Well, it is summer. But in spite of the waves of warm and sunny weather that have hit Tofino (some years it never gets hot here!) I have still been in writing a lot. Just not on this blog.

That’s because I’ve been thinking a lot about this whole social media experiment. It is over a year, now, since I launched myself on both Twitter (@jwindh) and out here in the blogosphere. And there really is a learning curve with all of that; here’s much more to social media than just understanding the technology, how to Tweet and Retweet, how to post to your blog or comment on someone else’s.

So I’ve slowed down on my own blog this summer in order to rethink where I am going with all of this: what I am trying to do with it, who I am trying to reach.

I see a lot of authors out there who blog about writing – or how to self-publish, or how to promote yourself or your book. That’s interesting to me as a writer, and I like reading and commenting on their blogs. But it is not really what I want to be blogging about.

But what does interest me – as a writer, photographer, and broadcaster – is thinking how everything is connected. And that’s the angle I will be taking with the relaunch of my blog – posting some thought-provoking little pieces to get the brains churning, and hopefully to stimulate some discussion, too.

So please tune in August 3rd, for the launch of the Jacqueline Windh Blog v.2.0.

I’ve firmly come to believe that some people are just genetically wired that way. That’s why we can’t help becoming activists – we are genetically programmed such that we just cannot stop and do nothing when we see something is wrong.

But it is hard to live with, when you feel compelled to act on everything you see that could be better. Partly because it distracts you from other things that also should matter in your life (like earning an income, or personal relationships). And partly because it is frustrating when you hit roadblocks, and can’t influence or exact the changes you see are needed…

I’ve had a really tough time lately. I’m in a bit of a love-hate relationship with my town, Tofino. You’d think a tiny little community on the idyllic surf washed west coast of Vancouver Island would be paradise to live in, wouldn’t you? To visit maybe. But not to live in.

I feel like I’ve been battling to “help” my community – to stand up for residents’ rights, like having affordable housing, or not having to pay more for water than our for-profit businesses pay. And, for the last three and a half years, I have been using my earth sciences background (PhD in Structural Geology) to try to help our community come up with an emergency plan for the coming earthquake/tsunami, that is better than the current one – which actually puts people’s lives in greater danger than if they just ignored instructions. (All of these battles are chronicled on the Tofino Residents blog, which I started but am pretty ready to give up on).

So I’ve been feeling really down: wondering why, when I take the time to volunteer my expertise for the community, it must be a battle. Why I feel compelled to fight the battle, in spite of the opposition. Why there even is opposition and antagonism to simply getting a plan that helps my friends, my community…

It’s not only Tofino. I feel really down about the world. About global warming, about right-wing journalists who are not even scientists but who do their best to bamboozle the public into believing there is even any legitimate debate about human-caused climate change, about the oil spill. I left my high-paying job in the mining industry (yup, that’s right! that’s were I used to earn big bucks!) ten years ago, to earn a pittance as a writer/photographer (and nothing as an activist) in order to try to right some of the wrongs on our planet.

But lately, I’ve been feeling really negative about it all. Sure, the difference I make – be that on Tofino’s tsunami plan or on global environmental issues – is ultimately positive. But it is so negligible on the scale of things. I don’t feel like I am making any real difference.

This week, though, when I was feeling my lowest, I stepped out my front door – and there on my doorstep was a big heart drawn in chalk on the pavement. I knew right away who had drawn it – a little 5 year old girl who lives two doors down. The week before, I had helped her learn to draw a heart with chalk by herself, as I watched her sister learn to ride her bike without training wheels all by herself.

I mostly ride my own bike, rather than drive, so I have got to know the six kids here on my little townhouse driveway . They’re all between 5 and 7 years old. (They talk to me, because they don’t have to flee off the driveway for me and my bike, like they do when a car comes in). I always make time for them, even when I am busy. The last few months, they have been knocking on my door, asking me to “come out and play” with them. I nearly always do, no matter how busy I am – even if only for a few moments.

In my utterly crappy mood, that chalk heart on my doorstep the other day just warmed my jaded and cynical heart.

Maybe I am setting my goals too high, trying to change things that are just too unchangeable. But that chalk heart made me realize that I am making a difference in this world – at least on the scale of those kids’ lives.

And so they make a difference in mine.

I keep seeing the same advice: Build your brand. And that is fine if you are only interested in, or only working in, one thing.

But I am interested in everything. To some people, that might look like I am all over the place. (Which, in a way, I am, I admit… )

But the thing is: everything is connected. And that’s what I am most interested in – the connections. So this is what I write about - both in my non-fiction and my fiction – and what I try to show through my sound stories (the radio dox) and my photos as well.

I don’t want to travel to some game farm to get the technically perfect, tight close-up of a captive wolf. I want to show that animal in its natural environment, connected to the habitat that it needs to survive. To me, that’s the story: the connection, the relationship.

Everything is connected. I feel that, in our “modern” and “advanced” society, where most of us live in cities far from the places where the things we consume come from, many have lost that sense of connection – but that doesn’t mean that that connection is not there. We’re just not aware of it. Every plastic-wrapped product you purchase is connected – both to where it came from (likely extracted from an oil well just like the one spewing out in the Gulf right now – so who’s really at fault there?), and to where it’s going (trucked to a landfill? or consuming energy as it gets transported and reformed into another product?)

Even if we are not always aware of the connections, they are still there.

So I think that is what I think about, and now what I blog about. Connections. Relationships – to our planet, to our food supply, to movements of our planet, to each other, to our own bodies.

But if I am supposed to be a brand – well, how do I make “connections” my brand? It’s a pretty big thing, not very definable.

A lot of what I do (i.e. why I left my well-paying job in the mining industry to earn a pittance as a writer) is about helping people to have the knowledge to make good decisions. To have the actual information, as well as to try looking at things differently – at times, even popping out of our ingrained “western” world view and reassessing our values and, therefore, our actions. Both about the big thigns and the little things: be it about personal health, or about treating our planet in a way such that the next generation can also live well here, or about preparing ourselves for the earthquake and tsunami that are coming here to the west coast. Every decision we make affects something: the world around us, the people around us, and the people to come.

So if you look at everything I blog about, the theme is there. Connectedness. But if you look at my list of blog topics – well, it looks like I am all over the place.

You’ve probably noticed that my blog activity has been a bit slow lately. That’s partly because I’ve had a busy spring, and have been focussing on my major projects rather than the blog. But it’s also because I am reassessing this blog, and I need your help! I plan to start posting more regularly, but I am just trying to figure out where I should go with the whole thing.

So, for those of you who have been following my blog this year – as well as for those of you who are new to it – what would you like to see here? What do you think I should do? Are you getting the connections I am trying to make, or do I seem to just be going all over the place?

Yesterday, Merry Bewick down on Chestermans Beach called me up and asked if I would come over and sign a copy of one of my books, that she had purchased as a gift.

I’ve been carefully tending my tomato seedlings since March. I’ve done a great job, I must say – some are approaching a foot in height, and a few even have buds on them.

So imagine my surprise when I saw Merry with a window-full of full-size tomato plants, many of them laden with fruit!

The challenge growing tomatoes here in Tofino is that we are on a skinny peninsula, surrounded by the North Pacific. Although we get a good deal of sun most summers, we just don’t get the heat that you need to ripen tomatoes. The plants grow; they even look great. And you can usually manage to get some hard little green tomatoes by September. But to get them to ripen before the winter starts to set in again (usually the second week of October; we don’t have fall), you really have to grow the fastest-ripening varieties. I have had the best luck with cherries: Tumbler and Golden Nugget. In the full-size varieties, Early Girl, Early Cascade and Alicante work best.

So I asked Merry what variety they were. “Oh, you know, stolen seeds,” she said. “Tomatoes from the store, that I ate and took the seeds out of.”

June tomatoes, I thought… no bugs around in winter, when they’re blooming. “Did you pollinate them yourself?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” she said, holding up a little blue paint-brush (see photo, above). “This is the bee!”

Merry said that some of the tomatoes were plants that she seeded about a year ago, and others she had grown from cuttings. “I just lop the tops off and thrown them in there,” she said, pointing to a bucket on the floor.

Well, you just keep on learning, don’t you? I am surprised that the tomatoes continued to grow through the short days of winter. But then again, I kept a green pepper plant alive and growing at a south-facing window a few winters ago, using a Q-tip as my bee, and getting some early spring green peppers too. I think the secret is two-fold: lots of light, and also that the plants don’t chill down at night, as they would in a greenhouse.

Thanks for the tips, Merry! And especially thanks for the tomato, which I enjoyed with my fresh home-grown Port Alberni lettuce (transported that same day from Port by bike!) in an extremely tasty and environmentally-friendly salad last night.

Norm Hann was our instructor – giving us a chance to try out something new, as well as to find out about a new and different way of getting a core workout. (The core muscles are all of the big muscles in the centre of your body – stomach, back, glutes – that support and stabilize the rest of your body. A strong core helps prevent injury as well as makes you stronger all-round). This morning clinic was one part of the program of this weekend’s Tofino running camp, led by ultra-endurance athlete Jen Segger.

Norm has just come back from a major SUP trip through the Great Bear Rainforest – “standing up” (literally and figuratively) for the Great Bear Rainforest, in particular about the proposal to have oil tankers pass through this pristine region. The oil well spewing out tens of thousands of barrels of oil per day unfortunately illustrates Norm’s point perfectly – the devastating effects that accidents can happen. So, to raise awareness about the risks to the region, Norm travelled nearly 400 km on the SUP in 11 days.

The boards are broad and quite stable. I felt a little wobbly on it at first, but it is not what I would call “tippy”. Not one of us fell off – which says something about stability, considering we were a group of first-timers. I think for straight-out travelling, I’d prefer a sea kayak – both for the ability to hold more gear, and for the stability in rougher seas. But the view from up high was definitely quite nice. The view around is better, but what surprised me is how much you can look down into the water from the SUP, views that you mostly miss from a kayak. Who ever knew there are so many big crabs down there!

I think what the SUP is really great for, though, is for that core workout. You do really need to hold your body stable while paddling – can’t slack off and lean back and lily dip like you can in a kayak. But also, the stroke is very different, hoding both arms straight, and using mainly body rotation to pull the paddle through the water.

I’ve been wanting to try this out for a while, so I’m really greatful to both Norm and Jen for making this opportunity happen. Apparently, SUP is currently the fastest-growing watersport. And it’s not only for flat water. Norm had it out there on the waves every day, surfing some really good rides at Cox Bay, one of Tofino’s biggest and best surf spots.

What do you think about SUP? Have you tried it yet? (For any Vancouver Island visitors who want to try: they’re available to rent on Nitinat Lake, abotu a 45 minute drive from Port Alberni).

But last month, the West Vancouver Memorial Library contacted me and asked if I wanted to put together a show of my photos. What an opportunity – of course I said yes! So I’ve been frantically preparing images, getting them printed, and now I am framing. And what a good feeling it is, seeing these images printed large.

I remember when I first started to print and display my photos, a decade or so ago. I had been photographing “seriously” for twenty years by then – I’m not saying I was “good” that whole time, but I had been working hard at improving myself: learning the technical stuff, and being ultra-critical about my own work so I could continue improving. But all of that time, all of the photos that I had taken were slides stashed away in little boxes. Once I started doing slideshows, and printing and framing my works – once I started showing them to people – I realized that’s what it’s all about.

I don’t photograph for myself. I photograph because I want to share what I see and what I feel when I am out there; I want to put a frame around a little part of it, and take it back home to share with others. Not many people get to see wild animals in the wilderness these days, and that’s something that’s really important for me. To show wild animals living where they belong: in their natural setting – not captive, not on the “wild game farms”, where so many “wild” animals are photographed these days – but to show the extensive habitat they need to survive. (We need those wild areas to be intact, in order for us to survive, too).

So I’ve had some good fun these last few weeks, going through images and readying them for exhibition. I still haven’t made the final selection of what will and won’t be shown – there will be between 30 and 40 prints on display all together – but I’m offering you a sneak preview of some of them here.

And if you are in or around Vancouver, I invite you to come down and see them all! They will be on display for all of June and July, at the West Vancouver Memorial Library (1950 Marine Drive), open daily (and free entry, of course!). And please, leave a comment here and let me know what you think…

(And – apologies for the long absence on the blog. Between the long travels, as well as trying to meet several overdue paying writing commitments, I made the executive decision to focus on the prior commitments. But I’m back now!)

First of all, the blog. Well, to be honest, I didn’t really know what I’d write about. I know lots of bloggers blog about writing, but – well, it just doesn’t interest me to write about writing itself. There is so much out there that I am interested in, so I decided to just go for it, write about whatever was catching my attention at that moment. Or, whatever I thought was important to write about, but that I would be unlikely to get published in other venues.

What really surprised me was how much I ended up writing about food! About growing food, about gathering food, about sustainable and local food sources. The fact that I blogged about this so much really drove home to me how much our food supply, and where we source out food from, concerns me.

Interestingly, these posts have proven to be some of my most-read blog posts as well. Until the ultramarathon-running tips posts were published (Multi-day race prep, Jan. 4, and Foot care while racing, Jan. 13), which were extensively linked-to by various sports-people and through Facebook, the most frequent route through which people found my blog was by googling the terms “Growing rice in Canada.” Who would have known? I wanted to find a carb source that I could grow out here on the west coast besides potatoes. I thought of rice – couldn’t find any info about growing it here in Canada on the internet – so just tried it out. Well, apparently I’m not the only one who’s been searching for info about rice-growing here in the north.

Twitter has been a mixed blessing for me. I love it! Which is part of the problem. I do spend too much time on it, which of course cuts into my writing time. I still have not broken 100 followers – but my followers are great, all people who read something I wrote somewhere and decided personally that they want to hear more from me. So I feel that there really is a connection with them, far beyond the anonymity of the internet, and that is wonderful!

I’ve had trouble working out who to follow, myself, though. I now follow just over 50 Twitterers, and there are many others that I’d like to follow – but the reality is that if I follow many more, I won’t actually have the time to read all the tweets that come in each day (at the moment in the low hundreds, and, so far, I still read nearly every one of them). So right now, the twitterers that I follow are mainly news organizations (e.g. @CBCNews, @cnnbrk) and various book-oriented publishers or writers (e.g. @globebooks, @GuardianBooks, and many others – check out my own “Following” list on http://twitter.com/jwindh).

I also follow a few bloggers who work in writing or publishing, who do an absolutely stellar job of compiling articles that relate to the publishing industry: @inkyelbows, @thecreativepenn, @rachellegardner, and @nathanbransford. I highly recommend any writers to follow these guys – through the articles they’ve led me to, I’ve been able to keep up-to-date on the many twists and turns that the publishing industry has been through these last few months.

So, where am I going to go with all of this? Well, I think the biggest thing that I’ve realized is that most of my blogging and tweeting is really about two different things – (1) myself and my interests as both a scientist and a writer, and (2) adventure sports. I think these two audiences are mostly mutually exclusive, so I realize that combining everything in one feed effectively dilutes anything I blog or tweet about. So I think what’s coming up in the next few months will be to split things up – get another Twitter account and set up a separate blog for the sporting themes. So this blog may actually move a bit towards writing about writing from time to time, after all (since writing is the main thing I do, these days) – but it will still be what it is now: a compendium of stuff that I find interesting, written when the inspiration strikes.

I’m pleased with the year. It’s my first foray into social media. It’s been a learning experience, it’s been fun, and I think it’s been really useful. (The website/ blog has had over 8000 hits so far, and I’m pretty pleased with that. Thanks, everyone!)

And you may have noticed that I have not mentioned my use of Facebook. I’ve been reluctant to join Facebook right since it first came out because of the contract you must “Agree” to when you join. It has softened up somewhat since then (after Canada won a lawsuit against Facebook about privacy concerns) but it still requires that you assign Facebook all rights to anything you ever post there (which they will cede back to you when you delete your account provided that no one else has ever copied it anywhere… yeah, right). Every time I nearly succumb to the peer pressure (everyone is on it!) Facebook pulls some other move that draws me away again, e.g. this new scheme of tracking people through their so-called “Open Graph” system.

Sorry guys, I don’t want you to track anything about me for your marketing purposed. Not saying I’ll never join… just saying that I’ve been thinking of it for years, and still can’t bring myself to agree to what they want me to agree to. Or to how they continue to change their terms of use.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who has been following my adventures and my ideas. Now that I know what I’m doing, I aim to make this blog a much more interesting place over the next year – so I hope you’ll come back frequently, to check in about what’s on my mind that week. And tell me what you think about it…

I’ve known Benja and his family for six years, and I’ve just been down visiting them in Punta Arenas, Chile, for a couple of weeks. Benja had already done his Strait swim before I arrived. He trained for this crossing for a year, both in the pool and in the river in Valdivia, where he is studying marine biology. The narrowest part of the strait is in the far north, starting from Punta Delgada on the mainland, about 5 km across to Bahía Azul, on the island of Tierra del Fuego.

Currents are strong throughout the Strait, but especially here at the narrows, so the timing of his crossing was very important: aiming to swim at slack current. But the Patagonia weather is wild! You can predict the tides weeks or even years in advance, but you never know what the weather is going to hand you. Fortunately, his chosen day of January 8th was relatively calm…  so he, accompanied by his trainer and family, set out. And his crossing went perfectly. As Benja explains it, before he knew it Tierra del Fuego was right in front of him. His crossing time was just over an hour (1:01:35, to be exact), a new Chilean record.

I arrived a month later, and met Benja’s friend Bárbara, who did her own crossing of the Strait while Benja and I were out at San Isidro Lighthouse (further south along the Strait) for a week. While we were there, Benja and his friend Jonas plunged into the Strait for a training swim without wetsuits, Benja staggering out of the water clutching his frozen head as soon as they were done, while Jonas lolled around in the shallows like a seal. Then Benja’s friend Carolina came out for a visit, and the two of them went out for a swim. With only one pair of goggles and one swim cap between them, Carolina had to wear a diving mask and Benja did his best to avoid the brain-freeze this time with a plastic bag and piece of cloth wrapped around his head.

Bárbara completed her swim while we were away – second Chilean woman ever to have swum the Strait. Benja and I returned to Punta Arenas to congratulate her. (Bárbara, who is a South American open-water swimming champion, had also just swum across from the mainland to the outer coastal island of Chiloé the week before). She did her Strait swim on February 13th, in a time of 1:24 (the strong current meant she actually swam an extra two km) – second Chilean woman ever to swim Magellan Strait, and the new Chilean female record holder.

Bárbara and and I had several days of overlap in Punta Arenas, staying with Benja and his family, and I sure enjoyed getting to know her. Here is a little video I shot of the two of them on one of their training swims (runs 1 minute 15s):

Later, the three of us went to the local pool together (yes, I will go swimming if the water temperature is acceptable…) They attempted to teach me flip-turns (which I did not master) and how to swim front crawl backwards (which I did master!) among other useful things (such as how to sink and crawl like a crab on the floor of the pool, and how to blow bubble rings from the bottom, two of Benja’s specialties). And, upon leaving Punta Arenas, Bárbara gave me a Chile swimming camp, which I now wear with pride, and which will always make me think of these two: inspiring swimmers and wonderful friends.

I am such a wuss in the cold water. But these cold-water addicts have really motivated me. I have a decent wetsuit, and I live just a 10-minute bike ride from Tonquin Beach. The nearest public swimming pool to do laps in is 125 km away… Of course I should train in the waters at my front door. I don’t really have any excuse, do I?

I am not saying I am going to do it. But I am seriously thinking about it.

Ha! It says that Lima is "the best airport in South America". Ha! I say again.

OK, I thought I’d be fine for my travels back to Canada because I would not pass through Santiago de Chile (airport affected by the recent big earthquake); my routing was Buenos Aires – Lima – LA – Vancouver. Especially after checking in in BA: they gave me my boarding passes right through to LA. All seemed good.

Then I got to Lima where, upon disembarking, the screen showed my 1:05am flight, at Gate 21, to LA (along with a whole bunch of other LAN flights) as “Delayed”. So those of us with the same connection lined up and waited patiently…  I heard the Australians in front of me being told that the flight was now going at 5:40am, but then the agent told them to be at Gate 21 at 12:30am. So the flight is going? Hmm.

Then it was my turn. The agent told me the flight was delayed til 5:40. I told her then I’ll need her to revise my connection to Vancouver. “Connection?” she said. “In that case,  you go on this flight, departing at 1:05am. Be at Gate 21 at 12:30.”

“So my original flight is going, after all?” I asked.

“No, it is a different flight,” she responded. Just with the same flight number, time, and gate. Hmm, very strange.

So we board, and wait. And wait. An hour passes, then close to another. Then the Captain comes on and says that the airport is closed for scheduled maintenance (it is now 2:10am, which is actually 4:10 am for me, Buenos Aires time) and we will now depart at 3:30am. Fortunately there is an empty seat beside me (why were they trying to boot people off this flight then, if there was room? another hmm). At least I am able to doze a bit.

An announcement wakes me. It is the Captain. My watch says 6:22am and we are still on the ground. “We are very sorry, we have exceeded the crew’s legal work time and we must leave you now. This flight is cancelled. Please disembark and follow the ground crew’s instructions.” Looks like I am staying in Peru. I set my watch to local time, 4:22am. And this is where the real fun begins.

The mob at the unmanned immigration booth, 5am.

OK, so we get off. People are already pissed off (we’ve been sitting on the plane for 4 hours now – you’d think they could have seen this coming a bit earlier?). Some are yelling at the LAN

staff, who are simply telling us that we must pass through Peruvian immigration, that they will get us a hotel, and that at 2pm tomorrow they will have information about the flight. 2pm!! There are several hundred of us – it is clear that we are not going to be in any hotel room for hours yet.

I have to decide upon my strategy. Go it on my own and try to rebook my flight (at 4:30am? I don’t think so) or follow instructions. I abandon the crowd, who are stalled at the arrival gate yelling at Claudia, the LAN staff person.

I get to immigration, along with the dozen or so others who elected to follow instructions. But there is only one booth – and no one is at it (the airport is closed, remember? no inbound flights). But we line up politely anyway, and try to keep our spirits light and make jokes about how ridiculous this is (remember, we’re all kind of giddy for having been awake for 24 hrs). I make friends with an American named Mike, who was on the coast in Peru when the tsunami following the Chile quake hit. He’d seen the videos of the Indonesia tsunami, and knew what to do when the bay in front of his beach-house suddenly emptied.

Claudia tries to figure out where to lead us.

So we wait and hope. Eventually the angry crowd joins us, still yelling at Claudia as they approach. And they are not in the mood to make an orderly line-up, so they crowd in front of our straight little line-up, forming a mass mob in front of the one unmanned immigration booth.

Then Claudia shows up and calls in Spanish for anyone who is in transit (people like myself, who boarded in another country and did not visit Peru on this trip) to go with her. I try to help the English-speaking people understand what she is saying, so they know whether to go or stay. I explain to Mike “I have to go with her. You have to stay.” I wave to him above the crowd as I am whisked away “I don’t know which option is better! Maybe I’ll see you again!” and the 16 of us who boarded in Buenos Aires follow Claudia.

OK, now here is where my memory starts getting fuzzy. By now, I am dehydrated (remember, they’d taken my water bottle? which I was going to fill before getting on the flight to nowhere) and just trashed. We wind around corridors and passages and through metal doors and glass doors. Eventually we get to a different, bigger, immigration area.

Trying to convince Customs we're here. 6am.

The customs official cannot deal with us, though. We have no “arrival” flight number for our form. So they argue with Claudia for a while, checking out the computer screens which, according to the customs official, prove that our flight is not here and therefore we cannot be here. We try to convince him of the evidence

before his very eyes (us!). The chief flight attendant shows up and tries to explain that we are really here. The immigration guy finally wraps his head around what has happened – supposedly the LAN people are supposed to fill out some special card when this happens – and eventually he stamps our passports.

So that is immigration – then customs. But no bags. Claudia takes us to international arrivals, where we wait a while at one carousel, then are herded over to another. The Australians are really thirsty, too, and asking for water. Although there are vending machines there, none of us has any Peruvian money.

So, after no bags appear anywhere, Claudia takes us over to national arrivals – I think it is like 6am or so local time by now – where it seems that some of the people who had boarded the flight in Peru have already picked up their bags. And there is Mike! We greet each other like old friends.

We know our bags are in there. 7am.

But alas, the door guards will not let us in, because we are coming through the out-door and not through the in-door (and there is no way we can backtrack through immigration to get around to the in-door). So we all fight and argue, but to no avail – the door guards believe that, since we have come in from Buenos Aires, our baggage can not be in the national section – even as we see other people from our same flight coming out with their baggage. So we yell and argue and threaten to bust through the door (I am quite ready to go through with it by now). The Australians are calling for water – one of them is feeling sick – and Mike needs medication from his bag. The chief flight attendant shows up, and then even the captain. I use my best Spanish: “Please sir, can you help us get our bags? We’ve been awake for 24 hours now, led all over the airport, and no one will help us.”

7 hrs later, some now in wheelchairs.

He smiles sadly. “I am in the same position. Just trying to get my bags, like you.”

The door guards insist that our bags can not be there – even though we knew that is not true. So eventually Claudia leads our group back to customs. An elderly woman who cannot walk any more is put in a wheelchair. I say goodbye

to Mike again, and we go back into international baggage claims, where our bags – of course – are not.

Back in the international area once more, people line up first at one place then another – I’m not sure why, we are just following one another around in a daze by now. The Australians have managed to change some money somewhere, and are slugging down bottles of gatorade. I am so thirsty; I find myself staring at their red gatorade sloshing back and forth in the bottle as they gulp. I am going to fall over. I have to turn away.

Claudia is out in the middle of the empty baggage claim room talking to someone, and my head temporarily clears enough to wonder what we are lining up for – if she isn’t even there. I stagger over to her. “Claudia. Our bags are not here. Better we just go to the hotel, ¿no?”

She agrees. So she herds us all up again – or what is left of us – and here is where the only good news of the tale comes. The hotel is right here at the airport, the Ramada Inn. No waiting for transport. Right next door where we can walk across the driveway and deal with bags, tickets, whatever, all by ourselves in the morning. Oops, I mean afternoon – it is already 7:45 in the morning.

No longer sure why we're lining up. 7:45am.

OK, the story could go on and on (and it has)… it’s now midnight and I’m writing from the Ramada Inn – yup, now over 24 hours in Peru. Almost all of that spent in line-ups at the airport today. I supposedly have a “confirmed” flight out at 3:40am (“confirmed” in the Latin American sense of the word). So I’m sitting in the hotel restaurant, trying to celebrate this unexpected visit to Peru by sipping on their national drink. When life hands you a bowl of lemons… make yourself a pisco sour.
Salud.

Epilogue:
I ran into the captain again on the elevator on the way to catch that “confirmed” flight. He tells me the delays were all on the Lima end. They took so long to load the luggage there that they were not done by the airport’s scheduled 2-3:30am closure (which makes sense why our rescheduled flight was for 3:40am, so as not to risk getting affected by that again).

So we boarded again… sat on the tarmac for another 2 hours again (I watched the luggage loaders sitting around, joking, getting in a fight, then making up and joking around again… but loading very little luggage, for most of those 2 hours). But finally we took off!

Once in LA I found out that the LAN people had mistakenly rescheduled my connection for the following day… so I spent my whole connection time there in a line-up trying to get them to swing my connection (and luggage) on to that day’s flight. And Wednesday night, after 4 days of travelling, I finally made it into Vancouver.

This whole thing is strange, though. Sure, part of it is the problems at Lima’s Jorge Chávez Airport. LAN tells us that the problem is because of the Chile quake, that they don’t have the planes. But that is not right – we had a plane, we were on it for 4 hours. And this issue of saying my 1:05 am flight was not going, then all of a sudden “another” flight with the same number, departure time, and gate was going – and then it didn’t go after all – is all very strange. There is something that they were not being straight with us about, something very strange about the whole affair…

OK, yes, it is the peak of summer, but this is Patagonia. Unfortunately, you can’t tell in the picture how windy it is! Not only is it high-latitude (53-54 degrees where I was, in and south of Punta Arenas – roughly equivalent to the latitude of Haida Gwaii/Queen Charlotte Islands). But in addition, the plate tectonic accident that has placed Antarctica symmetrically over the south pole (for now, anyway) means that, unlike in the northern hemisphere, the winds that swirl around the globe in the latitudes 50s, 60s and 70s are unimpeded by any continental mass here in the south.

The south tip of South America is the first point of land that juts down and intercepts these winds (check it out on a globe – South America’s southern tip is something like 1000 km further south than either Australia or South Africa. Sorry I don’t have a globe on hand to verify my figures, but something like that). That’s why southern Patagonia is so windy, and why the ocean currents are so treacherous.

So, I have been offline for a while. Over the next two weeks I’ll catch y’all up on the interesting places I have been to. I am officially down here to report on an adventure race, Xtremo6000, which is part of the Adventure Racing World Series and which will take place later this week in northern Argentina.

But I decided to take advantage of being flown this close to Patagonia by grasping the opportunity and heading down to visit my dear friends in Chilean Patagonia. I met the Cáceres Murrie family back in 2004 – they run a wilderness lodge at Cabo San Isidro lighthouse, the southernmost inhabited point of the American continent, on the edge of Magellan Strait. The Patagonia Expedition Race finished there a few years back – I was reporting on that race and, while waiting for the teams to come in, we all became friends. In particular, Benjamín and I really hit it off (he was 14 at the time), with our common interests in learning about gathering wild foods and trying to figure out how to make serviceable objects from found items, e.g. making urchin-catching spears (erizeros in Spanish – we don’t have a word for them in English) and weaving baskets out of the native reed junquillo.

Benjamín is now 20, and going into his third year in marine biology. (He’s also an amazing swimmer… more about than in an upcoming post). My visit coincided with his summer break, so we headed out to the lighthouse (or faro) with plans to hike to Cabo Froward: the southermost point on the American continent. Benjamín had some guiding obligations first (tourists who had come to hike and kayak from the faro) so I hung out with him, enjoying the hiking and kayaking and doing some photography.

By the time he had finished up his guiding obligations, Benja had a friend arriving back home in Punta Arenas (another champion swimmer, more about her coming up too). So we did our 4-day hike to Froward in just two days (i.e. 60 km of rough terrain: irregular coastal rock shelves, wet and spongy peat bog, and steep slippery rainforest trails in less than 36 hours!… carrying 4 days of food with us). There were 4 river crossings along the way – and we hit 3 of the 4 at high tide, forcing me to swim (Benja is used to cold water; I am not!). Out backpacks were stuffed into big garbage bags – as heavy as they seem, they still float!. We lucked out with the two sunniest days of my whole visit for the trek, and by the next morning we were back in Punta Arenas. (More on that coming up too… especially the dolphins leaping joyously at the bow of the zodiac).

So I’ll be posting more about the whole trip over the coming weeks – photos and words both. But the summary is…. a few days in Buenos Aires, overcoming the jetlag while taking in the tango scene, then 2nd a half weeks in the far south of the continent, then this coming week at Xtremo6000 adventure race (daily “live” reports coming on SleepMonsters, if you are interested).

It was a sad goodbye to everyone this morning… I’ve shared so many laughs these last few weeks, both with Benja out at the faro, and with the whole family, Pato and Ángela and their sons and all of their many friends. It’s tough when you have such good friends who live so far away… and you just never know if or when you will ever see them again.

OK, please check back over the coming weeks… for more about the faro, about our hike, about some amazing swimmers, about Andean condors, about Buenos Aires tango, about adventure racing…. lots coming.