this dark and desolate corner of the world, I can only guess. Perhaps it has something to do with the legendarily rich Humboldt current. Either way, they are a decidedly strange sight: a mass of crimson and salmon pink in an iron-grey Antarctic sea.

I think I’ll call it a day there. My ears were rescued until the captain had to do that emergency manoeuvre and now they’re right back to how they were before. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had some kind of Eustachian Tube Dysfunction, only the last time it ended in a burst ear drum and three bizarre and painful months of diplacusis dysharmonica. That’s why I’m not trying to force my Eustachian tubes open by the conventional methods. With any luck, they’ll heal in time.

A good night’s sleep would be nice – I didn’t get much last night because the five Brazilians in my dorm decided to turn on all the lights just before midnight and have a jolly conversation at full volume about their respective cities. They didn’t get the hint until they left for the club, and when they did, the chap from Rio decided to ignore his alarm at four in the morning, so the fellow in the bed above him had to creep out and switch it off. At least, I think that’s what he did.

But now I have a room to myself for five nights. Bliss! I intend to make the most of it. Starting with a good kip. Tomorrow is another day. BB x

Another World

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hostal Boutique Merced 88, Santiago de Chile. 16.15.

Now here’s a setup I really didn’t see coming. This time yesterday I was sitting in a living room in a comfy suburb of Santiago de Chile, some twelve thousand miles from home, knocking back a Corona Extra and watching Spain take on Belgium in their quarterfinal game. Twenty-four hours later, I’m in downtown Santiago, resting my feet for a moment after climbing up Cerro San Cristobal to see the Andes once again. If you’d asked me where I’d be and what I’d be doing at this stage of the summer back in December, it wouldn’t have been either of those scenarios, that’s for sure.

I must have been absolutely exhausted yesterday, because the last thing I remember is sitting down on my bunk bed and checking the time, which was about 18.50ish. The next thing I knew, it was dark outside, the numbers on my phone’s home screen had morphed to 03.10 and a man in the bunk above mine was snoring loud enough to rival an Amazonian thunderstorm. Maybe that was what woke me up. Either way, I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I whiled away a couple of hours trying to work out what to do with the last week.

Of course, I didn’t realise that my adaptor was too big for the sockets here until my phone was down to 3%. Fortunately, the giant in the bunk next to mine (seriously, he must have been at least 6’6”) had exactly the same charger as mine, so I sneakily put my phone to charge and waited for about an hour for it to juice up just enough to guide me to a ferretería in town.

Thus armed (and breakfasted) I detoured back to the hostel via the Parque Forestal to see what I could see (after all, I did bring the lens with me). A couple of Harris hawks kept putting the local pigeons to flight with their noisy circling, and I tried and failed to catch one of the park’s firecrowns as it flitted from flower to flower at blinding speed, but the austral thrushes were absolutely everywhere – and they were much less camera-shy.

They look a lot like the Chiguanco thrushes that were all around Cusco. Come to think of it, they don’t look all that different from the American robins of Central Park, in the right light. They’re clearly a very Santiago kind of bird. I guess I’ll be seeing more of them over the next few weeks.

I hadn’t really planned what to do with my day in downtown Santiago. Honestly, I had expected this week to be spent exploring the Lake District to the south, saving Patagonia for the end of the trip, but the guide I have hired is only working July this year, so I had to change my plans.

Santiago sits in a giant bowl, ringed on almost every side by the snow-capped peaks of the Andes. One finger of those lofty peaks stretches almost as far as Santiago’s heart. Crisscrossed by cycle paths and two very popular cable-car lines, the Cerro San Cristobal was just too great a temptation. As a rule, if there is a mountain nearby, I usually try to climb it. So that sorted out my plans for the day in one go!

It’s quite a climb – about an hour and a half up the eastern slope – but it does offer tremendous views of the capital city and its famous skyscraper, the Gran Torre Costanera, the tallest building in South America.

You can also appreciate the smog, which is really quite something.

I’m still tuning into the soundscape here, but three weeks in Peru have made the job a lot easier. I know a hummingbird now when I hear one, so it was fairly easy to find firecrowns on the way up – though they were nigh-on impossible to photograph, as hummingbirds so often are. One sound I did not recognise, however, was a strange owl-like call coming from the scrub. Merlin came to the rescue: it was a California Quail. I have wanted to see one of these enigmatic little things since I first saw them in Bambi as a kid.

California quail just isn’t the right name, though. They’re clearly quaver quails. Just look at the musical note embedded in the head of this dashing young male. You tell me that this handsome fella doesn’t deserve a musical name for wearing such a showy headpiece!

Speaking of showy headpieces, this tufted tit-tyrant was a nice find near the summit. For most of the morning, I could hear some kind of tyrant species high up in the trees, but this one came right down to eye-level and stuck around for a little while.

Santiago definitely looks better when you’re facing to the east. From the Cerro, the view out west is buried under a thick cloud of smog which seems perpetually fixed just above the horizon. The shape of the valley is part of the problem, trapping the exhaust fumes in a natural bowl, but it is something I’ve never seen the likes of before. I suppose I had better get used to it, as next year is likely to see me accompany some of my top public speakers to the world championships in Shanghai, and China is no stranger to smog.

Right at the very top, there is an enormous white statue of La Virgen de la Inmaculada Concepción, and at her feet, a small sanctuary. This seems to be the spot the locals make for in the afternoon, presumably to catch the sunset, as it was getting very busy by the time I reached it. Most of them doubtless made the ascent by cable car, as the lines to get tickets back down were just as big as they had been at the bottom. Foolishly, I still had my camera set to low-light shooting after my run-in with the quails, so when a buzzard-eagle appeared out of nowhere, I was woefully underprepared. I got off a few clean shots, but as it was close enough to see the glint in its eye, it was one of those encounters best left to the naked eye.

It didn’t get the same reaction from the crowd of sightseers that the condors did back in Peru – but then, Andean condors are twice as big and five times as heavy, so they really do command one’s attention.

I’m no less impressed by the Andes than I was when first I laid eyes on them. They really are the most impressive mountains I have ever seen, dwarfing every peak I have had the fortune to behold until now. Imagine growing up in the shadow of these mighty walls of rock and ice… Little wonder the Inca thought themselves divine!

My phone is nearly charged back up. Looking at the time, I think England have just set out against Norway in their quarterfinal game. I can’t watch or even follow the game on the radio thanks to the BBC being regionally locked, so I’ll just have to go for a walk and see if I can find anywhere playing the game en route. Could be a good excuse to take myself out for dinner, though I doubt I’ll do more than grab an empanada from a stall somewhere.

This time tomorrow I’ll be in Puerto Natales. It looks like Patagonia had its first snowfall last night. I can’t wait to see the snow again. It’s been too long! BB x

U-Turn

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

14.02, The Flat.

In the blink of an eye, my second year at Taunton has come and gone. It’s been another hurricane season, I won’t deny that. A little easier than last year, perhaps – if only because of the repetitive nature of teaching the same course – but every bit as busy. Since September, I’ve taken my student Funk Band out to their first external gig, joined a band of my own, taken a team to the Oxford Schools Finals Day for the second year in a row and led a public speaking workshop in the form of a legal practice (which, of course, I am totally qualified for…). I have returned to Extremadura under iron skies, taken yet another school trip to Barcelona and travelled all the way to Peru in search of the Andean condor on one of the most amazing adventures of my life. I have not found Her – Somerset is proving a very dry place – but I have made some good friends at work, which is a positive. I haven’t exactly had much time to commit to the search, and I have also spent almost every day of my holidays on the road, which is terribly self-indulgent of me, but it is how I survive the manic 24/7 existence that is working in a boarding school.

True to form, my summer holidays are set to follow the same trend. After a few days’ reprieve – just about enough time to tidy the flat and pack – I will be traveling across the Atlantic again, bound this time for Chile, nearly 1,500km further south than where I left off in April. Please don’t get me wrong – this one isn’t a purely self-indulgent adventure. I’m off to work at a school out there in Chile’s capital, Santiago, for three weeks or so. As to what form that work may take, I am still completely in the dark. I imagine any rational human being might balk at the idea of being less than a week away from traveling to the other side of the planet at no small expense without so much as an address or even the vaguest idea of what to expect, but I’m at that stage of my life where I am entirely my own agent and any change is welcome. The alternative is a rather static Somerset summer, alternating between driving lessons and debilitating bouts of hayfever. With my timetable for the next academic year allowing some time for the former, I think I can allow myself to dodge the latter by switching seasons in a Spanish-speaking country.

I won’t be hiding under an austral snowstorm all summer. When my five weeks are up, I’ve a wedding to attend in Athens, which I have been looking forward to for a very long time. Once again, I’ve only planned the beginning. How I get home after four days in the Greek capital remains up in the air. Maybe I’ll find a quiet spot in Thessaloniki and soak up the Mediterranean sun while I work on my novel. Or maybe I’ll travel back home across Europe, seeing Romania like I planned years ago. I haven’t decided yet.

I really don’t know what the next two months will bring. At the very least, I hope they bring change, whatever that looks like. My boss would really like me to stop saying yes to everything. She means well, I know. But if I don’t say yes to things like this, my youth will slip through my fingers and I will find myself in the same job ten years from now, still hoping that She will appear. The apps don’t work – everyone is exhausted – so, like a good scientist, I have to go and do the fieldwork. I don’t expect to find Her in Chile (let’s be honest, at a distance of nearly twelve thousand kilometres, it would probably be better for me if I didn’t), but it can’t hurt to try – and along the way, it would be nice to make some new friends and learn something new. I have work to do, of course – this Spanish Language A: Literature course won’t write itself – but with several long flights on the cards, that shouldn’t be a problem. With one “buffer” week on either side of my placement, I should have plenty of time to explore.

In short, I don’t know how this ends. I don’t know how it middles either. But I do know how it starts. Since I’m going all the way to the far side of the world, I figured I could go a little further. Before my placement begins – the day after the FIFA World Cup Final – I will be indulging my inner Attenborough once again in the desolate wilds of Patagonia. After a little shopping around, I’ve found a respectable guide who will take me in search of one of Chile’s most magical creatures: the puma. I didn’t have any luck with the jaguars in Manu this Easter, so hopefully Patagonia will deliver.

I hadn’t planned on going back to South America so soon – but here we are. Life is full of u-turns, but they aren’t always as exciting as this. So here’s to the summer of ’26! BB x

Heatwave

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

The Delayed 14.29 to Taunton, Reading. 14.51.

England swelters under the glare of an unseasonably ferocious sun. For the second day in a row, the temperature is pushing well into the thirties. It’s all the news can talk about. Trains are running slower due to speed restrictions, three children have “gotten into difficulties” while bathing (a tactful way of avoiding the potentially triggering d-words associated with fatal water incidents) and the whole of the South seems to have jumped into the car and carved out a four-square fiefdom on Bournemouth Beach.

I’ve hopped out east to pay my mother a visit, and in so doing stepped right into the hottest part of the country – bar London, of course, which is usually a couple of degrees warmer than the rest of the island. England is rather pretty in May, though she wears her best dress in the first two weeks of the month, when the flowers are still fresh and the wind is cool. Now, the early summer sun is at that particularly British angle where it’s high enough to burn but low enough to blind, and the heat feels more like the first week of August than the last week of May.

Retreating before the summer’s wrath, I have sought solace and shades along the banks of Hampshire’s rivers.

England is at its most beautiful wherever a river can be found. Crystal waters running over gravel, with shadowy trout and grayling darting from sunlight to shadow. Clumps of weeds and watercress wafting in the water as though in the wind. The trailing arms of a weeping willow gently tracing the water’s surface. Iridescent dragonflies of every shape and size – dragons, damsels and darters – hawking from bank to bank, playing a longer game than the mayflies, whose inert bodies drift downstream, their twenty-four hours spent. Chiffchaffs, wrens and blackcaps singing from the trees, the lazy purr of an overheated wood pigeon and, now and then, the explosive song of a Cetti’s warbler from deep within the darkest heart of a reedbed or thicket.

When I am traveling far from home, this is the image of England that I miss most of all.

Did you see the pike in that first picture? Don’t worry if you missed it – they are master ambush predators. Go back and see if you can spot it.

This corner of the River Alre passing through Alreston is supposed to have otters and kingfishers, but I was over the moon to see a pike. They were always my favourite fish when I was a lad, and it’s not hard to see the appeal for a young boy: fully grown, they’re huge, sinister, almost crocodilian monsters with soulless eyes and fins that move so slowly that their every twitch seems calculated. A perfect killing machine. Hardly surprising for a fish that outlived the dinosaurs, whose ancestors prowling Cretaceous rivers were not all that different from the river monsters that lurk in reedbeds outside Tescos and Sainsbury’s.

I can see why adventurous young lads might get a kick out of fishing up one of these ancient beasts, but I’m just as happy spotting one drifting between the weeds. It makes a change from chasing chiffchaffs through the branches of the tallest trees.

I’m racing home now, clearing the green fields of the Vale of Pewsey under a mercifully cloud-studded sky. I acquired a few books in a second-hand bookshop for a couple of pounds and a new sketchbook for a little more. I’ve been meaning to get my hands on the Horrible Histories books for a while, since they had an enormous impact on my art and my love for history and storytelling. Everyone seems to remember the enormously popular TV show (which, for my sins, I have never seen) but the books appear to have faded into collective oblivion. I dare say Martin Brown had more influence on my pen-and-line drawings than any other artist – besides the legendary Chris Riddell, of course.

Power’s running out. I’d better stop typing and leave enough juice on this thing to get me through the ticket barrier at Taunton station. See you around! BB x

Man in Manhattan

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Newark Liberty International Airport, Newark, NJ. 17.27.

Good morning America! The sun is shining, my bag is re-checked and I’m off to see the city, standing on the steps of an absolutely rammed Amtrak train bound for Penn Station. I will never roll my eyes at the train from London to Taunton again. This is a whole other level of packed.

Two years ago, I promised myself I’d never come back to this country. I allowed a broken heart to derail what should have been a grand old adventure around the States and swore off America for good, having come to associate the place with gators, gumbo and the worst heartbreak I had ever known. And yet here I am, in Central Park no less, using the last couple of months left on my ESTA to explore New York City. Fate has a funny way of making us eat our words.

And boy, am I glad I did! What an exciting way to round off the Peruvian adventure!

People come to New York City for all sorts of reasons. Jazz, sports, food from every corner of the globe. World famous locations like the Empire State Building, Broadway, the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, Trump Tower, Times Square and 110th Street… The list goes on and on. But me? I had only three hours to play with, so I spent almost all of them in Central Park.

Why? Because Central Park is a sanctuary for birds traveling up and down the east coast. Being the size it is, New York City and its adjoining suburbs make up an absolutely enormous area of developed land that has devoured what was once a vast stretch of virgin forest and marshland along the eastern seaboard. Central Park sits right at its heart, a large but contained green lung which many migrating species use as an important stopover on their journey home.

Which is apt, because that’s exactly what I was doing.

I have always wanted to see New York City. I wasn’t so fussed about staying here, though now that I’ve had a bite of the Big Apple I can’t help feeling I’d like to come back someday with a bit more than three hours to play with, which simply isn’t enough time to explore a metropolis like NYC.

Everything here is exactly the way I pictured it: towering brown-brick buildings with iron steps winding up the sides. Yellow cabs and green street signs. And billboards – yes! Billboards! It’s a quirky thing to take a shine to, but they were such a memorable feature of my last visit to the US and I really have missed them!

The glorious weekend sunshine had drawn thousands to Central Park, especially the city’s athletic youth, who were out in force on the largest park run I have ever seen. I don’t know what the Americans put in their food, but there’s something larger than life about the American twenty-something-or-other: they’re huge. We like to joke in the UK that the US has an obesity problem (a problem we often forget is shared) but take a casual stroll through Central Park on a Saturday and you might be forgiven for thinking the average American to be some sort of übermensch. Then again, this is the land that gave us Michael Phelps and breastaurant chains like Hooters, so perhaps that’s not altogether surprising.

Anyway. I didn’t come all this way to gawp like an awkward teenager at all the breasts and rippling pectorals. Not even close. I came here to see some birds that we just don’t get back home – at least, not unless the autumn winds blow them way off course, since many North American species wind up in the Scilly Isles every year.

Most of the birds I went hunting for today are common backyard species that the average American wouldn’t get overly excited about, but I didn’t really get the chance to go exploring the last time I was Stateside, so I was quite happy to marvel at some of the city’s more colourful residents.

First up: the American robin, with his smart orange chest. These things are everywhere and pretty hard to miss. House sparrows and common starlings have invaded the Americas in recent years, and they’re arguably a lot more common, eking out a living even within the unforgiving human hive of New York’s streets, but the flashy American robin stands its ground in the leafy suburbs.

I saw two kinds of woodpecker and heard at least three, though I didn’t quite get as close as I did in Manu. One dashing bird that might have been more at home among the jewels of the Peruvian jungle was that spectacular American favourite, the northern cardinal. Not only are they beautiful birds, all decked out in red and black, but their song is – well, I was going to write sweet or musical, but the word I really want to say is homely. I can see why so many Americans are especially fond of them.

One more bird that I was really keen to see was an easy find throughout Central Park: the blue jay. I never get tired of seeing jays back home in England. Their electric blue feathers were among the most prized trophies for those of us who collected feathers as children, and the blue jay takes that dash of blue in the jay’s wardrobe and goes all in.

I wonder what the first settlers made of these birds? Of course, I’ve grown up seeing their pictures in books, so (unlike Peru) I knew exactly what I was looking for. But imagine those first travelers, confronted with birds that looked familiar and yet utterly, utterly different. Hence American robins – which are actually thrushes – named for their red breasts, and blue jays – which are in the crow family, though not exactly jays in the strictest sense – named for their striped blue feathers.

A lot of New World species have names that seem to have been coined in a hurry, unlike the birds we grew up with whose etymology is often a lot more complex. Sapsippers, seedeaters, sunbeams and puffbacks certainly seem a lot more user-friendly than mergansers, dunlins, ospreys and orioles. Americans seem a lot more prone to call things like they see them rather than spending years conjuring up a more esoteric or poetic name – such as the aubergine, which can be tracked in a perfect, unbroken line of evolution from its point of origin in the East until it crossed the Atlantic and became an eggplant.

On the subject of American approaches to birds, I was pleasantly surprised to find I was not the only one in Central Park who had come for the birds. I encountered at least three different parties out with their binoculars, all of them on the hunt for spring migrants, and all of them discussing their task in that wonderfully amicable way that Americans seem to specialise in.

One party by the reservoir pointed out a Bonaparte’s gull (or, in their terms, a “boney”) roosting among the ring-billed and American herring gulls. Another group were watching the blue jays I had seen earlier. A much larger party had gathered in the North Woods, seemingly following the news of a hooded warbler, a rare and colourful passage migrant in these parts.

I didn’t see it, but I wasn’t that fussed. After all, merely moments before I’d struck gold when a familiar silhouette soaring high above the city turned out to be that all-American icon that I’d already seen woven into a hundred badges of homeland security officers this morning: a bald eagle.

I really wasn’t expecting to see something as spectacular as a bald eagle in New York City itself, but it just goes to show what a magnet Central Park can be at this time of year.

It wasn’t the only inner city eagle I encountered, either. I was just about to cross 110th Street (of Bobby Womack fame) when I saw a long-winged silhouette hawking over the Harlem Meer that I instantly recognised as that of an osprey. These awesome fish-eating eagles are an increasingly common sight in Central Park during the migration season. I had good views of them in the Louisiana bayou two summers ago, but to see one fishing at close range with the backdrop of Harlem behind it was a real treat.

Up close, you can properly appreciate their owl-like eyes, which seem considerably larger than those of other birds of prey, and their rough, scaly talons, specifically evolved to snatch and hold on to large and slippery fish.

Sure, I was in Harlem, I could have used the opportunity to explore New York’s fascinating black history, and maybe even visited the homes of some of my favourite musicians. But I’m a naturalist first and everything else second, remember? So I ended up spending about fifteen or twenty minutes just sitting on the bank of the Harlem Meer watching it hunting, while a madwoman hurled abuse at passers-by in a heavy Bronx drawl and a black man in his forties played with two remote-controlled cars on the opposite bank.

Eventually, I realised that time was catching up on me. I had to make sure I was back at the airport with at least an hour to spare, as I could not count on security at Newark being swift (and I was right – the queue took about forty minutes, with sniffer dogs tasked with inspecting all of us).

As such, I had to ditch my whimsical plan to see Trump Tower. That ludicrous golden folly isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. So in the time I had remaining, I packed up my camera for the last time on this adventure and took the Subway back downtown to Times Square – because I couldn’t come all this way to New York City and skip the human element altogether, right?

I suppose the ludicrous frenzy of New York’s most iconic street might have thrown me had I not just spent three weeks in South America, where crowded cities are par for the course. Compared to Lima, the only major difference was the colour: Times Square really is eye-wateringly garish. I only saw it during the day. I imagine at night it is a spectacle like nothing else on Earth.

Some other time, perhaps.

Well – that’s all, folks. I’ve made it safely onto the last flight of my adventure and I’m headed for home. The sun has already set behind us, but we’re racing forward in time over the Atlantic to meet it on the other side. Below me, Prince Edward Island is fading into the night and the shadowy island of Labrador – home of The Chrysalids and just about visible in the gloom – marks the last stretch of dry land in the Americas before this plane sets out across the lonely blue waters of the Atlantic and puts the New World behind us.

Thank you for coming with me on this latest and greatest adventure. I hope you have enjoyed reading about my travels as much as I have enjoyed writing about them. They’ll certainly keep me going through the next term ahead, which is always a busy one (though mercifully not quite as busy as the last two).

My adventures aren’t over yet. Spring is here and there’s plenty more for me to see and do back home. But it will be a little while until I have another adventure quite as grand as this one. A man’s got to work, after all!

Until then – hasta pronto, chavales! BB x

Peru: The Perfect Introduction to South America

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Aeropuerto Internacional Alejandro Velasco Astete, Cusco. 12.27.

My journeys around Peru have come to an end – and with them, my first foray into Latin America is complete. It has taken a dreadfully long time for this Hispanist to cross the Atlantic and put my Spanish to the test in the New World, but I have done it. I return to my day job with a much stronger understanding of the South American angle of my subject.

Doubtless I won’t have much to report today, between transit after transit (leaving Ollantaytambo for Cusco, Cusco for Lima and then Lima for New York and home). As such, I thought it might be worth doing a quick TLDR version of my adventures for anyone interested in visiting Peru. Read on if you’re curious.

Language

First things first: Peru is a Spanish-speaking country, but much of its signage and a lot of its citizens (even the beggars on the streets of Cusco) have a good understanding of English because of the sheer number of tourists who come here. I stood my ground and spoke Spanish almost all the time, but I reckon you’d probably be alright out here without being fluent in Spanish – though it really does help to grease the wheels, make friends of the locals and avoid coming across as a total gringo.

Safety

One of the biggest deterrents to travel around South America is, of course, whether it’s safe to do so. I can only answer with a resounding yes. I have spent three weeks lugging a very expensive camera around the country, which ought to have made me quite the target (and, for the record, I don’t look very Hispanic, let alone Peruvian) but I haven’t had any trouble whatsoever. Naturally, you need to keep your eyes open and avoid certain areas after dark (Lima’s Callao, for example) but that advice applies just as much to travel at home as it does here. In short: Peru is a very safe country.

Oh, and while I remember, it’s not the massage vendors in Cusco you need to keep an eye on. It’s actually the painting sellers, who are really drug dealers in disguise. Just so you know.

Food

Peruvian cuisine is phenomenal. While I never did get around to trying the national favourite of cuy frito or fried guinea pig (too many bones) I have eaten some of the most wonderful dishes ever out here. Whether you’re on the coast and deciding between spicy ceviche or aromatic parihuela, or up in the mountains and sampling the delicious lomo saltado with a glass of chicha morada, there are a thousand flavours to choose from. It’s also a very vegetarian friendly country, with plenty of healthy meat-free options in most of the major cities. I come away from this place with a new obsession for amaranth in the form of kiwicha – a deliciously healthy Peruvian porridge spiced with cinnamon and clove. If I can get a hold of the ingredients back home, I’m teaching myself how to make it.

Weather

If you travel to Peru at this time of year (March/April), you need to be prepared for everything. Light clothing for the coast, where it can hit 30°C and the sun is fierce. Winter wear for the mountains, where it is a full twenty degrees colder, especially if you’re planning on hiking up to the snowbound peaks. Rain gear, for sure, as the rainy season doesn’t end until May. Finally, a high factor sun lotion, because whatever the weather, the UV risk is high here.

Cost

Getting to Peru is the expensive part – but there are ways to reduce your costs. By flying from Madrid, I took about £200 off the total cost, which was still a money-saving hack even after factoring in a flight to Madrid and a night there. I’m not sure whether the flight I found was anomalous, but there is definitely something to be said for waking up at 4am and checking SkyScanner – both of the deals I found were only that price in the small hours of the morning.

Once you’re here, it’s unbelievably cheap to get around. I’ve played it safe with the limited time I had and flown LatAm between my three main destinations of Lima, Arequipa and Cusco, but it still worked out very affordable. Travel by bus is cheaper still – considerably – but it does entail a lot of overnight rides that can last for more than ten hours. Uber is also an affordable and safe way to get around, especially to and from the country’s airports.

In total, I think I’ve managed to stick to my budget of £2000 – including flights, accommodation and everything in between – but I know I could have done it for even cheaper.

Tours and Activities

With the exception of a few days’ roaming, I have relied heavily on GetYourGuide out here, and it has not let me down yet. If you’re the type that likes everything planned out before you go, you can organise all of your activities before you even set out. Most of the day trips are rarely beyond the £40 mark and are great value for money in terms of what they allow you to access: faraway attractions like Colca Canyon and the Islas Ballestas are considerably more achievable thanks to the myriad of day trips on offer. If you’re short on time, I can’t recommend PeruHop more highly – they were incredibly warm and professional (a rare combination).

And of course, there’s Amazon Wildlife Peru. I loved my 6D/5N tour to Manu National Park so much that I’m seriously considering coming back for another tour with them someday. If you’re in the market for an Amazon adventure with phenomenal cooking but you don’t fancy a malaria-ridden location that requires a whole lot of jabs, check them out. You won’t regret it.

Wildlife

If I’m qualified to report on anything, it’s this. Peru is a naturalist’s dream come true. Over nineteen days, I’ve seen nearly three hundred species of birds, as well as dolphins, tapirs, capybara, black and white caimans, a fer-de-lance snake, bullet ants, stick insects and, of course, giant otters and monkeys galore. I could have seen even more if I’d done a few tailored birding excursions, which I passed up this time around (I thought 300$ for a private tour in search of a few endemic passerines was hard to justify for someone who isn’t really an anorak).

Peru has it all: deserts, coastlines, marshes, mountains, salt lakes, cloud forests and rainforests. Even if you only limited yourself to a week split between Cusco and Manu, you’d still see more animals than many people do in a lifetime.

I’ll be back.

Things I will miss

  • Kiwicha for breakfast
  • Coca tea
  • Hummingbirds absolutely everywhere
  • Condors
  • The snow-capped peaks of the Andes
  • Huaynos (very romantic Andean music)
  • Being visible on a dating app for a change
  • The height of the average Peruvian
  • Manu National Park

Things I won’t miss

  • Gringos in ponchos (it’s not a good look)
  • DEET-resistant biting flies
  • Rain that lasts longer than three days
  • Seceo (give me a Castilian ethe any day)

I think that’ll do for now. It’s still a couple of hours until my flight to Lima starts boarding. I’ll ask the waitress for a tres leches cake when she comes around. I could use the energy! BB x

Mines and Mountains

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Casa de Ollanta, Ollantaytambo. 6.04.

My time in Peru is drawing to its end. In two days’ time, I will leave this beautiful country with its cloud forests, its condors and its coca tea and return to a land of Teams, terms and checking my emails on an hourly basis. I’m not vapid enough to lust after a life spent on the road – I strongly believe that at some point you have to be a responsible citizen and work for your community – but I always dread the returning shackles of my communication-based existence, with or without an adventure to sweeten the deal. I wish, if wishing were not in vain, that Teams and emails had never come to blight this world, to become a scourge for people like me – but the world is thus. Thus have we made the world.

I left Cusco at the slovenly hour of 6.40am yesterday with all of my belongings on my last organised tour of the trip: a guided tour of the Inca and pre-Inca sites of Chinchero, Moray, Maras and the unfinished citadel of Ollantaytambo, the last stop on my journey. It worked out cheaper than hiring a ride to Ollantaytambo direct from Cusco, and after six days in the Amazon I didn’t feel up to navigating the very affordable local bus service (which I’m sure is very reliable, but works entirely on know-how, which I am definitely lacking on this first visit to Peru).

Chinchero, the first stop on the tour, involved a visit to a local cooperative, where we were shown how cochineal dye was made. It was obviously geared toward the tourist trade, but it allowed me to lay my hands on a decent souvenir: a snug alpaca wool jumper (which I definitely appreciate here in Ollanta, which is a lot colder than the other places I have been).

Chinchero is what Cusco used to be: a quiet Andean town where a lot of the population speak Quechua and learn Spanish. But change is coming. To relieve the strain on Cusco’s Alejandro Velasco Astete airport – and improve tourist traffic to nearby Machu Picchu – the Peruvian government is building a brand new international airport just outside the city. When it is complete – most likely in 2028 – it will be both Peru’s second international airport (after Lima) and the second-highest airport in South America (after Bolivia’s La Paz). Construction is about 40% complete, but has ground to a halt in the last few months as the country’s politics have shifted to the presidential election – which, at the time of writing, is still to be decided, some three days after the election took place (though it looks likely that Keiko Fujimori will win the day).

It would mean that any future intentions of visiting Manu will be a lot more straightforward, but I do worry for Machu Picchu. Can it handle the tide that is coming? Will the proximity of an international airport help this region to prosper, or will it only usher in more and more day-trippers who have come here just to gawp at the view and take the perfect selfie – only to plaster it on their dating app profiles to look well-travelled, the way my generation once did with the Tiger Temple and Elephant Jungle Sanctuary in Thailand?

Our guide had the most mellifluous voice, whether he was speaking in Spanish or in American-accented English. It was almost hypnotic. He also really knew his stuff: I learned a lot about all of the places we visited during the day, even if I did wander off on occasion. A pair of American kestrels were nesting within the Chinchero ruins, and I had to observe these beautiful falcons for a little while. I had brought the zoom, after all – best it had some use on this fundamentally landscape-oriented adventure.

After Chinchero, we made for the bizarre terraces of Moray. These curious laddered circles carved into the earth are part of a potentially enormous complex that has yet to be fully uncovered. They were, I believe, a kind of pre-Columbian hothouse, an intricate agricultural system where each layer had a separate microclimate to the one immediately above, and could therefore be used to grow a large variety of crops. You can tell the difference for yourself just moving up and down the hillside, where the temperature rises and falls quite noticeably.

I’d seen the terraces of Moray countless times on GetYourGuide and various colourful billboards around Cusco city, but something I hadn’t appreciated were the tiny steps built into the walls, allowing passage from the lowest level right the way up to the top. I had always assumed people just climbed up and down – but then, the average Peruvian is very short, with men reaching a general maximum of 5’6”. I’d feel like a giant for the first time in my life if it weren’t for all these gangling Americans and German tourists spoiling my fun.

Tragically, perhaps that’s why my dating apps have really exploded out here. Maybe there really is something to be said for being 5’7” in a country where that isn’t considered short. Shallow, humbling, but potentially enlightening.

From Moray, we made a short hop through the town of Maras to the nearby salt mines upon which Maras’ fortunes were built. About 3,500 square basins of crystallised salt protrude from the mountainside, supplied by a saltwater stream that bubbles up from the rocks higher up. There were once five thousand of these salt wells, but erosion and regular earthquakes have destroyed many of them over the years, and the locals are (understandably) very protective of further exploration of what has been their primary source of income for potentially hundreds of years.

We’re still not quite out of the rainy season, so the mines aren’t in full working order just yet – that comes in July – but there were still a few local men toiling under the sun, shifting great sacks full of salt and restoring some of the dried-up salt wells.

After a buffet lunch in Urubamba, the driver took us to our last stop of the tour: Ollantaytambo, the usual staging post for travelers making for the Inca trail to Machu Picchu (or taking the easier route by train). Ollantaytambo sits between two formidable cliffs, into which have been built a number of watchtowers, fortresses and storehouses, with the aim of protecting this vital Inca town in the heart of the Sacred Valley.

That’s not the only thing they carved into the mountainside either. Under the right light, it’s possibly to make out the unmistakable profile of a face between the two military buildings on the mountain’s western face. It’s possible that the design is a mistake of nature, but from the way the rock is worn around the base of what would be its nose – and it is an extremely Peruvian nose – it’s a lot more likely it was carved out of the rock by the ancient settlers of the Sacred Valley, in imitation of an apu, an Andean spirit or mountain god.

Quite how they achieved this Rushmore-esque feat hundreds of years ago on a gradient that would make Philippe Petit blanch is beyond my ability to understand – but I can’t help but admire those ancient Andean stonemasons. It almost makes the nearby Skylodge suites hanging from the mountainside seem like a joke – almost.

Well, it’s 9am and I’ve had breakfast. I guess I should go out and do some exploring. I’m taking it easy today before trekking up to the Inti Punku (the Sun Gate) tomorrow in what will be my final adventure here in Peru, as was always the plan.

It helps that it’s cloudy. On a sunnier day, I might feel I was wasting the opportunity for some serious mountain-gazing. But after more than two weeks of constant activity (I really have been doing something adventurous every single day), I think I can justify a relaxed itinerary just this once. BB x