TOO MUCH MONEY
By miscalculation of some sort we were hundreds of pesos too much. Here was our last chance to get rid of them. Sugar Foot and I footed it around to the main part of town to buy most anything worthwhile, small and light, and to mail some letters.
The mailing of letters, with reasonable assurance of their arrival at destination, is a real chore. You must go to the post office. So far as I know, post offices are always crowded down here. In the confusion of a foreign language you must first select the correct windows in the correct order, especially if you want to register and air mail your letters. If you send by regular mail, the addressees will be confined to wheel chairs ere the arrival of such mail.
We looked and looked to spend all those extra pesos. She saw nothing whatsoever. We did buy the Dec. 26th Latin-American edition of Time in English for 35 pesos, but that didn't make a dent in our sheaves of Chilean money.
Then she had a brilliant idea. "Tonight is New Year's Eve. Let's buy some Chilean champagne and burgundy for the table tonight. We still have three more nights on shipboard to use any surplus."
Two fairly heavy packages and two boys to carry them about solved our peso problem.
Well, about 9 p.m. it was announced—just like that—the captain was giving a dance and New Year's party.
New Year's Day, 1950, our first and only stop was Ilo, Peru, where we took on 47 tons of canned tuna fish. Some five miles out, going to Ilo, I saw drove after drove of . . . guano birds. I had seen the snowlike tops of the rocks on shore in the distance. Guano is a fertilizer and big business down here. If it hadn't been for the guano birds there would have been no Grace Lines, now 100 years old.
Most of the west coast of South America is a desolate place. Mountains of brown bare earth and rock rise and stretch inland, parallel to the coast. It just never rains. The cold Humboldt stream sees to that. The sun shines hot, but the air is cold, even in mid-day. The towns and cities look dusty and worn, like the dry sections of the U.S. Lots of adobe-looking buildings. The whole country is drier than a rambo apple.