Killing Batteries

Having completed my ‘ultimate fly fishing’ adventure, I was demoted back to the ultimate eco-tour group for the final few ultimate days of the ultimate cruise.

FYI – an incontrovertible tourism fact I acquired on this trip is that you can make virtually anything ‘ultimate’ if you somehow involve a helicopter. Ultimate bird watching, ultimate knitting, even ultimate house of cards building, which would admittedly be pretty ultimate if you were able pull it off with a helicopter rotor spinning at over 200 revolutions per minute nearby.

I say that my return to the eco-tours was a demotion only because the eco-guides had seemingly run out of fresh tour ideas, due to the limitations of our location and seasonal options. And one of the only original excursions they could dream up, a volcano hike, nearly resulted in a pneumonia pandemic.

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My day of ‘ultimate fly fishing’ had finally arrived. I’d initially taken this term to be a mirthful oxymoron, but that was before I was rocketing past volcanoes and cruising mere tens of feet over forest canopy at a breathtaking 130 MPH in a Bell 407 helicopter to engage in said recreation.

OK, fine. It was pretty ultimate. Point taken.

After hovering next to a large waterfall and swooping past yet another sea lion colony, the helicopter deposited us on a small lake beach and minutes later we were in the boats, lines out. Though fly fishers usually go out in pairs, I was alone in a boat with my guide Ricardo, which was probably for the best as I had a lengthy casting learning curve ahead of me and the fewer people around to get hooked in the lip the better.

Being of the inaccessible by land or sea variety, our lake was deserted and perfectly still, with a stunning backdrop of impenetrable virgin temperate rainforest and snow-capped mountains further distant, shedding little puffs of clouds. During a conversation the previous evening with the lead guide, when I confessed that this would be my first attempt at fly fishing, he noted that the fish were so abundant where we were going that “you’ll catch four by accident”. In fact I caught 10, including a massive brown trout, snagged a mere seven minutes after leaving the beach while we trolled to our first site. It was that easy.
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“Welcome to Patagonia!” our guide said with a huge grin that was partly genuine partly affected. The other guests and I were definitely affecting ours – to the point of clenched teeth.

Having just hopped off a powerful jetboat, our group stood on a haunting black beach in five layers of warm and water resistant clothing, suffering wind gusts powerful enough to stagger a food critic and driving rain that impacted like BBs. Admittedly this wretched ‘beach walk’ was entirely our fault. The guides repeatedly warned us that the weather would be iffy and their invitations to bow out of the beach walk (in retrospect they might have been pleas) continued all the way up until we were getting ready to leap off the boat into the soft, sticky sand that clumped on our shoes like wet cement. By this point the wind and rain implications of pressing on were apparent, but our group was still bizarrely gung-ho for the experience – though in our defense some of us were still punchy from 20-something hours of flying in from the US the previous day.

Why we were so resolute to submit to the suckiest of Patagonia’s chilly late-spring elements rather than chilling in an entirely more pleasant way in the finely appointed, four star environs of our ship, ‘Atmosphere’, with its comfortable rooms, open bar, platters of tasty snacks and complimentary spa is still hard explain. But our Chilean hosts were protégées of the “School of Never Say ‘No’ to the Guest”, so per our expressed wishes we were now being deservedly pulverized by Patagonia’s sucky elements, collective enthusiasm spiraling away like an untied balloon.

The black beach was certainly intriguingly stark and other-worldly, and if the rain on my face didn’t feel like I had an anti-riot water cannon trained on me it might have even been breathtaking. But even Michelle Hunkier, Natalie Portman and Rosario Dawson doing a choreographed, all-Jell-O, nude yoga recital couldn’t have been properly appreciated under those conditions. A half hour of staggering through that meteorological punishment was all we could stand. We hailed the jet boat and raced back to Atmosphere.

Shedding my clothing and gear on the run, I clamored for the warmth of the outdoor Jacuzzi where I sat submerged from the nose down, my back being buffeted by a dozen tiny jets. A Pisco Sour was offered to me for the 17th time in 24 hours, while I stared transfixed at a distant backdrop of mountains and temperate rain forest drifting languidly by.
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Now before I blow your tutti-frutti minds with the singular ass kicking that was my trip to Chile, let me state this disclaimer: I’m well aware that my smug bragging of enviable trips lately has far outweighed the usual abject misery for which I’m known and admired and perhaps this is becoming a little tiresome for you, my loving readers. It’s a proven fact, for whatever perverse reason, that people vastly prefer to read hilarious tales of someone else’s travel despair over reading hilarious tales of wine baths in five star hotels.

Well, you know what I say to that? You’re all sick, sadistic crapheads. After over four years of nearly uninterrupted negative 10 star travel, I think I’ve earned every wine bath and relaxation massage from unusually large, masculine women that I can get. Also, I’m still quietly trying to push the “Stupefying Envy” literary genre to the forefront of travel writing so I can finally score a deal for my Lambo book. Meanwhile, if you absolutely need to read about sustained suffering and corresponding losses of dignity, click on the “Romania” category to the left, read just about any post and you should get all the personal anguish you can handle.

So! Chile! Good times. And the good times started a full month before I even left. Usually when I travel for this magazine I spend weeks composing emails, sleuthing the email addresses of select marketing people, sending emails, waiting, re-sending, being ignored, drinking/sobbing/cursing, finally hearing back, replying and finalizing just to score a comped room for a few nights and maybe a comped flight. Not this time. The ‘adventure cruise’ line that invited me arranged everything. All I had to do was show up at the airport in Minneapolis, produce a passport and look cute, all of which I accomplished effortlessly, as always.
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Folks, I’m just a few hours away from wrapping up my four and five star trip through Chile. But am I sitting back and letting these final hours wind down unproductively? Perish the thought. I’m a professional. When I’m on the road, I work like a miserable dog right down to the final buzzer. That’s what makes an outstanding travel writer people.

As such I am writing to you now with only my left hand. My right hand is holding a generous pour of Carménère, a French wine grape thought to be lost forever until it was re-discovered in Chile in 1994. The rest of me, from the tits on down, is immersed in a Ritz Carlton Hotel signature wine bath. Don’t talk to me about dedication. I am Mr. Dedication. Where’s my goddamn Nobel Peace Prize?

I caved to the wine bath idea after repeated insistence by the hotel’s public relations manager. Strangely, I thought it was just a bit over the top after the one hour relaxation massage, swanky lunch, repeated trips to the whirlpool and three indulgent nights in one of his Club Level Rooms. But I am nothing if not cooperative, so I relented.
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