Attack of the Anteaters?

I’ve always found it odd that athletic teams at the Irvine campus of the University of California go by the nickname “Anteaters.” It’s even stranger than the fact the teams at the University’s Santa Barbara campus go by the nickname “Gauchos,” even though colonial California’s horsemen went by the Mexican term vaquero (“buckaroo” is a likely corruption of the Spanish original).

Still, maybe the usage of anteaters isn’t so inappropriate for a potentially dangerous competitor - as two Brazilian hunters recently learned but cannot regret at this point. That’s because the hunters became the hunted or, at least, their presumptive prey turned the tables on them. One was a farmer who approached the animal with a knife but didn’t reckon on the beast’s long sharp foreclaws, which caused “deep puncture wounds in his thighs and upper arms.” The man bled to death.

There is no evidence that giant anteaters, which range from Honduras into northernmost Argentina, are aggressive toward humans, but will defend themselves, even against jaguars. They have poor eyesight, though, and may strike out accidentally (or not) against humans. If you’re fortunate enough to see one in the wild, keep your distance.

In captivity, they can also be dangerous - in 2007, a zookeeper in Buenos Aires Province also died from an anteater attack. At Rincón del Socorro, in Argentina’s Esteros del Iberá wetlands where Douglas Tompkins’s conservation initiative is reintroducing this endangered species to the region, there’s a large wired enclosure for an adult male anteater that killed its owner – yes, someone was keeping it as a pet – in the city of Santiago del Estero.

I actually have some first-hand knowledge of this latter case, which concerned a gentle beast (pictured above) that licked my hand through the fence with the long slender tongue it uses to consume the contents of large antmounds. All the same, lacking fear of humans, it’s literally capable of killing someone with affection. For that reason, they can’t risk letting it loose in the wild, but it’s also a good cautionary tale against keeping wild animals as pets.

South America Talk Radio

And now for something completely different: My recent appearance on Montreal's "Armchair Traveler" radio show is now available for streaming at http://tinyurl.com/l6mjxzk (in English, fortunately, not my desperation language of French).

Live from Montreal! South America Talk Radio

Tomorrow July 18th, at 10:30 a.m. EDT, I will appear on CJAD's Tommy Schnurmacher show out of Montreal. The general topic will be southernmost South America, to include Argentina, Chile (including Easter Island), Buenos Aires and Patagonia. The program will be streamed live at www.cjad.com, and will later be available as a podcast.

In Argentina, the broadcast/streaming hour will be 11:30 a.m.; in Chile, 10:30 a.m. except on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), where it will be 8:30 a.m.

Antarctica, Foresight, and Fram

Recently, I wrote about my experiences in the Antarctic and the sub-Arctic, calculating the latitudinal extremes I had traveled in my lifetime – probably putting me in the one percent in a sense, but not nearly so great as Norway’s Roald Amundsen (pictured above), the daring leader of the first party to reach the South Pole, in 1911. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ll never get so far as Amundsen’s Fram (pictured below in an Antarctic diorama), the wooden ship which probably reached farther north (85°57') and farther south (78°41') than any other vessel of its kind. Ironically, Fram (“Forward” in Norwegian, pictured below in a museum diorama) was built of tropical hardwoods from South America.

Nearly three decades ago, during a year in the Falkland Islands on a Fulbright-Hays grant, I spent much of the winter with documents from the local government archives, to which I had unparalleled access – honorary archivist Sydney Miller would just loan me the key, and I could peruse volumes of official correspondence at home at my leisure. Just about anywhere else in the world, that would be considered highly irregular, and access today is not nearly so liberal.

That wasn’t my only reading material on long winter nights, though – the Islands’ capital of Stanley also had a small but admirable public library that provided plenty of background material and a specialist collection of books on local and regional history, including Antarctica. There I borrowed Roland Huntford’s The Last Place on Earth, a comparative account of Antarctic polar expeditions by Amundsen and the famous Englishman Robert Falcon Scott. Huntford's was the first book to really arouse my interest in the white continent.

Before reading Huntford, I barely knew Amundsen’s name, even though he reached the South Pole before Scott and, unlike Scott, Amundsen made it back alive. Huntford brilliantly contrasted Amundsen’s meticulous preparation and detailed planning with Scott’s reckless improvisation. This was a controversial book that enraged Scott’s admirers in England, who considered him a tragic hero, while Huntford painted him as a disorganized romantic fortunate to reach the Pole - let alone expect to get his crew back safely.

Amundsen, in contrast to Scott, served a long Arctic apprenticeship under his countryman Fridtjof Nansen, and also spent winters living with the Canadian Inuit before tackling the Northwest Passage (n.b.: the “London” cited in the next to last link is in Ontario, Canada, rather than England). Amundsen was a skilled cross-country skier, traversing Antarctica more easily and rapidly than Scott’s inefficient man-hauling, and also made ample use of dogs. Nansen and Amundsen considered man-hauling “futile toil” that burned valuable calories and probably contributed to Scott’s failure.

An aside: on his way south Amundsen, who had disguised his departure for the south because he did not want to alert other explorers, nearly ran out of money in Buenos Aires: “The Fram Expedition was apparently not very popular at that time, and our cash balance amounted to about forty pesos (£3 10s)…” With help from Norwegian immigrant and diplomat Pedro Christophersen, he managed to arrange delivery of fuel and other supplies – perhaps suggesting that Amundsen was not quite so well-organized as Huntford insists.

On my recent trip to Scandinavia, I had the pleasure to visit Oslo’s Frammuseet (website in English), which preserves the vessel built for Nansen’s Arctic expedition of 1983-96 and used for Amundsen’s Antarctic effort (1910-1912, when they wintered aboard). Now enclosed in a protective building, at the peninsula of Bygdøy, Fram actually allows visitors to board and explore her – not comparable to reaching the South Pole, obviously, but enough to help imagine what it might have been like to spend an Antarctic winter aboard.

That said, Fram was more spacious than I expected, as the photograph of the kitchen below might suggest. Still, spending an entire winter in close quarters with 18 other men in Antarctica’s total darkness must have been a challenge.

It’s worth adding that the Frammuseet is not merely an expression of Norwegian hero-worship. It also offers a simply eloquent approach toward today’s global warming crisis as shown by the decline of polar pack ice: “When such bright surfaces change to water, soil or vegetation there is a strong feed-back, as these absorb much more solar radiation than snow and ice. Thus the land and the sea heat up.”

The museum website also shows a cautionary statement from Amundsen, perhaps directed at Scott: "Victory awaits him, who has everything in order - luck we call it. Defeat is definitely due for him, who has neglected to take the necessary precautions - bad luck we call it." That might also serve as a warning in the current climate crisis.

Beyond Cold Storage? Preserving Bories

Long before the town of Puerto Natales became a ferry terminal for Chile’s northern fjords and the gateway to Torres del Paine, tiny Puerto Bories was one of Chilean Patagonia’s economic powerhouses. A century ago, when Paine’s granite needles symbolized little more than the presence of pasture to graze sheep, the frigorífico (meat freezer) at Bories became the processing point for wool and lamb exports that helped provide prosperity for southernmost Argentina and Chile.

Built by the Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia’s most powerful 20th-century institution, Bories was a post-Victorian industrial architecture landmark that became a national historical monument a few years after it closed operations in 1993. After weathering in the wind and rain for another decade-plus, it’s now reopened as part of The Singular Patagonia, a luxury hotel that’s preserved the original installations as a museum open to the public.

Approached through the former woolshed, which now serves as a parking garage, The Singular has recycled parts of the historic structure into a spacious bar and restaurant while preserving the boiler room, engine room and even a steam locomotive in their original configuration – even though they’re no longer operative. Hotel guests, in fact, pass through those rooms en route to their sleeping quarters.

The hotel proper makes use of the existing framework to create a luminous structure whose spacious rooms offer panoramic views of the wharf on Seno Última Esperanza (Last Hope Sound), where vessels from the estancias dropped off the sheep and others picked up the wool and lamb that the plant produced.

Given limited time, I was unable to either stay or eat at The Singular, but the facilities certainly aroused my interest. Nature and its landscapes may be the main reason for taking a Patagonia vacation, but detours to historic sites like Puerto Bories definitely enrich the experience.

Jodorowsky's Tocopilla: Surrealism in the Atacama

To an outsider’s eyes, Chile’s northerly Atacama desert looks surreal so, on one level, it seems almost logical that the country’s most notorious surrealist – filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky – would come from that region. In fact, Jodorowsky hails from the mining port of Tocopilla (pictured above, where I have spent a few nights over the years), and most of his recent autobiographical film The Dance of Reality, which I saw last Saturday night, takes place there.

As Jodorowsky portrays Tocopilla, it didn’t look much different during his 1930s boyhood than it does today, with houses of Douglas fir on streets that hug the contours of the hills or descend steeply to the port. It wasn’t a romantic boyhood, though, with a politically obsessive and abusive father, and a mother who rejected her son. The ending implies he’s come to terms with that, but throughout the film he provides a wildly visual narrative of a sensitive and non-conformist youth in a conservative society (which he abandoned for Paris as a young adult). It’s worth mentioning that certain scenes are not for the squeamish.

Still, his portrait of Tocopilla rings true in many ways – in its portrayal of mine workers, the slums they live in, and especially the fire department (in Chile, all city fire departments are important social institutions that consist exclusively of volunteers). I was a little disappointed, though, by two of Jodorowsky's omissions: both the Tocopilla Golf Club, a short distance south of town, and the Tocopilla baseball field - this is true sandlot ball - qualify as surrealistic by my standards (the US presence in the mining industry began baseball here, and the community team has often been national champion in what, admittedly, is a niche sport).

Nevertheless, I wholeheartedly recommend the film; the trailer at top, narrated by Jodorowsky himself in English, provides a good introduction. Someday soon I’ll have to watch his psychedelic masterpiece El Topo, a fixture at midnight movies for decades after its 1970 release.