Punta Arenas, Chile

Arrived in Punta Arenas last night with The Duchess and we proceeded to gorge ourselves on the King Crab and Scallops that are the local specialty. Could barely move afterward.

Spent the day wandering around the local Municipal Cemetary, where a person can be dead in some serious Catholic style or some serious Catholic poverty, depending on your preference. Saw everything from the massive mausoleum of the main local sheep baron, which supposely is a scale model of some famous monolithic European monument that I´ve never heard of, to a hand-pained wooden sign announcing the premature death of a nine-month old child hung over a small patch of fenced garden about the size of a notebook. The graves are all decorated with that enthusiastic disregard for symmetry and composition that typifies the religious Latin American aesthetic, with as many flowers, figurines, framed photographs, grisly crucifixes, beatific Madonnas, thick candles, and tacky plaques crammed into the colorfully-painted plastered concrete-walled sites as possible. Enormous Marge Simpson topiaries separate the rows and the outer edges are lined with vaults about eight high where a coffin is inserted morgue-style behind a small picture window displaying the various aforementioned devotions. A wheeled ladder of the kind you might see in a nice bookstore allows people to pay their respected to loved ones in the upper rows.

Heading to Tierra del Fuego tomorrow by the usual route after our plans to take busses across a less-trodden path were foiled by the destruction of a gravel road somewhere in Argentina.

Learned this today: Even though the water flushes in a different direction and the constellations are all different down here, the smell of freshly cut grass in the sun is exactly the same as back home.

Also: This may be the house where Shackleton came to ask for a Chilean boat to go rescue his men when he finally arrived in Punta Arenas: