As we well knew, but jokingly disregarded, ‘Evangelistas’ was no conventional cruise ship, at least not in a present day understanding. More a cargo vessel that takes a few paying passengers than the slab-sided, deck-windowed condominium-booze-cruiser, neither steam-tramp nor the triple smoke-stacked liner of a bygone era as suggested by one example of wall art.

Three decks loaded with floats of live horses, liquid oxygen tankers and anonymous tarp’d trailers, cars, vans and long-distance motorbikes. As well as three pedal cycles whose riders’ average age is in the mid-sixties. Not quite ‘Evangelistas’ score; at 47 years she’s approaching her imminent retirement, and on first acquaintance, she looks her age. Careworn in a literal sense, weather-beaten around the edges as any craft would be from plying twice weekly the length of the southern Chilean fiords, but obviously cared for. The weeping rust blisters might be mascara’d in white paint, but the linoleum floor is render polished to a glazed mock mahogany.

We’d packed ear plugs, well versed with experiences from North Sea crossings where every pipe, bolt and brain cell would seem intent upon rattling loose. Only to be politely informed that she’s Japanese built, German powered, Chilean crewed. Solid. Quiet. Proud.

The initial publicity suggested that she was a ‘floating hostel’, which had raised a few interesting doubts. Too often hostels are populated with a certain demographic who adhere to the mantra that ‘others’ will clean the pasta-encrusted saucepan they abandoned yesterday in a festering sink, fatbergs floating in a cold water slick of congealing grease. Whilst they, and a room full of similar ingratiates interrogate their social media accounts. Sitting in an observance of hermetical silence until midnight at which point life reinvigorates the body.

Only this ‘hostel’ comes with no connectivity.

What’s to do for four days?

Four Brexit-free days.

It doesn’t have alcohol either, which might explain why three dinner tables have been pushed together and a 2000 piece jigsaw has all the straight edges in place, a triple language Scrabble contest emerges and a card school materialises.

No connectivity?

What’s to do for the next four days?

Four wind-free non-bicycle days.

Once the chore of consuming three major meals each day is replete (extra points have been awarded for the quality of the breakfast porridge), there’s the rolling tapestry of shorescapes to be contemplated. A slow scrolling reel, an unfurling braid of glaciers, mountains and sea-states that stitch the sky to sea. An utterly empty shore; at night there are no human lights to be seen, just the vast aurora of infinite stars.

No connectivity.

What’s to do for the next four days

Four Trump-stress-free days.

Yet there’s always something happening, little vignettes, minor short stories… five dolphins breach the silent surface heading directly for our bow and then disappear. A flock of bonxie-skuas so engorged on the floating bloated whale carcass that they can only flap frenetically out of the ship’s way, or the solitary albatross carving through the mounting wave troughs. The distant spout of a Minke whale that empties the dining lounge at lunch time, only to then energise an overexcited imagination when a leviathan-like garden of storm-torn kelp slides past. Every stick is a sea otter, every islet a seal colony, every wave disturbance another fauna spotting.

Trouble is – many are.

Other short stories are just as intriguing; there’s the freighter that’s perched on a submerged rock, an insurance scam that didn’t quite go to plan. Her non-existent sugar cargo was supposed to be lost in the fjord’s vast depths; greed and miscalculation has left it perched high and dry, serving as a monument for opportunism. Now a tern roost.

But maybe the most impressive moment of the passage is when the ‘Evangelistas’ slips on an inter-tidal slack water through ‘Angostura White’; a narrows with only two ship’s widths of clearance, one for each side. The surrounding mountains overhanging the ship’s superstructure, every gale-gnarled tree, every lichen-etched rock, chiseled stark on an ever more intimate shore.

Just breathe in.

Still no connectivity.

What’s left to do?

Chat.

When your ear is attuned to capturing key Spanish words in any conversation, it comes as a surprise when the first thing I hear coming on board is pure ‘weegie’ and being informed of the latest major news development from the West of Scotland… the impending management shuffle at Glasgow Celtic FC. Martin is fresh from finding a diaspora of lost cousins who happen to be sheep-men in Tierra del Fuego. Then there’s Jack at 73 years, who has just cycled the Labrador Highway, virtually convincing us to try the same. Or the Oregonian who, on finding out our nationality, declaims: ‘My People!” He’s fresh from discovering that he’s 82% Scots and has 12 kilts issued by the US military.(?)

And that probably captures the essence of the ‘Evangelistas’, a community of the inconsequential and inspiring. And, yes she is an ‘hostel’; but one where people chat, where there’s time to sea-gaze vacantly, where its left to the professional truck drivers to complete the clear sea-blue expanses of that giant jigsaw on the final evening.

One where everybody clears up after themselves.