You never know where you’re going to end up. Life is one long helter-skelter of movement, impressions and experience. Fab if you don’t weaken; the hardest part is assimilating it all, especially when compounded with a heady cocktail of well-crafted and provocative literature viz ‘The Piano Tuner’ by Daniel Mason, a powerful, compulsive but quirky novel that has prompted me to visit Burma, which it is now P.C. to do, I’m assured. (What an amoebic sentence! Six main ideas, linked by punctuation, abbreviations and causal connectives.) Unlike El Calafate, which is a tiny town growing rapidly on the basis that it now has an airport, Puerto Natales is an old lakeside town that is going nowhere. El Calafate has a modern vibrancy in the main street, a ‘young set’ feel, with architecture a blend of Wild Western house form and Scandinavian or Alpine log-clad kitsch. Puerto Natales is a grid of grotty shacks, fly-blown shops and a sad, graffiti-ed park. The leylandii are well-clipped – here, they treat them like yew trees – but the pavements are hazardous and the wind is raw. No surprise then that it’s in the province of ‘Ultima Esperanza’ – ‘Last Hope’. We arrived by bus across the pampas, and now I know why the 70s baths were so called – a dry, sagey, wind-bleached colour. Stick to white. The limescale doesn’t show so much. If the palaver at the border is any indication, there’s no love lost between Argentina and Chile – two queues for passport control 3 miles apart, policing a straight line N/S on the map, so on some arbitrary, bleak, God-forsaken prairie. M. Lebas was lucky though – I found his passport in the shop and recognised him (probably) from our bus. Fortunately, it was him – and he was pretty grateful. As it’s New Year’s Eve, we sought the best restaurant –i.e. our hotel, but it was full, so had to go to 2nd best. ENORMOUS portions, lovely atmosphere, astonishingly competent staff and fine wines. El Tunel, the night club was empty at 11.45, so we returned to our hotel for a free party with bubbly. Happy New Year!!