City Observations

Another post for The Yale Globalist.

Running and walking are terrific ways to get to know a place. The ground-level approach allows for the assimilation of sights and sounds into one’s impression of a city or region. I’ve had a few unique running-based experiences these past two or so weeks that stood out and I thought I'd share two of them.

Tucumán, Argentina. Tucumán, located in northwestern Argentina, is one of the country’s more forlorn provinces. Sure, the statistics will tell you as much — per capita GDP, unemployment, blah, blah, blah. But so does an experience I had while running the perimeter of the central park of the province’s eponymous capital.

Runners, at least the ones I know, are renowned for peeing in public places — after all, nature is not a call one lets go unanswered. To their credit, however, they generally take pride in discreetness. But the runners from Tucumán, or at least one runner from Tucumán, are in an entirely different league when it comes to audacity for public urination.

While running one evening, another male runner in front of me abruptly stopped, directed himself towards a tree adjacent the sidewalk, dropped trow, lost some water weight, and returned to his workout without so much a glance at the passing rush-hour traffic on one of the heaviest used thoroughfares in Argentina’s fifth biggest city. From the reaction, or lack thereof, of perambulating passers-by, using public parks as a very public toilet is just as normal as the odor that wafts from Tucumán’s public waterways (perhaps not unrelated), the litter on the street, or the countless poor who traverse the city in horse-drawn carts scavenging for recyclables.

Fiambalá, Argentina. Fiambalá is ground zero for organizing this little mountain-measuring excursion into the mountains. It’s a modest pueblito at “the end of the world,” as its residents like to say. It feels the part. Surrounded by desert and near-constantly assailed by howling, sand-laden winds, Fiambalá nonetheless manages to take advantage of its location.

There are two attractions: hot springs and the Andean cordillera. I was there for the latter, but one night I ventured on a run to the former. After managing just a few kilometers beyond the town limits I was stopped in my tracks by the visually arresting clarity of the night sky. When in this part of the world last (two years ago) I made a similar observation in my journal — it is rather hard not to notice. Neither has this escaped the attention of the international astronomical community, which has sited the highest density of high-performance telescopes in the world in the Chilean-Argentinean altiplano region which Fiambalá abuts.

Looking into the sky, I practically felt my own eyes were telescopes. It was all there. The celestial dust of galaxy smeared from horizon to horizon in one shimmering longitudinal stripe, a fallow-yellow crescent moon, and a twinkling firmament stars everywhere else. When the night sky is this clear, this unadulterated, it's the best show there is.

As fortune had it, the night sky was not the only entertainment on the evening. After reaching the hot springs I took a break to enjoy the lesser twinkling cluster of lights of Fiambalá in the valley below, and of course the greater twinkling mass of lights above. That's when the guardrails on the side of the road started shaking. Earthquake!

Aftershocks still echo in this part of the Andes from the catastrophic 8.8 Chilean earthquake of late February. Whether this comparatively quaint 5.3 qualifies as such I am unsure, but it was a fun ride and an impressive second act to the sublime display of natural beauty and power to which I was fortunate to bear witness. Fiambalá may seem to be the end of the human world, but it is also one of the final, increasingly scarce frontiers to the truly natural world.

What's Going On

Another post for The Yale Globalist.

This is the obligatory, "who am I, what am I doing, and where am I doing it" post. I’ll attack it sequentially. The first is easy. I’m a rising junior in Branford who enjoys studying public policy. But that doesn’t mean I’m without “avocational academic interests.” In fact, this summer is all about avocational academic interests — specifically, a field of geophysics called geodesy (study of measurement of the earth), and more specifically, a field of geodesy called hypsometry (study of altitude).

In general, hypsometry is an antiquated field of study, if one can even call it a field of study in the first place. Remote sensing has done to altitude-measuring mountaineering expeditions what video did to the radio star. But there are exceptions here and there. Mountains that indicate tectonic change, for instance, are of particular interest to geologists, and mountains that represent superlatives, such as Everest, capture the public’s attention. Both require a degree of precision that remote sensing cannot offer.

The summer project that brings me to South America falls more into the latter category; I am working with a mountain of superlatives. Ojos del Salado is the second highest mountain in the world outside the Central Asia cordillera and the highest volcano in the world. It is also in an extremely remote region of the world — the northern Argentine-Chilean border — and has been climbed by very few people and been measured by even less. I am in South America to try to measure it.

There is a primary and secondary goal. Primary: Ojos del Salado has two summits of approximately equal altitude and no one knows which is taller. So, using rather precise GPS units (precision<1 cm) that are worth about as much as I am, myself and my climbing partner will try to get to the top of both of Ojos’ summits and record data that can definitively determine the “true”summit.

Secondary: Using altitude data from Ojos’ “true” summit, we’ll compare and corroborate it with data from Aconcagua and Monte Pissis, ostensibly the highest and third highest mountains on the continent, respectively. Through the twentieth century and up until the advent of the GPS, there was a protracted kerfuffle among mountaineers and geodesists concerning the order of the three highest peaks of South America. While that debate has effectively been settled (the accepted order, from first to third, is Aconcagua, Ojos del Salado, and Monte Pissis) it doesn’t hurt to throw additional data of nearly incontrovertible quality at the matter.

Obviously, though, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with this whole endeavor (for one, the weather’s awful — it’s winter in the Southern Hemisphere). And in fact, something already has gone quite wrong: a major bureaucratic obstacle from the Argentine Federal Police that has set everything back four weeks. So if you see my posts from locations that are not northwestern Argentina, it’s because I’m piddling around, killing time, and visiting friends before getting back to work. Fortunately, there are worse parts of the world to be “stuck” in!

The Beautiful Game

I'm back in South America and I'm back to blogging. This time not for me, but for The Yale Globalist, a campus magazine. But nonetheless I thought I'd throw a few of my posts up here before they get cut down to size and style...

Hard as it may be to believe, when I found myself watching Argentina’s World Cup squad battle Nigeria's on a flickery TV screen 200 km away from the closest permanent human settlement, 4,000 meters/13,000 feet above sea level, and ensconced between towering snow-capped Andean volcanoes that rank as the highest in the world, it was part of my summer research. Seriously! Admittedly, to fully explain the latter will take a while, so for now I will focus on the former — Argentina, the World Cup, and association football.

Argentina won, 1-0. Argentina also deserved to win. They played better. To those not fully initiated in the ways of the world’s sport (which included me until two years ago) these last two sentences might seem like an odd, redundant thing to say: Of course the team with more goals deserves to win, that’s why you keep track of them in the first place! In football, however, this is not necessarily so.

Football is the most arts-like of sports. Quality of play is adjudicated as much, if not more, by the gut than by the scoreline. After watching a match, deep down, you know which was the better team, regardless of how many goals they scored. How this happens, goodness knows. The "gut" is an incredible organ. But it happens, and at a football match's conclusion you walk away with closure and an opinion. Uniquely, though, relative to other sports, there is a dearth of statistics to confirm and substantiate what your gut clearly knows to be.

Of course, there are goals — a rather important statistic indeed — but they come sparingly in football. So while goals often correspond to the quality of play and indicate the truly superior team, surprisingly frequently they do not. There are ties. Or a team, utterly dominated for 89 of a match's 90 minutes, benefits from a singular error and wins 1-0. Usually in other sports to analyze these sorts of phenomena, onlookers would cite a battery of statistics to show just how "lucky" the 1-0 winner was, or to indicate the "better" of two tied teams. But try as the Nate Silvers of the world might, it is exceedingly difficult to condense a football match into a pithy few meaningful numbers. (Not coincidentally, in fantasy sports — statistics-driven online sports competitions — football has all the popularity of spinach.)

The sport’s resistance to statistical simplification stems from its fluid nature. The clock runs continuously, even through injuries, and the ball is in motion for almost all that time. Thus, football cannot be conveniently compartmentalized into possession, as with basketball, or individual plays, as with baseball or American football. So while you can often partly determine the worth of strikers (designated offensive players) by their goal tallies, how can you do so for defensive midfielders or full-backs or even teams as a whole? Empirically — statistically — you cannot.

As such, in the absence of statistics, football aficionados are left to appraise the on-field product as Roger Ebert does movies or Robert Parker does wine. Football journalists, for example, become more critics than dispassionate reciters of numerical fact. To those accustomed to baseball or basketball recaps — essentially an obligatory litany of statistics rendered readable by an occasional anecdote — the football recaps in The Guardian or the Mirror might seem airy and ungrounded, but it’s difficult to write a grounded 500 words when spectation yields only ineffable “feels” of offensive or defensive energy and changes in momentum.

The lexicon of this journalistic genre is telling. Andrés Iniesta and Xavi Hernández, the supremely talented Spanish national team midfielders, seem to be called “maestros” more often than their legal names. Ingenious passes are “inspired.” Football itself is “the beautiful game.” Though inconspicuous and largely unintentional, the sport’s vocabulary, delicate in its effort to describe the constant stream of on-field creativity that makes football football, betrays the sport’s art-like aspect.

Of course sports fans the world over still like a good old number or two. Enter: player ratings, an epitomizing example of football’s subjectivity, of trying to quantify the unquantifiable. Ebert gives movies up to four stars; Parker gives wines a number between 50 and 100; football journalists give all 22 players a 1-10 rating after their matches for passing creativity, work ethic, and finishing ability. It's essentially a hybrid between a box score and a critical review.

All told, football inspires an almost unsports-like appreciation of the sport. A loyalty exists to the beauty of the game — to the art of the game — that supersedes club and even national identity. Which leads me back to my rather unusual World Cup-viewing location.

I watched Argentina’s World Cup match at Las Grutas, a snowbound Argentinean national police outpost sited on a desolate mountain pass leading to Chile and the Pacific, while acclimatizing for an alpine science expedition. Watching the match with me were Domingo and Juan, the caretakers of Las Grutas’ three weather-worn concrete Quonset huts.

Domingo and Juan are Argentines, of course. So I floated a hypothetical their way. What if Argentina were not to be victorious this World Cup? Who, then, would you prefer to win?

They exchanged a guilty look, understandable considering their answer. Brazil.

Blasphemy! Argentina and Brazil, of course, are like Lex Luthor and Clark Kent or chocolate and vanilla: rivals of the highest order. But nonetheless their answer rings honestly. First, there is South American fraternity; a sort of epiphenomenal pride in having one of the continent’s own claim a world’s prize. But more significantly their admission speaks to a fidelity to football as a sport.

In the estimation of the Argentines, the Brazilian samba superstars of 2010 play brilliantly and beautifully. That even an Argentine can admit this of their greatest foe — of the country, fittingly, that first gave the world the joga bonito style in the ’50s — is proof positive that football is the beautiful game and, partly by consequence, the world’s game.

Buffalo, Chile

My trip to the Islas Juan Fernández began and ended in the port Chilean city of Valparaíso (pictured). Situated on the coast a mere 120 kilometers/75 miles from Santiago, Valparaíso (and its sister city of Viña del Mar) seems to have shed what could have easily been a little-brother, port-city-for-Santiago identity. (Being defined in relation to another city — e.g., Tianjin, China's sixth largest metropolitan area in its own right, is usually related as "Beijing's port city" — is an unfortunate fate for any city.) In fact, I submit that Valparaíso has not only held its own but even surpassed Santiago, at least in appeal to travelers.

(Photo credit: TripAdvisor.com.)

Santiago is bland, smogy, sprawly, and car-centric. Valparaíso is the antithesis to each of those characteristics and much the better for it. Staking its beginnings as a sea port — sailors would call it Little San Francisco — Valparaíso's fortunes as Chile's entrepôt historically waxed and waned with global trade. While the city has since diversified, a strong connection to its roots remains. Walking the streets closest to the seawall and still-active port, a stevedoring, On the Waterfront ethos persists. The sidewalks and shop façades are polished to dark, gritty shades of brown and black by generations of use and a maritime climate of rain and drizzle (Valparaíso's latitude, 33°, about the same as Los Angeles's, belies a more temperate range of temperatures). On the streets, still bustling with pedestrians and vehicles alike, people make eye contact and smile, but there's a conservative, blue-collar nature to interaction and appearance. Flamboyance is not to be found.

But as I said, Valparaíso has also expanded beyond its historic livelihood and culture, and this is abundantly evident when you move beyond the hard-scrabble sea-level streets. The city is laid across an amphitheater of hills all focusing towards the half-moon bay that doubles as its port (pictured). Hilly urban landscapes always seem to engender charm and character — monotony of cityscape, by topographic fact, cannot exist.

Even the access points to the hills are charming and characterful. For many hill-based neighborhoods, the quickest and certainly most effortless mode of transport is funicular. I wasn't familiar with the word until visiting Valparaíso, but funiculars are anachronistic contraptions perhaps best described as elevators on rails. They transport the pedestrian commuter from the bottom of a steep incline or cliff face to the top, saving the passenger from a sweaty, lactic acid-inducing climb at the expense of pocket change.

(Pictured: Valparaíso boasts of 15 funiculars, the first constructed in 1883. The rickety, weathered wooden superstructure and delicate click-click-click of ascension make you wonder if anything has changed since then. As another blogger writes, "somehow [funiculars] get you there; as with the making of sausage, you'll enjoy the product more if you don't ask too many questions about how it's done." Photo credit: Samuelle Barron.)

Once above, you enter a wonderful world of serpentine streets and alleyways, houses teetering on precipices just barely staying on gravity's good side, and walls that look back at you (all pictured below). Walking along the winding cobblestone streets, aromas waft out of cheerful cafés and restaurants tucked in the most inconceivable nooks and clotheslined garments above you flap in the breeze. Almost all residents get around by their own two feet — there's simply not enough space for vehicles and expansive streets — and houses are haphazardly stacked on top of or against each other creating a most curious smorgasbord of architecture replete with non-ninety degree angles. The city has ensured that many of the most scenic vistas are not consumed by private real estate but instead, through a handful of twisty, airy public promenades, belong to all, allowing you to take in the view of the port below and the polychromatic medley of houses on the next hill over. In short, the hills overlooking Valparaíso's port combine for a lovely if seemingly unintentional aesthetic.

Per the downright weird title of this post, I relate this juxtaposition of hillside bohemia and blue-collar heritage to Buffalo. Buffalo, New York. Such an unlikely comparison is a compliment to Buffalo, and it is an unlikely comparison. I've never visited Buffalo, but I have read this New York magazine article subtitled "What could possibly make someone want to leave New York and move to Buffalo?" The answer: Cheap living and increasingly high quality of life. Buffalo is experiencing a renaissance partly fueled by hipsters, young professionals, and a thriving artistic scene — a phenomenon occurring to differing degrees in a handful of rust-belt cities. I admit Buffalo is no Valparaíso but there seem to be parallels in the cities' histories, and Valparaíso certainly gives faded urbanity the world over, Buffalo included, a model for what can be.

(Pictured: "A wonderful world of serpentine streets and alleyways.")




(Pictured: "Houses teetering on precipices just barely staying on gravity's good side." Photo credit: Bluemoon Interactive.)


(Pictured: "Walls that look back at you.")


(Pictured: Despite Santiago's capital status, the National Congress convenes in Valparaíso in this building. Its architecture is almost as brutal as the regime of the man who had it built, Augusto Pinochet. Photo credit: Kelsey Gilmore.)


(Pictured: The Chilean armada, homeported in Valparaíso.)






(Pictured: Zooming in recommended for this photo. Photo credit: Geoff Hill.)

Despite the above written and photographic paean to Valparaíso's charm and character, I was not living in the city. Instead, I was residing in Viña del Mar, its glitzier, ritzier, more superficial sister city (they are connected by a convenient new light-rail line). I had met one Valentina Contreras (pictured), a PhD psychology candidate at a Valparaíso university, while in Mendoza, Argentina. We kept in touch through the intervening months and were now sharing evening meals of avocado, goat cheese, and fresh bread over games of cards in her Viña del Mar flat, which provided a wonderful launching and receiving point for each day's exploration.

If Valparaíso is Little San Francisco, Viña del Mar is Little Monaco. White sand beaches greet incoming ocean swells and wealthy, retired couples stroll the beachside esplanade as they take a break from rolling the dice at the city's posh casino. Wealth and Viña go hand in hand, but there is also a lot of middle-class and student housing — overflow for Valparaíso. As an element of "Valparaíso overflow" I can fully attest that Viña del Mar did a swell job of taking me in and ensured that my experience Chile's premier set of sister cities was a good one.

Some closing shots of the Valparaíso/Viña experience:

(Pictured: This castle gracing Viña's coast has historical significance, but I neglected to scribble in my notes what.)


(Pictured: I made acquaintance with this globetrotting Québécois family at the hostel in Buenos Aires. So imagine my surprise when, two months later, we stumbled upon each other in the Valparaíso bus terminal! Photo credit: The Rousseau family.)

Isla Robinson Crusoe

Part three of a three-part series about the islands and my time there, if a bit belated.

This blog has frequently noted how the pace of life is different in South America. Sneaking peeks at one's watch is less frequent and to-do lists are less likely to be found among the detritus of a cluttered desk — indeed, the per capita occurrence of cluttered desks is probably markedly less in South America than in the U.S.

At this point I will not venture to valorize, but just point out that this is different and there are undeniable benefits and drawbacks to the South American style. The morning of my last day on Isla Robinson Crusoe brought with it a perfect example, at least to the productivity-paradigmed American mind, of a drawback of the cavalier approach to life down here.

I had spent my time on the island based out of a wonderfully quaint hostería/B&B just off Juan Fernández's central plaza with my newfound companions from the Rancagua. Over our penultimate dinner, we plotted to embark on a hike to the wild reaches of the ecologically diverse, topographically spectacular island that we had the good fortune to be on. Constituent to our plan was hiring a lobster fisherman to take us to the far western extreme of island (see map) — an hour-long boat ride for us and a pit stop en route to the lobster grounds for him — thus allowing us to take our merry time hiking the 14 kilometers back to town. We made the necessary arrangements: a 6 a.m. departure, US$80 to be split among us. The only apparent obstacle remaining, formidable as it might be, was waking up the next morning.

(Photo credit: Moon travel guides.)

We largely triumphed. One by one, with disheveled hair, rime-rimmed eyes, and sleep-impaired mental faculties, we stumbled out of our respective rooms and down to the municipal dock. Despite our appearance, though, we were ready. As you may have surmised from the lede of this entry, however, our lobsterman friend was not.

(Photo: Felipe contending with early o'clock. Photo credit: Andrea Pescosolido.)

We waited. Occasionally one of us would run back to the B&B to trade an item out of his backpack, or we'd alternate between restlessly paging through a book, inattentively gazing out to sea, and strolling back and forth (pictured), but generally a feeling of annoyance predominated — annoyance seasoned with impatient fidgeting. We had become very excited talking about this hike the previous night, and just like that, with a variable we had not counted on variating, all was undone. As minutes wore by and lingering hope beget full-bore frustration, we began to acknowledge our lobsterman's truancy as a matter of fact.

(Photo credit: Andrea Pescosolido.)

What a let-down. We started to consider alternative agendas for our day, but they all felt lacking and anticlimactic. As Ambrose Bierce said, happiness is the "agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another." Sage words from a sagacious satirist, but in this instance the perverse pleasure of schadenfreude had been inverted. We were experiencing the "disagreeable sensation arising from contemplating the gratification of another" activity — an activity that had been all too close, at least in our minds, to reality.

Then, at 7:30 a.m., an hour and a half tardy, our lobsterman showed. The excitement lasted only a few minutes, unfortunately. Instead of strolling onto the dock with a sea-faring bluster and fuel for the day's journey, he came to negotiate: the price had doubled; US$160 to be split amongst us. Needless to say we were outraged.

In retrospect this is interesting for two reasons. First, paying US$160 for a water taxi in Sitka would barely get you out of the harbor. It's still an incredibly cheap fare. But all of us standing on that dock had switched to the inevitable, perhaps parsimonious, mentality of South America, one where we'd scoff at someone trying to sell us a US$0.35 empanada because we knew if we'd nose around enough one could be had for US$0.25.

Second, it's amazing, even writing this over a year from the fact, that he made nary a mention of his tardiness; the thought simply did not occur to him. We had hauled our bodies out of bed to greet the lovely smile of dawn as it peered over the horizon, my friends even accomplishing the feat at the tail end of an alcoholic daze from the previous night, and the man who had insisted on such an early time of departure was not only AWOL for an hour and half, but so were his excuses.

I suspect that the real explanation lies in the pockets of chronological blurriness that seem to encompass every small town in the world. In Haines, Alaska, a town quite close to my heart, there is "time time" and there is "Haines time." Haines time is "time time" minus 15 minutes to a half hour, depending on the day of the week. When trying to organize ultimate games there, I'd always fret when no one would show on a Sunday afternoon five or ten minutes after the theoretical start of a pick-up game, yet 45 minutes later we'd have a rollicking game of five-on-five complete with subs and spectators. Juan Fernández is fivefold smaller than Haines, ergo 15-30 minutes multiplied by five is — voilà! — 75-150 minutes. Our guy was right on time. It's just that we had not set our watches for IRCST — Isla Robinson Crusoe Standard Time.

Now that our water taxi had anted past what our collective inner miser was willing to pay, our hand was forced. We needed to find an alternate pursuit for the day. We were crestfallen but nonetheless decided to venture out on the trail anyway, even if we likely would not have time to reach the airfield and the far end of the island. By 9:30 we were hiking.

I have only seen snippets of the BBC's Planet Earth, but the parts I have seen lived up to the hype in every way. The cinematography captured the magic of nature in way you just cannot believe, and David Attenborough's engaging, congenial narration adds much to the images (for some reason a British accent adds a wonderful little something to nature documentaries that no degree of celebrity narration or gravely-voiced gravitas can touch). But I cannot help but think that the documentary series is incomplete without a mention of Isla Robinson Crusoe. The island is really one of the most remarkable places I have ever seen.



(Photo: Sir David and a friend. Photo credit: The Guardian.)

It is as if Gaia came down and painted swaths of the island as different habitats, each zone of ecosystem emanating in concentric rings from the town, and each zone of ecosystem becoming increasingly desiccated and desertified. Divine intervention or not, in a matter of 15 kilometers the island transforms from a temperate rainforest that, in all honesty, might have my beloved Tongass outdone for moisture per square meter, to a barren skeleton of volcanic terrain in which not even the most hardy plant can interrupt the bleak yellow of sun-scorched earth.

In the stead of Mr. Attenborough, allow me to narrate the journey.

We begin with the rugged, wind-worn coast, houses pixelated along the rocky beach like a Georges Seurat painting. So often the clouds that accompany the wind make for a ceiling of visibility that cloaks and conceals the mysterious, mountainous interior of the island. These clouds create island's next ecosystem, a cloud forest. As if straight from China, a continuum of moisture spans the sky to earth, from water-laden wisps of mist to a multitude of droplets suspended by the green grace of ferns. Just about the only actor missing from the scene would have been a bamboo-chomping panda.

(Photo: Isla Robinson Crusoe cloud forest, minus panda. Photo credit: leonardo71.)

It comes as no surprise, then, that the thick, multi-layered canopy of the forest affords no vista for the humble hiker. The same was true for Alexander Selkirk, the real-life castaway who spent four years marooned on Isla Robinson Crusoe and who served as the basis for Daniel Defoe's famous novel. As legend has it, he made a daily trek from his cave at sea level through the cloud forests to ridgeline, a 540 meter/1,770 foot climb, to gain vantage of the surrounding seas and perhaps — hopefully — a topsail or mast to which he could signal with the smoke from a ready-made bonfire. It is no wonder Selkirk chose the col he did (now named Mirador Selkirk, or the Selkirk Lookout). The view from the ridge was breathtaking.

(Photo: The ridge that leads to Cerro El Yunque, the island's highest point, as seen from Mirador Selkirk. As you can see, when not socked in, the view is incredible. Photo credit: Gerhard Hüdepohl.)

After Mirador Selkirk, vegetation thinned and the landscape gradually turned from a rich green to a flaxen yellow. Mirroring this botanic transformation was a meteorological transformation: As the vegetation disappeared on the ground, so did the clouds in the sky above. I cannot for the life me figure out why this is. The entire island looks a great white shark's lower jaw, with mountains roaring right out of the ocean. And it's not as if certain mountains have cloud- and moisture-magnetizing properties and certain mountains do not. So, a topographical explanation seems unlikely given that the whole island is more or less topographically constant.

(Photo: Looking down the peninsula of the island as the land turns from a dynamic green to a lonely beige.)

I suppose it's just one of the island's many mysteries. As our party descended down switchbacks from the rainforest and moved farther out the peninsula along steep slopes covered in long grazing grasses, each of us began to fatigue a little and regressed to our most comfortable pace. Eventually we lost sight of one another as the gnarly topography prevented most any direct viewline up and down the peninsula. After a few more hours of walking, despite not being able to see my progress towards the tip of the peninsula, I developed a hunch that I was almost there. I abandoned my backpack, took a water bottle in one hand and my camera in the other, switched from sandals to tennis shoes, and ran with a weird dogged determination to make it to the tip of the island. Finally, after a few more kilometers I came over one last bluff and the black asphalt of the airstrip spread out below me with its coterie of shacks and buildings (pictured). At this point, the ground was cracked open by the heat and entirely bereft of any plants. It could've doubled for the Puna if not for the tarmac and the soothing oceanic indigo surrounding me on three sides.

I made a quick turnaround. Having walked and jogged to the tip of the island for purposes more of personal satisfaction than sightseeing, time was too far into the afternoon for my liking. (The ship was departing that evening and I wanted to return to town to get on board.) As I started back, despite my intentions for a swift return trip, my curiosity was piqued by a low, subwoofer-esque rumble coming from below the cliffs on the side of the trail. Well, I thought, I wasn't in that much of a hurry.

A little farther back the trail the cliffs yielded to a steep scree slope and I skied down towards the provenance of these odd sounds, cutting haphazard turns in the drifts of pumice. Once at the bottom the origin of the sounds was revealed: hundreds and hundreds of fur seals sprawled across the rocks sounding like an a capella concert gone dreadfully wrong. There was rusted, chain-link fence with signs warning against intrusive approach, so I stopped at the perimeter and snapped a quick video.

Seals are grouchy, awkward creatures to watch out of water and showed little regard for my presence. This is a good sign considering this species' history. The Juan Fernández Fur Seal, now endemic to the islands, was nearly hunted to extinction in the early twentieth century and for a time the species was thought to be extinct until a small population was rediscovered in the Islas Juan Fernández. Now protected, their population has rebounded to over 10,000 but the seals are still considered vulnerable due to their small range and consequent genetic bottleneck.

I was very much glad I took the unplanned detour, and reinvigorated by the fur seal snorts and guffaws I made good time back the trail until coming across my cached backpack. With a few extra pounds on my back, I again slowed down to a trot and pushed up and over Mirador Selkirk and back to the town before 8 in the evening, catching up with other members of the group along the way.

(Photo: Feral goats, an environmental menace to the islands since the days of Alexander Selkirk, ravage native vegetation and contribute to soil erosion problems. In an effort to extirpate the population on the islands, Chilean park officials have constructed several goat-proof fences across the island's harsh contours, splitting the goats into distinct populations, which then allows for hunters to eliminate them quadrant by quadrant. So far, however, the scheme has not worked.)



(Photo: While I took in the view at Mirador Selkirk, 540 meters above sea level, the most curious thing happened: this intrepid little canine companion emerged from the dense foliage and followed me all the way to the tip of the island and back, disappearing just as abruptly once we got within a kilometer of Juan Fernández. I had no food to offer as incentive, he apparently was just in the mood for some 28 kilometers of exercise. I definitely enjoyed his faithful company.)

After a quick shower and food I decided to burn a few hours at the island's only Internet café before the Rancagua's departure, now delayed until midnight. En route I encountered two suited, carefully coiffed, name-tagged young men: Mormon missionaries, or Elders as they're called within the church. I can't say I was surprised. It seems that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, when deciding where to allocate their agents of spiritual persuasion, disproportionately target isolated lands and islands. The 10 countries with the highest per capita prevalence of Latter-Day Saints are Tonga, Samoa, American Samoa, Niue, Kiribati, Tahiti, Cook Islands, Marshall Islands, Chile, and Palau, in that order. It is as if church leaders want to see quantifiable success from their religious outreach efforts, and remote lands and islands are the perfect laboratories in which to operate. They're small and largely removed from outside influence, and if you add an extra ingredient to such a country's religious composition you can quickly and clearly see the results.

Isla Robinson Crusoe was no exception. According to locals I spoke with, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of islanders were members of the church. In this instance it was obvious why: the two missionaries were charismatic and fun to talk with. But missionaries are missionaries and they’re dedicating two years of their life to a mission for a reason. So as pleasant as it was to speak with two fellow Americans in English, there was a slight uneasiness to the conversation as all three of us knew where it must inevitably turn. And turn the conversation did. After exhausting the standard biographical questions there was a slight yet conspicuous pause and then one of the missionaries made the ask.

“Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?”

Or something to that effect (it’s been a while). With just a few hours left on the island I certainly was not ready to get mired in a religious discussion, so after a platitude-laden explanation of my religious beliefs I made an escape to the Internet café and ultimately the B&B.

We boarded the Rancagua that night, shuttled to the boat by a fleet of dories and zodiacs, then climbing a collapsible staircase hung over the side of the vessel (pictured). There was much commotion on the docks — it seemed as if half the town was getting on the boat. In the case of locals between the ages of 14 and 18, the entire town was sailing away. Education is only provided through eighth grade on the island, so it becomes an annual rite for the town's teenagers to be shipped off, literally, to Valparaíso or Santiago for secondary school. After the controlled pandemonium ran its course the Rancagua set course for the mainland and steamed away from the amazing little island that seemingly had it all: Isla Robinson Crusoe.

Some closing shots of Isla Robinson Crusoe and the voyage back to Valparaíso:


(Photo: Isla Robinson Crusoe’s library is quite extraordinary for a little island of 500 people in the Pacific. The library appears to be a labor of love for the kindly old man who holds court over the circulation desk and assists the occasional visitor, as he did me, noting my accent and directing me to the English-language section of books and periodicals. I checked out an Andy Warhol biography and three English-language National Geographics from the 1970s, one of which featured a cover story on Southeast Alaska and quoted several individuals I knew! Photo credit: Chilean Library Network.)


(Photo: These three crew members agreed to a photo just before digging into a hot plate of rice and ham...generously drizzled with mayonnaise. Although unpalatable to me, imagination is the limit for mayonnaise as a condiment in Chile and Argentina, as evidenced in this photo.)


(Photo: Look like a familiar scene, Southeast Alaskans? This scene on the aft deck was kindly made possible by peaceable, majestic seas and a smiling blue sky. Neptune and his nausea-inducing oceanic fury had apparently taken a chill pill in the intervening two days after the first leg of our voyage.)


(Photo: In spite of calm seas, the return trip was not necessarily comfortable for all — there was an unfortunate dearth of bunks in the cargo hold [the men's assigned quarters] thus necessitating improvised sleeping arrangements.)


(Photo: Sunset at sea.)