Cruising for langostinos

I had the awesome opportunity to participate in a research cruise for three days. The aim of our mission was to examine the distribution of langostino at all life stages: larvae, wayward teenager, adult. The langostino is a tasty crustacean, one you may have remembered from my adulations over seafood empanadas a few weeks ago.

It has been a while since I’ve spent a night on a boat. My main concern was getting seasick as I had been taking medicine for an irritated stomach. I had a sneaking suspicion that my doctor might not recommend copious vomiting as a weekend activity. But, armed with two different kinds of anti-nausea meds and a large supply of galletas de agua (saltines), I felt well-prepared for the eventuality. I wasn’t reassured by the small size of the boat, nor the way that it rocked in the super calm harbor. But, the weather gods were smiling, and we left the Dichato with glassy seas and one meter swells.

We went out on the Kay Kay II, the UdeC’s research vessel. There were two scientific teams onboard as well as a crew of six to do all the necessary sailing and machine wrangling. I was on a team of three from the LOPEL (Laboratorio de Oceanografía Pesquera y Ecología Larval) lab and our mission was to track the langostino’s baby phase. We would trawl the waters for zooplankton all night long. Why all night? Because during daylight hours, zooplankton, which are small marine animals that measure micrometers to millimeters, swim deep down in the water column to avoid visual predators and then swim back up to the surface at night to feed on yummy diatoms (algae) and rogue organic particles. At every station, we deployed the CTD; an instrument which is the oceanographic equivalent to an expensive and finicky swiss army knife. Using a winch attached to a cable, the CTD is sent down to a few hundred meters and measures the water’s physical characteristics (conductivity, temperature, and density) along the way. Next, we deployed the Tucker trawl, which is a series of nets that can be opened and closed at different depths so different points in the water column are sampled for zooplankton. After dragging them behind the boat for a few minutes, we pulled them back on, drained them, and added formalin to preserve them for later identification. Hopefully we would find some baby langostinos lurking in the mix.

When you’re working on a boat, time is a measured and dolloped entity. There were six stations to do and each station took us about an hour. When you add travel (around an hour between stations), the sampling, which we started at a crepuscular 18:00, took all night. With the help of the crew, Edu, Carlos, and I would deploy the CTD and the nets, then take a nap for an hour, and repeat. I never really fell into a deep sleep, just cherished the sensation of the boat speeding through the cresting waves, as this meant I could stay lying down. But then, the captain would hit the brakes and I could feel the boat slow against the swell, signaling that it was time to roll out of the bunk and start sampling again. I got to sleep for maybe two hours the next morning before I needed to get up again to run our stations backwards with the CTD.

Luckily, at this point it was the other team’s turn to trawl. But besides sending the CTD down, the LOPEL team was also in charge of collecting water samples at each station to measure oxygen and nutrients/organic matter content. For this, we used a handy bottle with an opening on both sides called a Niskin bottle. I’ve always thought that whoever invented the Niskin bottle was someone with a genius for beauty in simplicity. The Niskin bottle is used to sample water at whatever depth you want. It is a cylindrical tube with two stoppers connected to each other by an elastic running through the center of the tube. The stoppers are pulled back and snapped to the center of the bottle so the elastic connecting the two ends is under tension. The bottle is attached to the same cable that was used to lower the CTD. When the bottle is at the right depth, we attach a weight to the cable and send it shooting down the line. It hits the catch and releases the tension in the elastic, snapping the stoppers into place. Et voila! You have the a bottle of water from any depth strata desired.

I’m carefully filling glass bottles with water *sampled at a specific depth stratum* by the Niskin. After I’m done filling the bottle, I will add chemicals to the water that will react with oxygen and precipitate. *Depending on the amount of oxygen*, the water will turn a shade of milky white to dark yellow. It is easy to see the oxygen gradient when comparing the colors of water from different depths!

Meanwhile, the other team was deploying the bottom trawl to capture the langostino on the sea floor where it had matured from its larval free-swimming form to its bottom dwelling juvenile stage. The other team had the interesting problem to contend with that the cable on the bottom trawl was too short to reach the sea floor. Their solution was to attach a long length of line to the trawl. This maneuver included dragging the net in the water from the aft deck (ship’s butt) to the foredeck (ship’s front) to deploy it. They were not able to reach the bottom the first time, but they did the next times as we sailed over shallower ground. It was interesting to see the mix of species within the trawl as well as the mix of year classes. One of the hauls had both crabs and adult langostinos, while another one heaped out juveniles. Most of the time sampling in the ocean feels like groping blind, but it’s always exciting because you’re never entirely sure what you’re going to get.

The cruise was short but packed. It was fun to reacquaint myself with a lot of ocean sampling equipment and learn about a new sea critter. Even though the seas were glassy, caution and experience did not allow me to try laying off the seasickness meds until we were well into the third day. But it was not until we were pulling into port that I realized that I had been on a boat overnight without throwing up once. A first! Hopefully not the last.

And I couldn’t resist adding a couple of seascapes.

A story of (street) dogs and (sea) lions

I remembered there being a lot more street dogs in Chile. I have only seen a handful of strays in Concepción, sunning themselves on the university lawns or trotting up the sidewalk. I asked a friend and he gave me a long look and said, yes, there used to be a lot more, but the government has gotten rid of them through neutering campaigns or even euthanization. And so, I thought I would only encounter the huge packs that I saw roaming around Punta Arenas six years ago in my memory. That is, until I went to Talcahuano.

Talcahuano is a port town 30 minutes from Concepción by bus, or “micro”. I had to go there to take a boat safety and survival course, the story of which I have regaled to you in my previous blog post. Talcahuano is a port town, destroyed in the 2010 tsunami and rebuilt. I find it grittier than Concepción, and the dogs are gutsier. I walked down the marina with some new friends from the course during lunch time and we were accosted by several dogs who wanted food though we clearly had none. These dogs were more pushy than I had grown accustomed to and followed us. Yes they were cute, but I was also a bit wary. You never know when a stray dog might bite.

At some point, when we were walking along the marina, my new friends gestured at me and pointed down over the rail. There on jetty lolled two sea lions. Maybe I’m jaded, or maybe my work with the National Marine Fisheries Service has indoctrinated me into thinking sea lions are no good endangered salmon vacuum cleaners; but whatever the cause, the cuteness of sea lions has mostly worn off me. I saw two bloated smelly blubber sacks lolling about. And I was acutely aware that if one of them sat on me, I’d be done for. Then Alondra pointed outward and I watched, eyes widening, a sea lion climb into a skiff that was moored in the bay. I was floored. I kept pointing back at that sea lion that was lolling half out the boat because it was so big, and said, “No puedo creerlo, hay un lobo en el bote!!! Que???”. My friends nodded and smiled as though to say, “Yes, we see it, we pointed it out to you.” But I could not get over it, there was a fracking sea lion in that skiff! I tried to imagine what it would be like to go out to your boat one morning, coffee cup in hand, and then find a sea lion lazing about in your boat! How do you get it out? The surprise would probably be enough to make me lose the coffee cup to the sea, maybe breakfast as well. I expressed my astonishment to a labmate later and he told me not to worry, the sea lions don’t get into boats when there are people in them. I don’t think I conveyed the root cause of my astonishment very well.

And so, later that day, we were gathered at the marina for the practical part of the boat safety and survival class where we would jump off the boat in nought but our clothes and a lifejacket and swim through the freezing Pacific water to a life raft. Dogs milled about the marina as the instructor reminded us of what we were supposed to do. We inflated the life raft on the asphalt and one dog nearly got crushed by the rapidly expanding orange rubber. I was surprised that the dogs were so easily tolerated at the launch of what seemed to be a boating club, but Chileans do have such a lax attitude about their street dogs. Still. Their presence irritated me. Or maybe it was the prospect of jumping into the freezing water. Who knows.

Another thing that got me nervous was that the dock was completely covered in sea lions. If there were so many sea lions on the dock, who knew how many there could be lurking in the water, waiting to nab an unsuspecting pretend naufragée. Then a boat approached the dock and all of a sudden, something amazing happened.

All the dogs that had been happily milling about the courtyard sprung into action and converged onto the dock, barking at the sea lions. The sea lions slipped off the dock like jelly marbles as the dogs advanced, barking, until only one or two remained, including a large alpha sea lion that alternated sticking its nose up in the air and barking back at the dogs. Still, I was astonished at how these huge animals that must have weighed at least four times as much as a dog yielded so easily to their onslaught. Maybe it was that there were so many of them. Maybe they just couldn’t be bothered. But it was not a hazard-free job. One of the dogs that attacked the sea lions only had three legs because the fourth had been bitten off by a sea lion. Despite the danger, in a couple of seconds la lancha was almost completely cleared of sea lions and the boat could dock safely. The sailor tying the line to the dock peg took it all in stride as though it was a regular occurrence. And I realized that it was. These people had trained the street dogs to attack the sea lions so that they could dock the boats. Absolutely incredible.

I think what I love about this is the idea of using resources that one has at one’s disposal to tackle this particular problem. There are sea lions lying around, but so are the dogs! And this way, everyone is happy, the dogs are fed, the sea lions are kept away when necessary, and the world is in harmony. Except, I’m still not clear on what you do when you have a sea lion in your boat…

Only 2% of you would survive

As part of the requirements to step foot on a commercial or research vessel in Chile, I needed to take a boat safety and survival course. The course would last three days and at some point, we would have to jump off a boat in our clothes and swim to a life raft. I was not looking forward to that part.

The first day, I just concentrated on trying to understand what the instructors were mumbling in rapid Spanish. In the morning, two instructors went over the parts of a boat and first aid principles. I expected it would be even more difficult to concentrate in the midst of my post-lunch slump, but when the third instructor started speaking all eight of sat up straight. He had small deep-set eyes and spoke softly with little inflection, saying that the biggest enemy to overcome during a catastrophe is fear. Because one of the symptoms of fear is acting without thinking. He then relayed a story of how he was on a boat that had run aground and one of the sailors who had been consumed by fear ran up the deck shouting that they were sinking. He jumped over the rail on to the rocks below and broke both his legs. “And then we had to get him out,” said the instructor. “That took a while.”

He then proceeded to bombard the class with potential scenarios and gauge people’s survival instincts. He pointed at me. “What do you do if there are twenty-five of you trying to fit on a twenty person life boat?” I did not think that he would take “Risk it?” as an adequate answer so I just shook my head. The next person said, “Take turns hanging off the edge into the water.”

“Correct.”

Damn. Why didn’t I think of that? My odds of surviving a shipwreck were shrinking.

So it was with the mentality that fear is the enemy that I woke up on Wednesday morning with the knowledge that I would jumping in freezing cold water in the afternoon. I had taken one look at the harbor the day before and had decided to wear as little clothes as possible so as not to contaminate them. I regretted it once I arrived in Talcahuano. Everyone else was wearing two long sleeved shirts and sweaters. I was wearing a T-shirt and leggings. I had hoped the afternoon would disperse the gray and windy morning, but the clouds remained. After peeling off my sweater and donning the life jacket in the cold wind, I began to really think that saving my clothes from the foul harbor water had been decidedly the wrong impulse.

Once on the boat, the captain drove for about five minutes away from the dock to a large red buoy. The boat dragged the inflated life raft behind us. We moored to the buoy and our instructors reminded us of the exercise. We would jump one by one into the water, form a train where each person would hook their legs around the waist of the person in front of them (we had practiced inside the classroom) and swim on our backs while stroking our arms in unison. Then we would swim around the boat and buoy to the life raft and climb in.

My turn to jump in came up rather quickly. I remembered that I needed to pause to think before jumping so as to demonstrate how advanced I was in not letting fear overcome me. The water was very cold. Someone had trouble with heights and took a very long time to get in the water, so we just got colder. Finally, everyone was in and we formed our train. Unfortunately, we were facing the wrong way and had to turn which was a very laborious process. Luckily, our caboose was an older man going for his captain’s license with plenty of at-sea experience, and he was comfortable directing our train. Once turned, we were finally on our way, chanting “Uno, dos, tres!” to keep the beat of our strokes. However, we moved very very slowly. We were sheltered by the harbor, but the waves were large and sent us sputtering. Maneuvering the turn around the buoy should have required a team of coxswains. The distance we had to cover was maybe 50 meters, but it took us about 20 minutes to make it to the life raft. I cannot imagine have to swim 200 meters, or even two kilometers to the life raft. After what seemed like for too long, we made it to the orange floating island. It took a bit longer to get, but finally the last person slid across the seawater slick rubber and we cheered our victory. The ride back was freezing. Our instructor said he had once been in the water for seven hours waiting for a rescue. I couldn’t imagine being in there for seven more minutes. A day or two later, I came down with a bad cold.

According to our intrepid instructor, one of the most important strategies for surviving a shipwreck is to stay in a group. And I feel like this exercise, short as it was, did demonstrate this principle. Our train formation not only made me feel warmer, it also made me feel less anxious. In addition, different members of our group had different skills. Our older, more experienced caboose, really helped us get oriented the right way and reach the life raft. But once he was there, he needed the help of younger, stronger people (such as yours truly) to get into the life raft. While even a fake “abandon ship!” was quite enough excitement for me, it was a very interesting exercise, and I learned a lot. And even though only 2% of us would survive a real shipwreck, I am proud to say that 100% of us survived this accreditation exercise, with only mild hypothermia. Huzzah!

Food stories, Part 1

I’m calling this “Part 1” because I anticipate that there will be many more food stories to come.

Food in Chile is really hit or miss. In my first week in Concepcion I went out to lunch with a colleague and I ordered “casuela”, an apparently quintessential chilean dish which boils down to soup, in this case, chicken noodle soup without the noodles. But it was very bland and I had trouble finishing it. And this is a country where people take long lunch breaks, actually lunch is supposedly the most important meal of the day.

A lot of the local more traditional eateries I’ve been to have a three course meal menu with a salad, main course, and a dessert. But I am so far underwhelmed by these. And this may also be because eateries around universities do cater to a younger student crowd, but I have noticed a fondness for mayonnaise (without fries) and sweet drinks that I find baffling. The saddest lunch I had was when I went to a Japanese fast food place and thought I was ordering something that I thought was a poke bowl, but instead turned out to be rice with some fake crab and a huge amount of two different flavored mayonnaise. Extremely upsetting. Not any less baffling was the time I went out to lunch with another colleague and she took me to a more healthy place that offered menus of salads, quesadillas, and wraps. I got the quesadilla, and it was indeed chicken and cheese and veggies in a tortilla shell, but to my infinite disappointment … but it was stone cold. I felt completely betrayed by my food. How is this a quesadilla????

Despite the lack of food consciousness, Chilean cuisine has one redeeming feature: seafood. I had tried amazing seafood on my previous trip to Chile, including curanto and ceviches, but my first week here I had a revelation that rivals either of those: the seafood empenada.

It happened like this. During my first week in Concepción, I accompanied Pamela and Eduardo, the two head technicians of my lab to the University marine station at Dichato to renew the lab’s seawater reserves. The marine station was a newish looking building with a hatchery for dogfish and sea urchins on the ground floor, and scientists dutifully sorting through samples on the in the upper floor. Across the street was another building that was just bare bones. I was told that the lab was destroyed in the 2010 tsunami that hit the Chilean coast. It swept away the building and all the expensive scientific equipment. Luckily, no lives were lost at the lab, but they are still in the process of rebuilding and don’t have even a quarter of the scientific equipment that they used to have. They say that people want to move the location of the lab to safer place, but having a lab right at the ocean really allows you to do things you can’t do if you’re far away, such as pumping seawater directly from the source into your aquaria. It was a bit of a sobering moment, but at the same time, really fascinating to see how Chileans deal with the constant threat of disaster at any moment.

After visiting the station Pamela and Eduardo suggested stopping off at the market to get snacks. The market was mostly seafood, and they pointed out the local fish for sale: merluza, conglio, reineta; all the while Pamela steered us to a staircase in the back of one shop. We went up three flight of rickety stairs to a table that was right next to the kitchen. I was excited about the idea of seafood empanadas. Pamela said I could have several different kinds: marisco (seafood), macha (a kind of razor clam) queso, langostina (squat lobster) queso, carapacho (crab) queso, and probably several others. I elected for the classic “marisco”. Pamela and Eduardo also each ordered one. Pamela asked me if I had brought lunch to the lab, because if I hadn’t I could get another one. And I looked at Pamela, thinking out loud, “Another one. Yes… And maybe another one after that?” I asked it like a question and I was hoping that she wouldn’t judge me for my gluttony. But the look she gave me said, of course get two more if you want two more. So she amended our order for another langostino queso and macha queso empanada.

And they came out of the kitchen in steaming bags ready for us to go. but I couldn’t wait that long and attacked the bag. Pamela and Eduardo shrugged and followed suit. Oh my, I did not expect it to be so delicious. Up until this point (second week in Chile) I had only had baked empanadas which tend to be bigger than fried empanadas and have a thicker crust. I am going to go out on a limb and say that the fried empanadas unequivocally taste much better. The marisco empanada was delicious, the pastry was flaky and thin and golden and the filling was a minced lemony shellfish explosion. It was really hot but I didn’t care, I just shoved it into my mouth as fast as possible. Unfortunately it wasn’t fast enough. Eduardo pointed at my shirt which was covered in shellfish juice because apparently there was a “sopita” in the marisco empanada that I had missed out on! And as I had only recently met these people I thought that spilling the food on myself was probably a good enough show… no need to suck the sopita out of my shirt. Though I was sorely tempted. Luckily I still had two more empanadas left to go. I had planned to take them back, but considering the other two were only in the middle of their single empanadas I tore into the second one. Macha Queso. Maybe my favorite. Macha is this huge razor clam and I did not expect this shellfish to go well with cheese. I don’t know why I thought it wouldn’t. But oh my gosh it was amazing. Pamela and Eduardo were impressed. “Te gusta?” Emphatic nods ensue. Yes, I really liked it!!

Baked empanada de pino, the traditional empanada filling of ground beef, onion, olive, and hard-boiled egg

And back in the lab Eduardo made a great imitation of my eyes going big and rubbing my hands together like a Bond villain while saying “Que rico!” (how yummy!). People really appreciated it. And that led to Pedro offering to take me out that weekend to eat at his sister-in-law’s restaurant in Lirquen to try mariscal frio which is a cold seafood soup. And it was incredible. Such huge shellfish! And I tried fiure which is a red tunicate that I’ve never had before. The fiure had a bitter metallic taste that I wasn’t partial to, but I was glad to have tried it. We ended up ordering a second platter of the cold shellfish soup because it tasted so good.

And so, Chile is a country of culinary contradictions, where casuelo sits aside a macha queso empanada. But knowing that one exists really makes you value having the other.

Mission accomplished!!

I’ve seen a lot of animals at Huinay, a plethora of birds, daily dolphins, the occasional sea lion. But one animal I never saw was the penguin. When I first got to Huinay, I confided my secret ambition to my peers and they scoffed, “Why do you care so much about seeing penguins, there are penguins here all the time!” But in the two months I was there, I didn’t see a penguin, not even once. After a couple of a weeks, I no longer ran outside to scan the sea every time that someone said they thought they saw a shadow of dolphin fin. I saw a pudu, a small deerlike animal so rare that when it was spotted at the water’s edge hiding from a puma, the whole camp went to see it. I saw sea lions sunning themselves on the salmon farm bouys, and I learned how to tell the difference between a juvenile and mature night heron, a male and female chucau. I saw hawks and great white egrets, and hummingbirds. But that one animal that apparently was so commonly seen around Huinay that I was mercilessly teased wanting to see at all? That’s right… not one measly little penguin.

So when I started to plan my trip I knew that I had to fit penguins in there somewhere. My biggest concern was that the summer is not only the high season for tourists, but also for penguins. Starting at the end of February, the penguins leave their colonies for the sea, only to return in September. Knowing this I wanted to maximize my chances of seeing penguins. And this is how I ended up in Punta Arenas, with my first imperative to see penguins before they left forever and I would be left with a sad penguinless space in my heart. I arrived in Punta Arenas yesterday afternoon, and went straight to the lovely Hospedaje Magallanes. According to my research there were two penguin colonies, a small one at Seno Otway, and the large one of Magallenic penguins at Isla Magdalena. The only problem was that I had been informed that after the summer no more ferries go to Isla Magdalena. After dropping my bag down I immediately cornered the hostess Marisol to ask about the availability of penguin tours. Without blinking she said that she could reserve a spot for me on a tour to Isla Magdalena. Fantastic! I later got to talking to several of the other people at the staying at the hostel and apparently they were waiting to take the tour as well. It had been canceled two days In a row because of high winds. Nooooo.

I was very worried up until I got to the Solo Expiditions store front this morning. It was drizzling sightly, but the many Chilean flags around the city were hanging limply. I inquired if the boat was leaving that day and happily it was. A half hour later, 12 of us were piled into a van that took us 20 minutes away from the center of town. We went down the lime green dock where a small white motor boat was waiting for us. The ride to Isla Magdelena was a about 30 minutes over calm seas. It’s very cliché, but as soon as we stepped off the boat onto the island, the drizzling stopped and the sun tried to peak out between the clouds. Apparently, only half the colony was left, the rest had gone to sea, but I didn’t care; there were penguins, penguins everywhere. And to think that in Huinay I would have settled for seeing one lonely little penguin. But after 2500km I got to see tens of thousands… WORTH IT!!

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is tumblr_mk52igg0u21rytfgoo1_1280.jpg — Live penguins. FINALLYYYYY!

¡Que rico!

I love good food. Do I even have to state it? I love good food. I like to say it’s my Frenchness coming out, but I think that the importance of good quality and taste in food is something that every culture values and every person can appreciate. I was told that I would love the food in Chile (“You will eat a lot of meat and a lot of fish.”). I say, yum! I love good food because of its intrinsic value (i.e. I love good food because eating yummy things makes my stomach happy), but also because eating is an experience that is best when shared with other people. I can think of so many good memories that are centered around sharing or cooking a meal with special people, and I would like to share two Huinay food moments that stand out in my mind among many great meals over the past four weeks. The first one happened shortly after I had arrived at Huinay, and the second one happened a few days ago, but both show how important food has been in making me feel like part of this community.

Termas y curanto

My second evening at Huinay, I was invited to go to the Porcelana termas, which are thermal pools on the other side of the fjord, about 20 minutes away. I was both excited to be going as I had never been to thermal pools before, and nervous about going because no other English speaking person was going and it was only my second day and everything was still super new to me. But I went anyways. The group consisted of me, Belen and Yessi, two students from Valdivía studying forestry engineering, Dennis and Veronica who are the kitchen masters, Reinhart who’s in charge of admistration, and Helena his daughter. We left after dinner, at 8:30ish. It was a 25 minutes boat ride to Porcelana, and we pulled up to a pasture-like hill. Veronica’s niece lives in Porcelana (it looked like this “village” was about as big as Huinay; a collection of two or three houses tasked with the upkeep of the termas), so there was happy chatter all around. After a 15 minute walk through the forest we arrived at the much-awaited bunch of natural pools. These pools are filled with heated water, courtesy of Nature, as a result of the geothermic activity in the area. Indeed, there are geysers nearby and many of the surrounding mountains are in fact inactive (hopefully) volcanoes. Reinhart never tires of telling the story about how he was hiking around Huinay 4 years ago and was the first person to spot El Chaiten exploding.

My first terma experience was very enjoyable. You sit in a pool of silky water that is a little muddy, but in a good way. At first you can’t stand the heat of the water, but then it becomes pleasant, and you can sit back and relax and take deep breaths of air that smell of mulch and sulfur. And when you get too hot you’re supposed to take a plunge into the freezing river, just a few steps away beyond the trees. I wasn’t too keen on this part but everyone insisted that I do it because it’s part of the experience, so I let Dennis hold my glasses as I quickly submerged my head and all. It was SO cold! We moved between pools of different temperature, my nerves and shyness dissolving in the hot water as everyone attempted to speak with me, and Belen repeated sentences slowly when she sensed I had lost the thread of the conversation. We stayed there for hours, the sun set, and from the pools we could see that small patch of sky above changing from pale blue to navy, so gradually and slowly that it was barely noticeable, and the first stars came out while the sky still felt light. It was a night without moon, and I was able to sit back, listen to the buzz of Chileno, and see our Milky Way galaxy splashed against the trees.

At around midnight we gathered our things to leave. Others with more foresight than me had brought flashlights with them, and we stumbled along the path until once again we came out onto the pasture-like hill. Yessi, Belen, and I lied down on the grass to look at the stars while Veronica went to speak with her family. The three of squealed in delight as shooting stars blazed overhead. Veronica came back and we got up to go. She was holding a huge plate in her hand, which was covered by another one. I realized that I was very hungry. Dennis, Yessi, Belen and I gathered around her, and she uncovered the plate of curanto and the most amazing smoky smell reached my nose. Curanto is an important dish that is typically Chileno, typically Chilote (from the island of Chiloé). Helena explained to me that it is cooked in a hole in the ground, where shellfish and meat are piled in layers underneath huge leaves from the narca plant. Later when we came back to Huinay she pointed out the plant that looks like an enormous land lilly pad. Veronica told us to go head and dig in. Yessi and Belen and Dennis all grabbed one of the mussels. Veronica motioned to me to do the same. They were enormous, about the length of my hand. I took one gingerly with my fingertips; the outside was all slippery from the juices. The mussel was delicious, juicy, seafoody, and smoky, the best one I had ever had. I learned that ¡Que rico! Is the appropriate thing to say when enjoying good food, and I said it many times. Everyone exclaimed how good it was, and I was handed more mussels, more meat, which were accompanied with approving nods and smiles when they saw how much I liked it. We walked down the hill, back to the boat, Yessi steering me away from the cowpats, our fingers sticky from being licked. I felt full, happy, and we silently watched the stars from the boat on the way back. I noticed that the shapes of the mountains were darker than the sky.

Los Haivas

After a few weeks I had made it habit to visit the kitchen and say hi to Dennis, Veronica and Camila before sitting down to eat. I spend most of the day with my fellow science staff and it is nice to catch up with the others; exchange a few words and see what delicious food I was about to eat, and maybe nibble at something around the corners. I can think of many a day when upon entering the kitchen Veronica handed me a pancito (mini bread) fresh from the oven because she knows that I love them and that I’m always hungry.

One day, about two weeks ago, a group of “VIPs” from Endesa (the electricity super-company that built Huinay, remember?) were here to use the facilities as a summer retreat. This meant that the kitchen was working doubly hard to produce a gourmet meal for them on top of our food. I was early and didn’t know where Katie, Annika, and Uo were, so I went to the kitchen to see what was going on there. I chatted with Dennis for a few minutes, peeking around, trying to see what we were going to eat today. Dennis knew what I was after and showed me this huge pot on the stove, filled with these enormous crabs, easily twice the size of the crabs we had in Baltimore where crab is considered a local delicacy. They were for the VIPs though. He broke off one of the enormous forelegs with the pincer on it, smashed the shell with the heel of a carving knife, and handed the meat to me. I ate it, it was steaming and sweet, so delicious and there was so much of it. Veronica and Camila came back upstairs from the store room, and they huddled with us around the kitchen table. I asked what the Spanish word for crab is (jaiba) as Veronica cut up a couple of green lemons to squeeze over the meat and showed me how to sip the briny juice that is left in the crab leg once the meat is removed.

The four of us happily smashed the crabs with the heels of the knives, without a care about the noise, spilling juice all over the cutting boards and metal table-top. It was a simple treat; but an impromptu, almost illicit one, which is partly what made it taste so good. Over the growing pile of empty shells and smiles at each other’s enthusiasm about the task at hand, I felt a great fondness for all of them. As others started to stream in the dining room I left the kitchen, and sat at the table, already a little full but undaunted by the prospect of a second delicious meal.

A little piece of green

Last week I left the 200m radius of Huinay for the first time since I got here four weeks ago. Along with a couple of other camp fever victims and visiting scientists we hiked about 800m up the mountain to a refugio. The relatively well maintained path wound itself through mulchy mud and over enormous rocks and tree trunks. Though it was a dry day and the sun was shining, everything was wet and my clothes soon became soaked due to enormous ferns showering me as I battled my way through this temporal rainforest. Besides the occasional cobweb there was a marked absence of insects and the silence was only pierced by the high pitched whoop whoop whoop of the chucao bird or the more raspy and startling call of the woodpecker.

This is the forest where the alerce, a tree steeped in mythology, once reigned supreme in the Andean evergreen forest before experiencing decimation through industry. The wood of the alerce grows so densely that it lasts virtually forever. On the island of Chiloe one of the biggest attractions are its wooden churches, 16 of which have been declared UNESCO world heritage sites, and the “palafitos”, wooden houses built on stilts which were the traditional dwellings of fishermen in the South of Chile. These structures are made of alerce and have successfully withstood the wear of centuries and inclement weather. The alerce is one of the longest lived trees on Earth. In one of the offices in Huinay, we have a piece of wood from an alerce tree that was 4000 years old when it died around 50 BC. It stood for almost 2000 years until it was chopped down about 250 years ago. I am told that seeing an alerce in its venerable age and enormous height and girth is a mind boggling. Unfortunately, because of all the colonists who wanted to have alerce shingled roof this mountainside has long been cleared of the alerce giants.

But the mountain did not need the mystical trees to blow me away. Many of the trees were enormous ulmos whose white flowers make the fjord across from Huinay look like it had been coverd a patchy dusting of snow. For most of the hike it seemed like every available space on standing and fallen tree trunks was covered in moss and lichens. Now, I’ve never been much of a moss person. It’s not that they’re undeserving of my attention, it’s just that they’re not something that I usually notice while taking a garden stroll. What I mean to say is, the variety of moss back home is slightly underwhelming. But man did they have my attention now! I had never seen such moss and lichens before, they were growing in beautiful patterns of filaments and huge disclike structures, reminding more of a crystal aggregation than a plant. On the way back down I stopped to catch my breath and examine the green stuff covering one of the tree trunks in front of my nose. I wondered how many undocumented species of lichen was growing on the single branch I had stopped to look at. Is this the excitement that Charles Darwin felt when he scrutinized the same (maybe?) plants? I’d like to think so. A chucao landed at my feet and looked at me with an expression that said, what the hell are you doing stuffing pieces of moss in your pockets? I didn’t deign to answer and continued to slide down the mountain, feeling very lucky to be in this amazing and rarely visited spot as well as a little smug that the cheeky bird had no idea that my other pocket was filled with (super cool) rocks I had collected earlier, higher up the mountain.

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Welcome to Huinay!

It’s been almost a week since I arrived at Fundacion Huinay. Huinay is research station in Northern Patagonia, Chile. My first reaction upon arriving was one of wonder and awe. I had been in a few research stations before, but in none of them were the facilities so luxurious or whimsical. Huinay is in the fjord region of Patagonia which means that the landscape is entirely made up of mountains starting several hundred meters below the water’s edge and running uninterruptedly to the crest several hundred meters above us. Because of this, the station couldn’t be built on flat terrain, and indeed, the houses are built on raised wooden platforms that rest half-way on the mountainside, half on wooden stilts. Another remarkable fact about Huinay is that it is built almost entirely of wood and an effort had been made to disrupt the trees as little as possible to the point of including them in the building design. Indeed one of the first things I noticed that the decks of the houses and labs had been built leaving spaces for treetrunks and the effervescent verdure seemed to singlemindedly want to poke through every crack in the wooden slats. All of these details sprang out to me at once while Katie was giving me the grand tour and I thought, “I’m living in a treehouse.”

Huinay is the product of a very strange partnership: The University Catholica of Valiparaiso and the Chilean elecitricity giant Endesa. What I understand is that the university owned 34000 acres in Northern Patagonia and proposed to Endesa to foot the bill for the first and only state of the art research station in all of Patagonia. Endesa agreed to do so because building an ecological research station is in line with conservation goals, and this would look pretty good coming from a not-so-green supercompany. I feel that the station lives up to its somewhat conflicted ideological roots. On the one hand there are hippy-dippy sustainability initiatives at this station, such as growing our own vegetables, keeping a beehive, and sorting the trash between biodegradable and non-biodegradable. On the other hand, there seems to be no initiative to implement some water or electricity saving rules. Whatever the motives, Huinay was opened for business in 2001 and great science was had by all!

The story of its conception gave me the answer to the question of why Huinay was so swanky: it had been funded by one of the richest companies in South America! Everything was very, VERY, nice. When I first arrived at Huinay Katie led me up an immaculate flagstone path through overhanging leaves and vines towards a wooden (tree)house. I was to live in the scientists’ house which had a large common room complete with couches, table and chairs, and a kitchenette. I am sharing a room with the other intern, Annika. And what a room! Complete with a desk, enormous shelf space, an en-suite bathroom, and sliding glass doors that lead to a balcony. Delightful! Equal to the quality of the room is the quality of the view. Out on the balcony I can look over the treetops and the blue ocean right to the forested cloud-laced fjord on the other side. Not too shabby right?

I feel like I should have mentioned this before, but here goes, Huinay is very isolated. There are no roads that lead to it; it is only possible to get here by boat. The only thing here other than the research station is a “village”, and I put village in quotes because it is comprised of two houses and a school. School is out right now, but during the year it has about 15 students, mostly the children of salmon farmers who have the option of living at the school during the year if it’s more convenient. On the station there are another handful of people. On the science side we have Ulo and Katie as the research coordinators and David the GIS guy. Sole and Reinhardt have lived on the station since the beginning and they take care of the administrative side along with Lola. Dennis and Veronica cook, Marco, Hernan, and Meli are boat captains/ maintenance workers. And then people come and go. One of the purposes of the station is to receive groups of visiting scientists. A couple of groups will be arriving in the next weeks so it is about to feel very crowded compared to the deserted island vibe we have right now.

So that was the story of how Huinay came to be here which explains why I am typing on my computer in a treehouse on what feels like a deserted island, but is actually on a fjord firmly attached to the Chilean coast. I’m about to go pick a bowl of blueberries from the garden patch which I will eat with some yoghurt that we keep in the fridge in the common room, because we have a fridge in the common room! Though this kind of opulence may feel wrong in this lush deserted island setting, I’m not complaining, it’s nice to have the best of both worlds.

73° North and on what planet am I?

On Sunday, I went with 5 of my labmates on a road trip to the Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean. I was very excited to dip my toes in this ocean that so few people have been to. Even the insistence of the Prudhoe Bay veterans that touching the water at Prudhoe was not something that I wanted to do, could not dampen my spirits. Why do you not really want to get the Arctic water on or near you? Because Prudhoe Bay is the largest oil and gas producer in the United States, and you have to pass through miles of oil wells and refineries to get to the ocean. Needless to say, the waters lapping up on these shores of industrial activity are not the cleanest. To even see the ocean, you have to take a tour of the oil fields. There’s only one road, and it goes to Prudhoe, there is physically no other way to even see the ocean without taking tour. So we signed up to take the tour.

On the road to Prudhoe. You can see Franklin Bluffs in the first picture on the right.

The trip up was about 2 hours and a half of dirt road and rolling tundra. The road follows the Sag river, short for Sagavarnirktok (I had to double check the spelling), through a very uniform landscape of flat green tundra. About half an hour before getting to Prudhoe, we pass the Franklin Bluffs, a long series of cliffs that were names for John Franklin, an explorer who apparently spotted the cliffs all the way from the ocean. We pass a mileage sign to Deadhorse. So I’m a little bit confused about our final destination, is it Prudhoe or Deadhorse? Deadhorse is the name of the “town” in Prudhoe bay. I put “town” in quotation marks, because it isn’t really a town. No one actually lives there permanently. But it has housing and facilities for the 3000+ seasonal workers that come to work in the oil fields. As we approached Deadhorse we could see the industrial facilities stretching out in a line on the horizon. It was enormous. Easy to understand that Prudhoe bay and Deadhorse blur into one big mass.

As we were a little early for our tour, we first drove around to see what Deadhorse has to offer. As we soon discovered, it was not a whole lot. There is a general store, where we stopped to browse the selection of souvenirs that shamelessly take advantage of the ridiculousness of the town’s name. There is a dining hall. And, as a spectacular bonus, there’s a tanning salon. And that’s basically all the entertainment that Deadhorse has to offer. What it did have in abundance were a lot of prefrabicated boxy buildings, the purpose of which were hard to discover. I guess housing possibly? It was definitely a very weird place to be. It looked like a settlement on an alien planet. All these buildings were very colorful, but covered in a thick layer of dust. That and the lack of people milling about gave it a very ghost town feel. After buying our souvenirs, we walked around a little bit, trying unsuccessfully to find signs of life. I got the feeling that this would not be a very fun place to live, especially in the winter during 24 hour darkness. There’s really only so much tanning you can do.

We finally found Deadhorse Camp, a two-story derelict mustard building which served as housing for tourists, and waited for our tour to begin while watching a band of caribou frolic next to Dalton Highway. About 10 minutes after the tour was supposed to begin, a man in a blue jumpsuit presents himself as our tour guide and invites us to board a dust-covered minibus. Our final destination was the east docks, about 45 minutes away. The tour was quite interesting, the guide pointed out the functions of different buildings, told us about life working at Prudhoe (you get two weeks of daily 12 hour shifts then two weeks off, and you get paid a ridiculously high salary), and some tidbits about the hardships of working in the winter. I just couldn’t get over how vast the oil fields were. The west docks were so far away that rather than using the airport at Deadhorse, it is more economical for them to have their own airport. Crazy. It just went on and on and on.

After 45 minutes of driving past refineries and oil wells and gravel pits, we finally made it to a little spit of gravel that jutted out into the Arctic Ocean. I saw immediately that the warnings of my friends about the unsanitary nature of the water were not exaggerated. There were rusted barrels jutting out and who knows what else hidden in the water. But who cares, I was at the Arctic Ocean, a whole ocean that I had never seen before!! Pretty incredible. Once we were done admiring the view of the water and the refineries-dotted coastline, we piled back into the bus and headed back to Deadhorse. It was getting late, and we had seen what Prudhoe had to offer. Time to go back to Toolik.

While we were on the road, I thought about the oil fields and how revolting they were in their industrial opulence. But the ironic thing is, the road that made it possible for me to get to Toolik only exists because it is necessary for trucks to make the haul between Prudhoe and Fairbanks. Without the oil fields, there would be no reason to have such an extraordinarily high-maintenance road, and without the road, there is no way that Toolik could exist. A strange connection to have, but enabling awesome science slightly redeems Prudhoe in my eyes, even though it was unintentionally done.