The End of the World (Antarctica Not Included)

Reporting from the Argentine coast, February 2, 2025

The Seno Glacier, one of approximately a million jillion glaciers we saw in the Chilean fjords.

We’d been drifting towards the South Pole ever since we left Panama, the tropics yielding to deserts and then to mountains, forests and glaciers. So many glaciers. The sky getting grayer, the air getting colder and us getting closer to the end of the world.

We could tell when we got there, because there’s a sign

No, I’m not going to translate it for you. (Photo by Paul Fishman)

I’d been down there once before, the Chilean part anyway, 25 years ago. I decided, for reasons I’ve long since forgotten, to spend my 45th birthday in Patagonia. I’m sure Bruce Chatwin had something to do with it. And also Paul Theroux, whose book about taking trains from Boston all the way to the tip of South America, culminating in a ride aboard The Old Patagonian Express, sent me down a lifelong travel book rabbit hole. Theroux, a somewhat grumpy presence in less-than-welcoming places, is the travel-writing role model I most admire. Go figure.

He spends less time making grand pronouncements about historical events than he does complaining about the food. He’s the embodiment of the axiom that bad trips make the best stories. There’s never been a great travel story about a trip that went perfectly. So, I say thank you to the fine folks at Villa Vie for giving me plenty to complain about.

Twenty five years ago, because of Theroux, I desperately wanted to take one of the last long-distance passenger train trips in South America, the overnight from Santiago, Chile to Temuco and Puerto Montt. It’s a good thing I went when I did, because by 2004 it had ceased to exist. Nowadays the train from Santiago only goes as far south as Chilan, a mere 250 miles. Puerto Montt is another 400 miles from there, a six and a half hour drive, 8 hours by bus.

Neither of which would be nearly as fun as that overnight train turned out to be. The sleeper and dining cars were old German railway stock, lacquered to within an inch of their lives, with linen tablecloths and mahogany cabinets and waiters in the dining car with waistcoats and bow ties. I’ll never forget the head waiter who poured red wine from impossible heights — holding the bottle above his head on a swaying train — directly into glasses, never spilling a drop. It was like a circus act. I applauded every time, even before I was drunk and had to be escorted to my compartment.

A refurbished Chilean bar car from olden times.

From Puerto Montt, I took a four-night trip on the Navimag Ferry, to Puerto Natales. through some of the same fjords that Odyssey would traverse years later and across the Gulf of Pena, which translates in English to “Gulf of Torment” because of it’s notoriously rough waters. Crew members on the Navimag called it the “Gulf of Vomit” for obvious reasons. It was my favorite part of the trip.

Not only did I not vomit — unlike many of the other less-fortunate passengers — but I rode out the roughest waves eating microwave popcorn and watching “Armageddon,” — the Bruce Willis movie where he and Ben Affleck have to blow up an asteroid — in the tv lounge. During the scenes where Bruce and Ben are bouncing around the asteroid in low-gravity dune buggies, we were bouncing right along with them. You’d pay big money for that ride at a theme park. It was GREAT!

There hasn’t been anything quite that dramatic on this trip — except for my early Theroux-like tantrums about the shitty beer — but the week or so Odyssey spent weaving in and out of the Chilean fjords has been my favorite part of the cruise. The sea, inland passages mostly, has been generally calm, the passing scenery astounding and seemingly endless. Jagged ridges that look like Godzilla’s tail. Steep Mordor-like peaks. We intentionally went down marine cul-de-sacs, dead-end waterways where, inevitably we’d come up on a massive glacier, stretching for miles into the mountains, the newly-calved faces a bright shade of Ty-D-Bol blue, the surfaces white and wind-whipped like some kind of gigantic meringue. Some days the views were so impressive that I even made a point of waking up before noon.

It felt very much like riding a long-distance train. Sitting by a window, watching the spectacular landscapes glide by as we went through the Strait of Magellan, the Beagle Channel and a half-dozen other nameless tributaries. South America breaks into pieces at its southern tip, dissolving into miles and miles of rocky archipelago. Until we sailed around it, I had no idea that Cape Horn, where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans smash into each other, the wind and the weather changing every few minutes, is an island. Also I was hoping there’d be a guy with a cloak and a bugle. There was not.

Cape Horn, where oceans and weather systems collide.

I sat by the window in the Morning Light Lounge, beer in hand, mesmerized for hours at a time. I couldn’t have been happier. It was almost enough to make up for all the voyage’s ongoing frustrations. Almost. but not quite.

Because cool as that was — and I don’t just mean temperature-wise — it wasn’t as cool as where we originally thought we’d be going. We were supposed to go beyond Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, beyond Punta Arenas and Ushuaia. beyond Cape Horn . We were supposed to go to Antarctica.

It was in the brochure and on the website, a bucket-list destination for lots of people on the cruise. When I first started talking about living on a cruise ship for 3 and a half years, the first question people generally asked (after, “Have you lost your fucking mind?) was, “Are you going to Antarctica?”

Where we were supposed to go, but then we didn’t.

“Hell, yes,” I’d tell them. Then I’d show them the itinerary: Deception Island, Antarctica, January 31. Half Moon Island, Antarctica, February 1. Coronation Island, Antarctica, February 3. I knew we wouldn’t be able to go onshore — you need zodiacs and special permission to do that — but I certainly expected to be close enough to say I’d been there and maybe wave at some penguins. And for the rest of my life, if anyone asked how many continents I’d visited, I’d be able to honestly say, “All of them, motherfucker. Buy me a goddam beer.”

But it became pretty obvious when we were still in Belfast that Antarctica wasn’t going to happen. The ship had too many problems — busted rudders, broken pipes, and sputtering engines among them — to ever be allowed in unpredictable iceberg-flecked Antarctic waters. It’s a 31-year-old flat-bottomed ship, basically held together with thoughts, prayers and duct tape. It uses the wrong kind of fuel for an environmentally-sensitive area. And the more we read about Polar Certification requirements that Odyssey clearly couldn’t meet — remember, we had a LOT of free time — the more obvious it became. We knew last summer that we’d never be cleared to cross the Drake Passage. And Villa Vie management must have known it, too. How could they not?

Still, Antarctica remained on the advertised itinerary all through the summer and the fall, long past the point where there was any chance we’d be allowed to go there. Villa Vie didn’t announce that we wouldn’t be going until December 27. We were already in Ecuador by then, too late for anyone who’d paid for the South American segment to bail out. A lot of Residents were understandably disappointed. And more than a few felt they’d been deliberately misled.

Did I mention how cool the glaciers were?

I don’t know why Villa Vie waited so long to acknowledge what most of us already knew. It certainly hasn’t helped their credibility, already in tatters after the Siege of Belfast. Now, they’re promising that we’ll get to Antarctica eventually, some time in 2027, assuming the ship gets the modifications it needs to be Polar Certified by then. And maybe we will. But I’m not counting on it.

So, for now, we’re headed north instead of south, up the Atlantic coast, towards Montevideo, Buenos Aires and eventually Rio de Janeiro, in time for the last day of Carnival. After that we’re supposed to sail up the Amazon. There will be plenty of chances for things to go horribly wrong. I suspect Paul Theroux would be pleased.

Me and a giant penguin in Ushuaia. (Not Antarctica.) They’re much bigger when you get up close.