I can recall many instances when I have done something and, in retrospect, have asked myself why did I do it. The case in point here is the decision to spend a night in Eco Camp - a 'sustainable' resort at the foot of Torres del Paine in Chile. As Graham will readily admit, back at the tourist office at El Calafate, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
We were told there will be no electricity and no communications with the outside world. The tents looked decent and the whole back-to-nature thing seemed like quite a laugh. Just one request, er, separate tents please. Sounds good. Thumbs up. Across went the credit cards. Let's go eat.
The journey there has already been covered in the last post.
Arriving at Eco Camp (late, because they forgot about us) we were greeted in the main tent with a log fire, one drink each, and a plate of salmon, sour cream and cream crackers. Devoured within seconds.
Graham: can we have more salmon please?
Waiter: (puzzled)
Graham: Can we please have more salmon?
Waiter calls manager. Manager comes out. Er, sorry no.
Graham: can we have more biscuits please?
Waiter: (puzzled)
Same routine, except, this time, we were told to share the hors d'ouvres with the Australians in the table next to us!
Graham: 'forget it'.
We were then told that dinner will be starting so please move to the dining tent. There were four other people at Eco Camp. An Australian honeymoon couple, and a sort of Austrian aristocrat from the Habsburg era with his wife, bizarrely, from Manchester.
Quite why we all had to dine at the same table when there were FOUR OTHERS available is still a mystery to me, but as is always the case in these situations I found myself sitting next to the worst person. This is why i don't go to dinner parties - the cool, good looking and funny people are always at the other end of the table, while I invariably end up sitting next to either the freak, the child molester, the wart hog, or the crashing bore. On this occasion, it was the woman from manchester. Fuck she was awful. So while Graham was having a perfectly jovial time drinking, laughing and sharing travel stories with Ludwig von Trapp and the Aussies, i was lumbered with the mentallist. We had already made introductions before dinner so i couldn't exactly pull off the 'i dont really speak english' thing. Just had to grin and bear it as she, seeing as I was of some sort of Asian descent, explained Manchester was a place where "you know, Manchester United play their football matches?" Purgatory.
In the end, instead of smashing my head into the table, I made an early exit and headed for bed in my 'dome' - a sort of Mongolian igloo tent.
I barely slept that night because the torch they provided in the dome had no battery, so from 2am till 6am i was fumbling around all my possessions in sub-zero pitch blackness figuring a way to keep warm and stay alive. The iPhone was my saving grace, not so much to phone Graham in the next tent (there was no signal), but to use as an emergency lamp. That, sadly, died at 3am.
When finally wrapped in every warm item of clothing - including socks, wooly hat, tracksuit, fleece jacket, hoodie, a self-made scarf balaclava, and curled up under two duvets and four blankets - then came the timely and irrepressible urge to pee.
Because this is Eco Camp, there is no toilet in the dome itself. You have to go to a COMMUNAL one! In 1000% darkness it took ten minutes just to figure out how to open my door. Like the emperor penguin, I marched against the brute force of the antarctic wind trying to locate this goddamned toilet which of course had no lights on to save energy. Once i was there, i realised the 'toilet dome' is designed with concentric circles much like a maze. When you are looking down from the top view, it's a doddle. But when you are actually in it you could be there forever. So after locating the ladies toilet, I then went 360 degrees in the opposite direction and eventually found the men's, the showers, the basins, and finally the bogs and the single urinal at the very epientre of the circle.
Back outside my igloo, even though i was half way to getting frost bite, the urge to have a ciggarette proved too much and so I did. Now relieved of ten tanks of urine, i smoked in complete silence. The wind had died down, the sun hadnt come up yet, and when I looked up I saw the milky way. It felt like the past four hours had all happened intentionally for this one solitary moment. It was 6am.
So when, two hours later, Graham came knocking on my door to announce that our 8-hour hike up the mountains was about to start, with no guilt or sense of missing out, I just told him through my balaclava, "I'm not doing it".
Brilliant.
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