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Flight to Saunders Island

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:18:48 +0000

I spent my first few days in the Falklands in a state of destitution. There is just one bank, and it doesn’t have a cash machine, so visitors arriving on a Saturday like I did have to wait until the bank opens on the Monday before they can get any money out. If they have the bad luck to arrive at a time when that Monday is a public holiday then they’re in trouble. And if they also have the bad luck to have only managed to get hold of 40 pounds of Sterling in Santiago before they arrive, and for those 40 pounds to turn out to be old bank notes that are no longer valid, then their first few days in the islands will require them to impose on the charitable nature of the Falkland Islanders.

This was the situation I found myself in, on account of the Monday being the Queen’s birthday. This is something that we would never dream of celebrating in the UK and it certainly isn’t a public holiday. But here, before I’d arrived on the Saturday, there had been parades and ceremonies, and most things were closed on the Monday. Fortunately I was staying at Kay’s B&B, and Kay was supremely helpful and kind in all matters. She lent me enough money to last until the bank finally opened on the Tuesday morning. I would have been in dire straits without her help so I was very grateful.

I had booked a flight to Saunders Island for the Tuesday. Flights in the Faklands don’t follow a fixed timetable – there are normally two flights a day, one at 8am and one at 11am, but where they go depends on who needs to travel. Luckily I was on the second flight, which meant I had time to get to the bank and get some money, at the offensive cost of 4.5% plus £1.50 for a phone call to validate the transaction. If I had wanted Sterling instead of Falklands pounds they’d have charged me a truly disgusting 1% extra.

Financially independent once again, I headed to the airport. The Falklands Islands Government Air Service aircraft are tiny eight-seater planes, they fly low over the rugged landscape, and our journey out to Saunders was spectacular. We stopped at Port San Carlos, Port Howard and Pebble Island on the way as we chugged over the snow-covered hills in the tiny prop-engine plane.

The war

admin — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:45:10 +0000

On the way back from Volunteer Beach we drove back past Mount Kent. The hills near Stanley were the scene of fierce fighting during the war, and even now, 30 years later, relics still remain. We made a stop at the wreckage of an Argentinian helicopter. Keith told us that in the later stages of the occupation of Stanley, when British forces were shelling the town, senior Argentinians would leave at night for safer refuges in the hills. This helicopter had been ferrying officers away from Stanley for the night when it was attacked and shot down by a British aircraft.

Volunteer Beach

admin — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:17:09 +0000

There were two other tourists on the islands while I was there, Claudia from Germany and Lynn from Singapore. Claudia was staying in the same place as me, and we decided to share the cost of a trip to Volunteer Beach. This beach is not far away from Stanley, in terms of distance, but at this time of year it feels amazingly remote, as it requires some serious off-road driving. We got a lift there with Keith, a local with some impressive driving skills. It was an awesome journey there, over the snow-blanketed hills via road to Johnson’s Harbour, and then off road over rough terrain to get to the beach. We were the only visitors today, and probably the last until spring because the track was about to close for the winter. This was the first time I’ve seen penguins in the wild. Straight away we could see that not all penguins are the same, as the tall and dignified king penguins strolled out of the way of Keith’s car, while the smaller gentoo penguins scrabbled away frantically, sometimes tripping over as they ran. If we had been here in the summer there would have been magellanic and maybe [...]

Thermal shock

admin — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 10:01:04 +0000

For the last six months I’ve been enjoying Santiago’s incredibly stable weather. More or less every single day has seen clear blue skies and temperatures in the thirties. And when I haven’t been in Santiago I’ve been in the Atacama. Between early October and last week’s incredible downpour, the only rain I’d seen was literally a few drops which fell in January. So I knew, really, that it was going to be cold in the Falklands, way down south just a few hundred miles from Antarctica. I knew that. But I had forgotten what cold really was. I rediscovered the phenomenon as soon as the plane door opened after we’d landed at Mount Pleasant airport. By the time I got to the terminal I was shivering. I’d seen snow on the high ground from the plane as we descended, but much worse than the snow was the wind, a wild icy blast which sapped my body heat and swept it away over the hills. I suffered on the day that I arrived in Stanley, and I suffered much more the next day, when the snow had come down from the high ground all the way to sea level.

Time for a holiday

admin — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 09:59:58 +0000

I arrived in Chile at the end of September 2011 and by April 2012 I still hadn’t left. The last time I spent more than six months in one country, it was 1999. So even though this six months has been spent in a foreign country, I’ve still been getting ever itchier feet. But a nightmarish situation with a herniated disc meant that for a few of those months I could barely even leave the house let alone the country.

With the back situation easing a bit, and having just completed my first solo night shift at the observatory, I decided the time was right to hit the road again. I’d long fancied a trip to the Falklands, had started actually planning it a few weeks ago, and finally a week before I wanted to go, I booked the flight.

And what a flight it was. I came down from Paranal on Thursday, had Friday to get used to daylight again and pack, and then at 4am on Saturday I headed out into the streets to grab a taxi to the airport. I had a fun ride with a friendly driver who thought it was really funny that I was going to the Falklands. “There’s nothing there, right?”, he asked. True enough, I said, but I was in the mood for getting away from it all and I wanted to see what the fuss was all about. More or less my whole life these islands have been in the news every now and then, but I had no idea what they actually looked like, didn’t know anyone who’d been there, never met anyone from there.

The flight took off just as the dawn sky was beginning to brighten, and we had spectacular views of the country as the sun rose. As we got down to Patagonia the weather was amazing and the landscapes below were mindblowing. I’d been to some of those places, six years earlier, and looked down nostalgically on the Moreno Glacier and Torres del Paine.

After the rain

admin — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:30:26 +0000

After my interrupted sleep I wasn’t looking forward to my first night unsupervised at the controls, but in the end it was postponed again. Early the next afternoon the decision was taken that the telescopes would not open at all that night, to avoid any possibility of water getting in. The “domes” have flat tops and any standing water could spell disaster for all the sensitive mechanics and electronics. So we went up to the control room anyway but no astronomy would be done tonight. It was a pity, because the skies after the storm were stunningly clear. With the luxury of having no observatory work to do, I went out on the platform late in the night to appreciate the view. I moved here in October, at which time the centre of the Milky Way is setting and can’t be seen very well. Now, for the first time, I got a good look at it. It’s stunningly bright and you can only see it well from the Southern Hemisphere. This is a real shame for the 90% of the world’s population who live in the Northern Hemisphere – their view of our home galaxy is completely inadequate in comparison. [...]

Desert rains

admin — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 08:58:47 +0000

After four nights of this shift, one had been completely lost and three partially lost to bad weather. The fifth was my first night as a trained night astronomer. Crunch time. Would I mess it up? Would I break the telescope? Fortunately it turned out I wouldn’t, because the night was also completely lost, with thick clouds and high humidity ruining any chance of doing any astronomy. I was slightly relieved.

I went out on to the telescope platform a few times. Lightning was flickering some way inland, but I assumed the storm would not come out our way. Since I moved to Chile in September 2011, I had hardly seen any rain at all. There was an evening of drizzle in October, and I felt a few spots, literally no more than 10 or so, in January. Otherwise, nothing, and my English soul was in need of watering. But up here in the Atacama, I didn’t think it was going to get any. So when I went out on to the platform again at 5am and actually felt spots of rain, I didn’t really believe it was rain. I just thought it was extreme humidity.

We gave up a couple of hours before dawn when it was obvious the weather wasn’t going to improve. I went to bed at about 7am. Then, at 9am, I was woken up by thunder. Blearily I got to my feet. Thunder? Surely not? And what was this sound, something like rain battering on the window. In disbelief I rolled up the blind and saw that it was true – an epic downpour was in progress. Still half asleep, I went out into the corridor of the residencia and found rain pouring through the roof. The building appears not to be even slightly waterproof.

I was just stunned. I hadn’t expected to see anything like this here in the driest desert on Earth. They tell me it does rain here, sometimes, but the last time had been only eight months ago. I’d thought, during the long dry summer, that when I did finally experience rain again, I might go out and stand in it and enjoy it. But after two hours sleep I was so tired that I just went back to bed, and slept through the rest of the storm once the thunder had stopped.

For a couple of days afterwards, water was still dripping through the ceiling.

Bad weather at Paranal

admin — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 23:00:42 +0000

I’m at Paranal right now, undergoing my final training before they let me fly solo at the controls of the world’s premier optical observatory. My training so far has been seriously affected by weather – of the 11 nights I’ve done, five have been completely lost and most of the rest have been partly lost. Last night the telescopes were closed a couple of hours early, and tonight we didn’t open at all. The telescopes have to be closed when the humidity goes above 60%, and tonight it was nearly 100% and there were clouds right on the peak. Before the clouds came in, though, I went out to take a photo of the night sky. The moon was rising, and Orion was setting. When I took the photo, I couldn’t see the shadow the moon was casting, so I was pretty amazed when I looked at the camera screen to see the shadow of the telescopes, cast on to the clouds below.

Quaking

admin — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 06:44:00 +0000

Chile is on the Pacific Ring of Fire, the great tectonic band where about 90 per cent of the world’s earthquakes happen. Before I moved here, I’d experienced four earthquakes, one tiny one in Guatemala, two moderate ones in the UK, and one on a previous visit to Chile. Since I arrived here six months ago I’ve felt five more and I’m starting to get used to how often they happen. I felt two at Paranal on my first shift there, and then in January I felt my first one in Santiago, when my building wobbled startlingly.

Every earthquake feels different. On Saturday morning I was woken at 4.30am by the building shaking again, and it felt like all the motion was vertical. The previous quake had felt completely side-to-side. There were two distinct pulses of shaking, and the building creaked eerily in the quiet night. I got up and went out onto my balcony, and all around I could see lights coming on in apartments. I tried to check sismologia.cl but found that the website was down. This happened in January as well. Any earthquake large enough to be felt triggers a wave of people wanting to know how big it was and where it happened. Eventually the website came back up and I found out that this had been a magnitude 5.0 earthquake, centred just 30 miles from Santiago. No damage reported, no casualties, only a slight irritation to be woken up so early. That evening I met up with some friends, some of whom had been here in 2010 when Chile suffered one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded. We all talked about what we’d felt.

Then on Sunday evening after a quiet day, suddenly I felt the familiar shaking starting again. At first I could hardly believe it, coming just a day after the last one. We’d been talking about how long earthquakes seemed to last, and as the shaking started I looked at a clock because I was curious to know how long it would go on for. The shaking and noise grew, and as I looked out of my window I could see all the windows in other nearby buildings wobbling crazily. Car alarms started going off, and dogs started barking. But I didn’t feel worried or inclined to hide under a table or leave the building, until I heard some of my neighbours hurrying out into the corridor. If they’re panicking, I though, then perhaps I should. But then, after a full minute of shaking, the quake stopped.

Once again, sismologia was down, and it stayed down for a while, but soon enough I found details on the USGS earthquake page. This one had been greater than magnitude 7, and was one of the largest earthquakes of 2012 so far. It was easily the strongest earthquake I’d felt, and for some time afterwards I kept thinging that the building was shaking again.

The earthquake was centred near the coast and the next concern was whether there would be a tsunami. Before 2004 I guess most people wouldn’t have thought too much about this risk, but now we’ve all seen terrifying footage of what they actually are. In Santiago there was obviously nothing to worry about, but a friend on the coast in Viña del Mar was having her relaxing weekend away ruined by trying to work out whether she should head for the hills or not. I did my best to help but found that my vocabulary had crucial gaps in it. “Coastguard (blank) tsunami along the cost of Chile”, I read on one news website. What might that blank mean? Fears? Flees from? Washed away in? I looked it up, and fortunately found out that it meant “rules out”. A couple of hours later the sea was apparently seen to recede dramatically and an evacuation was ordered, but it turned out to be a false alarm.

So we were all safe, and despite the size of the quake there was little damage and no deaths, although an elderly woman died of a heart attack shortly afterwards.

Of course it’s only a matter of time until the next quake. As long as there is no damage and no casualties, I think earthquakes are quite cool. I like the weirdness of feeling the very ground below shaking violently. I find it incredibly impressive and awe inspiring. But magnitude 7 is probably about the limit for this. The 2010 quake released more than 300 times as much energy as this one. That, I will be happy not to experience.

The road to Calama

admin — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:11:32 +0000

As I checked out of my hostel, they asked me if I was on my way to Bolivia. I wished I was. Sadly my direction now was south, and I caught the bus to Calama instead of heading up into the Altiplano. San Pedro is among some of the most incredible scenery in the Atacama. On my first journey here from Calama six years ago, I was blown away by the outrageous desert, and since then I had travelled this road another five times. Today it was my seventh trip along the road, and it seemed even wilder and even more incredible than before. I had the seat at the front of the bus, and I spent the whole hour and a half just staring out and enjoying the expansive views of the driest place on Earth.