Robinson Crusoe Island - No Friday on Sunday

Sunday, 12 October – Robinson Crusoe Island, Chile

 

429 miles sailing from the Chilean coast is Mas a Tierra which oddly enough means “Closer to Land”. The Chileans upon realizing that 429 miles isn’t really close renamed the largest of the islands of the Juan Fernandez archipelago, Robinson Crusoe Island. Why this name was chosen is unknown other than a sailor named Alexander Selkirk was marooned here in 1704. He lived alone on this volcanic rock (the highest of a number of the incredibly green mountains here rises to 3,000 feet above sea level) for almost 4½ years before being rescued by a ship carrying a writer named Daniel Defoe. Hey, do you think….? Nah.

 

Selkirk’s journal states that by the time he was recued he could no longer speak intelligibly and “had only goats as friends”. He mentions one goat particularly fondly, but he told Defoe that he only saw it socially on Fridays. Perhaps the details got changed a bit in the novel. Actually RCI is pretty darn spectacular. There are 146 native species of plants of which 101 exist no where else and all sorts of interesting birds and about 1000 seals which are known for their bad breathe. Honest. (This might explain Selkirk’s interest in goats, not seals.) The very rare Double Skinned Seal lives here. I told a number of the others at lunch that this was so that they could swim through the ice when the water was frozen. A few wrote that down in their notes. The guide book also speaks lovingly of the red hummingbird which is famous for “its needle-fine black beak and silken feather coverage.” I believe Selkirk might have written the guidebook.

 

We arrived this morning during a rainstorm that seemed only to be only turning the unpaved streets to mud but made for a pretty nifty sunrise—we anchored at 8 am in the dark due to the ill advised time change to daylight savings time for all of Chile last night—and sailed out of Cumberland Bay four hours later apparently because the sun came out and the mud was drying out. I took the first ship’s tender (we call it “the cork”) and after documenting my visit to “country #121 upon landing made a little hike up a hill to the aeronautical radio and automated weather site for the airstrip on the other side of the island (they use a ferry to get people around the island from the airstrip to town) and then back around the town. The surprisingly pretty and well kept municipality of San Juan Bautista accommodates 100% of the entire islands population of 600. The town runs a TVRO dish and rebroadcasts a number of TV channels to the locals from a couple of yagi antennas on a pole. Since a total number of tourists of only a few hundred a year actually visit Robinson Crusoe Island, those of us who left the ship here pretty much made for 1/3^rd of the 2008 count. So it was pretty surprising that the couple of shops in town opened only for about an hour before closing for the day. It was equally surprising that the shops had picture postcards of OUR SHIP on them, island tee-shirts and hats, and the tiny post office opened. The crowd of ship’s passengers were a bit disappointed that the PO only could sell them regular Chilean postage stamps. That is, none of the stamps were unique to Robinson Crusoe Island, but ultimately that didn’t seem to limit the trade. I suspect the postcards mailed from here will arrive with the next shipment of spiny lobsters for which the island is famous. This might explain why there is a small restaurant on the wharf. It is named, “The Slow Restaurant”. Honest. I guess the pace of life (and restaurant service) is slow here. This is a this little rock in the middle of the South Pacific 500 miles from Santiago, Chile for heaven’s sake. It all makes sense. Even the goat thing.

 

By the way, the 2^nd sink in the bathroom in my suite is ideal for washing the mud off shoes. The Bulgari bath soap will make the sneakers smell very nice. Now for 3½ days at sea to find out if we can actually land at Easter Island.