Four of the six South Georgia passengers arrived in Santiago early this morning, with everyone but myself having a ticket that allowed them to overnight in the capital. Lan Chile booked me on an 8:00 PM flight out of Santiago, which would have meant spending the day in the Santiago airport and sleeping on the floor of the Puerto Montt airport at night, but luckily I was able to switch to an 8:30 AM flight. After arriving in Puerto Montt it quickly became apparent that no one in this city speaks a single word of English, so my three-word Spanish vocabulary (“burrito”, “taco” and “cervesa”) was put to creative uses in order to get a taxi from the airport and then a room in a hotel. I’m not yet in full-on travel mode, but after flying over the jagged peaks of the Andes, running the airport’s taxi cab gauntlet, and getting a discounted room price despite barely knowing what the hotel owner was saying, it’s a fair assessment to say that the side of me that spent the past six months trapped in a cubicle is now fading quickly into memory.
"My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?" — David Mitchell