This travel blog is from my experiences as an English tutor in Chile. I, of course, would recommend reading all the stories from the beginning, but below is one of my favorites: “Week 7: The End of the World.”
When I left the US, my parents gave me a ruby red travel Buddha. While he is short, he is also, from his toes to his bag, quite fat.
Look at that fat smile.
They say the Buddha ate whatever the world supplied, but I like to think my Buddha eats worlds: one fat world is in his belly from breakfast, one fat world is in his cheeks for lunch, and one is in his fat pack for later.
As my current idol, he’s made me a hungry traveler, and, with my trip nearing its end, I decided I needed to go to the end of the earth–Punta Arenas–to be like him. Only a few miles from the tip of continental South America, I could eat the world.
After checking for a few weeks, I found a cheap flight that landed at midnight and left thirty hours later. It was not enough time to visit the popular mountains to the north, but, how romantic, I thought, to be at the end of the world for one sunrise and one sunset.
I’m going to spoil it now: the end of the world is the same as the middle, the sides, and probably the top. Yes, it has some eccentricities: the basketball courts overlooking the sea have no fences and are used for soccer; somebody left tanker ships to fall apart in the docks; and there is a park of plastic dinosaurs surrounded by diminutive trees, swamp grasses, and wild horses.
Nevertheless, I sulked at the sameness. The shops, the outlets, and the Chevy dealers were the same. The straight of Magellan looked like any bay, and the distant Tierra del Fuego looked distant. This could be any town in Chile, any town in the world.
Good grief
I tried not to be disappointed. Look, I thought, the houses here have fresher paint than Valparaiso, and those birds could be mistaken for penguins.
But I had come for a meal, and this was toast.
It did not help my mood that since it was Good Friday and Punta Arenas is a religious town, most attractions and restaurants were closed. Passing the time, I walked down empty streets, by the coast with the cold wind, and past the basketball courts and Chevy dealers. Eventually, I tired of walking and decided to go to church. At least people were there.
I arrived early. I had avoided the boredom of mass for years, yet here I was, to escape the town’s sameness, sitting in the same wood pews, seeing the same stained glass, smelling the same incense, I had sat in, seen, and smelled 12,000 miles north and 20 years ago. I meditated, feeling my disappointment and my self-loathing. Damn myself for not feeling happier. Damn myself for not doing better research. Damn Google for making everything my fault.
Before too long though, I heard a rap. A short old man with white hair was pulling at one side of the pew and gesturing for help. Confused, I lifted the opposite end, and we rotated it around a column. Asking me to stabilize the pew, he, in his Sunday shoes and suit, climbed atop the thin back support.
At this point I noticed he was holding a piece of brown twine in his hand, and an older woman in the mezzanine above held the opposite end. She smiled and waved at me. The man tied the twine around the column, and when he finished, he stepped down, thanked me, and walked away. The woman above smiled and waved again, still holding her end of the string.
What a terrible decoration, I thought, as I myself smiled and readjusted the pew.
I think I knew then this was my day’s high point. It was so ludicrous. Such effort and frustration, planning and nervousness I had felt to reach the end of the earth, just to assist some old fogies with a trivial, even misguided, task. I loved it.
I felt buoyant. Returning to meditate, I found the same frustrations and self-hate, but I felt them with joy. As mass began, I marveled at the same incense smell, hearing the same bad church songs by the equally bad organist. I felt all the connecting sameness of the world beginning to fill my stomach.
When I surfaced, parishioners on a Tyson ladder were removing their Lord and Savior from the cross and exiting the church. The rest of the parish and I followed them outside to an old Chevy outfitted with megaphones, and, following it and the plastic Jesus, we began walking the stations of the cross. Some women had heels and yoga pants, some kids wore baseball caps, some nuns prayed ardently. Tourists took pictures of us as we stopped now at the station of Simon, now at a red light, and processed to the cemetery.
Looking down the boulevard at the trees, wildly contorted and with thick leaves as dark as evergreen, I felt the breeze, carrying as little warmth as the Antarctic tundra, as little as the icebergs, as little as miles and miles of open black ocean, and I felt, alongside this procession of warm sameness, that I was at the end of the world.
Yum