Wenger Patagonian Expedition Race 2010
No Comms, No Maps, No Food ... Just Wilderness
Will Gray / 11.02.2010
In 2009 the race had begun in Chilean Patagonia’s main tourism district of Torres del Paine, Puerto Natales and Punta Arenas, where communications had been relatively plentiful for half the race. In stark contrast, this race went out of its way to go out of the way. And it did it very well.
As soon as we had walked 100m away from the ferry port on the upper tip of Tierra del Fuego, all mobile phone coverage was extinguished and we were on our own. We were now reachable only by satellite connection, and as you may have noticed, that has turned out to be rather unreliable.
When we tested the antenna in Punta Arenas it didn’t work. It logged on, but it couldn’t find the satellite. Chile obviously wasn’t a priority when the folks who put the satellites in the sky planned their routes around the globe. When we looked on the map for the one satellite that should have been able to help us out, we found it. It was in Africa.
Last night it was in India. And this morning, when we went up the hill to try and get a better ‘view’ of the sky, well, we don’t really know where it was. But it certainly wasn’t there.
Fortunately, plentiful Organikos coffee helped us through the ordeal but it still couldn’t help us get out of there – because the ferry had been stopped for 11 hours and the island was running out of petrol.
Which is why we’ve been sitting in our smelly sheep shack for most of the day, working on photos, stories and racer comments in the hope that sometime soon we will be able to tell the story to the outside world!
And now we can.
SleepMonsters
