The journey from Denver, Colorado to Punta Arenas, on the most southerly point of Chile, where I was to meet our research aircraft, the DC8, takes about 30 hours. My colleague, Aga, was flying the first half of ATom-4, our final jaunt around the world measuring the properties of the remote atmosphere, sampling over the central Pacific from the Arctic, down to New Zealand and across the Southern Ocean to the bottom of South America. I would take over from here to cover Antarctica, up the Atlantic to the Arctic, and back to base in California.
From Denver as far as Santiago feels like fairly standard travel, but from Santiago south things get interesting. The plane is small, but very full. Apart from a motely collection of atmospheric scientists who had amassed from around the world in Santiago, and a handful of adventurous backpackers, the passengers are mostly people from various towns and cities dotted across Patagonia, or those coming from the capital to visit family there.
I was in a middle seat between two brothers from Punta Arenas, both university students. My Spanish is a little rusty, and I always struggle with Chilean Spanish – the rapid delivery and lack of care if the odd consonant or whole syllable gets left out in the excitement of delivery. Nevertheless they were wonderfully patient with me and we passed the long flight with broken conversation. I was eager to know more about day to day life in this small, remote town, and the brothers were keen to impress on me how good life is there. They spoke of how safe it was, and how well-funded the education system is and the opportunities they have for training and studies, and how favorably the quality of life is compared to being in a big city. Periodically they would point out different mountains we passed, telling me their names, and how they were formed. We stopped in the small town of Puerto Mott, for some passengers to get on or off. It looked incredibly beautiful with green fields, a huge lake, and dramatic volcanic mountains behind. We flew the last leg, south from Puerto Mott to Punta Arenas in the gathering dusk, which made the already stunning mountain views even more breathtaking. The three of us regularly changed seats to take in the vistas.
The next morning, as I always do at the hotel we use in Punta, I pushed the desk up against the window, and worked looking out across the ever-changing Straits of Magellan. Peal dolphins swam by periodically and the mountains in the distance peeked sporadically through the clouds. There are a number of places and situations in the world I could call my ‘happy place’, this is for sure one of them. Mid-afternoon I went for a walk along the beach. I recognized a figure walking towards me, a colleague from Germany who’d arrived just a few hours ago and who I’d not seen since the last set of flights back in October. As we walked and chatted I was struck by how we’d formed close friendships amongst those of us who’d flown together on these ATom missions over the last few years, and how we’d really gotten to know each other and care about each other. We’d experience incredible things together, and moments of crisis together, and extreme jet-lag together, and it had brought us close in that way that only shared work, experience and goals really can.
That evening back at the hotel, the DC-8 was just taking off from New Zealand to arrive here in the early hours of the morning. I logged onto x-chat, the service we use to text chat between the plane and the ground. Aga was experiencing difficulties with one of our instruments. The flow in one of the five channels was fluctuating more than we would like, and so together we trouble-shooted the cause and a solution. At the same time, one of my sisters back in the UK messaged me on whats-app. She was in the early stages of labor with her second child and, since it was the middle of the night there, and I was awake anyway, we texted back and forth a bit for company while she let her husband catch an extra hour of sleep. Suddenly the world felt so small, that I could be sitting in this hotel at the end of South America, listening to the waves crashing and wind howling outside with that relentless force particular to these Southern high latitudes, and at the same time chatting with my sister in the UK and my colleague somewhere up above New Zealand.
We had a couple of days between the arrival of the DC8 from New Zealand and our flight out over Antarctica, during which Aga and I worked on some maintenance and fixing minor issues with our instruments on the plane. Knowing this would be the last time we’d work together like this, cramped into that tiny place between our instrument rack and the seats in front, getting into our well-practiced rhythm of passing each other tools, using four-hands to access tricky parts of the set-up, communicating easily with few words – I felt a little pre-nostalgia. When I departed on the DC8 and Aga set off home to Vienna, who knows when we would work so closely together again.
With the weather and the isolation, there’s not a whole lot one can do in a few free hours in Punta Arenas. Particularly on the third of fourth visit. But there are fabulous views and amazing restaurants to enjoy when the work is done. There’s this one restaurant on the top of the hill that a few of us went together on the last night before many of the first-half-ers left. It’s so pretty inside, cozy and traditional, and specializes in local lamb and sea-food. We has a wonderful meal, all sampling each-other’s dishes, chatting with our waitress who was so happy to tell us all about the local specialities and traditions. Amid the Spanish certain Germanic words and food stood out on the menu, particularly using the word “Kuchen” for cakes. The taxi driver who’d brought us from the hotel has told us about how this region had advertised in European newspapers for people to come and farm the land, even offering them free land to entice them over. And the bakeries bore signs of this in cooking traditions from places like Germany and the former Yugoslavia.
In contrast to the cozy, warm sanctuary of the restaurant, walking back to the hotel the “roaring forties” (even though we’re technically at 53 South, the winds here are the same ferocious beasts as those that spin around between 40 and 50 south, gathering speed and intensity with little land-mass to slow their progress) threw their might at us.
We saw in real life that classic post-card image of a woman clinging to a lamppost so as not to be blown away by the wind, and ran half the way back with freezing rain hitting us horizontally in the face. Back at the hotel I went early to bed, excited for the next day’s research flight, when I would see Antarctica for the first time!
