“Bloody South American buggers won’t let us in anywhere with Corona beer!” laments retired Cathay Pacific hero Kevin Hoban.
World exclusive! Tim Metcalfe reports from somewhere out at sea!
(Panama Canal, 18 March 2020) – What began as a somewhat fascinating but uneventful cruise has turned into an epic unpredictable adventure into the unknown for Sai Kung pensioner Kevin Hoban.
The 70 year-old retired Cathay Pacific flight engineer anticipated little more excitement than encountering penguins, icebergs, fjords and glaciers on his South American voyage aboard ‘Oceania Princess’ from Tierra del Fuego on the southernmost tip to Peru.
Despite being helpfully informed that his windswept port of embarkation, Ushuaia, is nicknamed “End of the World”, he remained innocently unperturbed of what cruel twist of fate might lie in wait.
“Apart from the possibility of a Titanic collision with an iceberg, or being shipwrecked rounding infamously treacherous Cape Horn, my only concern was sea-sickness, or becoming incomprehensibly inebriated at dinner on the Captain’s Table,” he said.
Not surprisingly, a bout of queasiness and inevitable indulgence in Argentina’s robust, rousing Malbec did indeed ensue.
“But apart from a few nightly occasions, which my long-suffering wife Theresa repeatedly lamented as ‘so very embarrassing!’ everything was pretty much hunky dory.”
Or so he thought.
His first indication that a cruise from “End of the World” quite clearly suggests ominous uncertainty ahead next arose at several scheduled ports of call up Chile’s breathtakingly beautiful ‘fjord coast’.
“Buggers wouldn’t let us in!” said Kevin, disappointedly. “Something about Corona beer, which I always thought was a Mexican problem. A bit unfair, really, because I was only imbibing in Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon by this time. Lovely stuff, special reserve!”
Our increasingly bewildered voyager stoically accepted such minor irritations and tribulations, however. “That’s travel for you,” he conceded cheerfully. “It’s the journey that matters, not the destination.”
As it happens, never a truer word was spoken.
Unbeknown to Kevin, on passaging past the relentlessly dull scenery of Chile’s Atacama Desert, notorious as the driest and most lifeless landscape on the planet, his greatest setback of all was looming with accelerating inevitability.
On approaching his final destination – Lima in Peru – he accidentally slipped into slumber polishing off a duty free bottle of 25 year old Macallan, dreaming fondly of flying home to Hong Kong, where he could recount heroic tales of penguins, icebergs and rude Chileans to his admiring drinking buddies.
Almost predictably, it was not to be. So much of Kevin’s adventure into the unknown had somehow gone pear-shaped already that he was only mildly surprised to be rudely awoken by even more distressing news.
Lima, it turned out, was not to be his final destination after all.
“Buggers won’t let us in!” he said, dejectedly. “First Chile, now Peru. Seems like some bloody South American conspiracy against Corona beer! Captain now says he needs to find a port that will accept the ghastly stuff!”
At time of writing, intrepid Kevin was last heard of steaming into the Panama Canal, final destination unknown.
“It’s like bloody Star Trek, boldly going where man has never gone before!” he confided in his last despairing dispatch.
“Everyone’s a bit vague about where we might end up – or more to the point, who will let us in. Captain suggested Miami. But knowing Trump, who knows where they stand with Corona?
“Only time will tell, I suppose. But like I always say, it’s the journey not the destination that counts…..”
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