The piramid

Since I was a child I liked maps, I spent hours reviewing a world map that my mother bought me. What I never had and always wanted was a globe, to admire the size and proportions of the entire earth. I wanted my room to be like in adventurers and explorers movies full of maps, exotic objects and mysterious relics from far away places. I fantasized about owning my own planet earth and mentally traveling anywhere in the world, from the north pole to the south, from ultra-known cities like Paris or New York, to the unknown Bismarck mountain range of Papua New Guinea or the tepuis of southern Venezuela. All of that would be at my fingertips.

However, my disappointment came when my father, obsessed with saving, decided that the world map was more than enough. After insisting a lot, I managed to get him to buy me a balloon, but this was not made of a resistant material, it was a small globe made of flimsy plastic, which had to be inflated with air; It was not what I imagined. As if that was not enough, a week later my childhood misfortune worsened when I saw that the balloon had been punctured. It was partially deflated, as if the interior of the planet was being sucked in, but it still had some air left to resist gravity. Despite being a disappointing gift, I decided it deserved to be saved. So I used special glue for plastic and looked for the crack on its surface. Finally I found it, it was located in the south of the Indian Ocean, guiding me by my geographical curiosity I noticed that the island of Amsterdam was located in that area of ​​the planet. A French overseas possession, an uninhabited island with a hostile climate that is only visited at certain times of the year by French researchers. After replacing the globe, I looked on my precious world map, which would never be punctured, and I noticed that near Amsterdam there was another island, that of Saint Paul further south. Reading in encyclopedias I discovered that they all belonged to the French Southern and Antarctic Lands. Why did those islands so small, remote and devoid of people thrill me? I don't know. Perhaps they interested me precisely because they were so uninteresting, because they were uninhabited, or because they were relatively close to Antarctica, the lost continent often called the end of the world. The ocean served as the boundary between the known world and the frozen and hidden mysteries of the southern continent.

Over time, and forgetting my disappointment with the globe, I looked everywhere for any information about those islands. The search was fun and interesting, but I reached my limit when I discovered something that was otherwise very obvious. Being uninhabited islands, there are not many people who could report on them and all those who have done so were French, whose language did not know. I settled for reading summaries of scientific papers and encyclopedia entries translated by Spaniards. State of the climate, type of flora and fauna, means of getting there and details of the tiny scientific station where its inhabitants live stations. Despite being trivial information it seemed to me an interesting world, a mysterious place, but not extravagant. I myself was surprised by the obsession with that area of ​​the globe, however when there was nothing new to read, I just stopped paying attention to them. Every few months, at least once a year, he returned to look for data on that distant land of France, as if waiting for new news or a new discovery, no matter how small. But I couldn't find anything, sometimes I thought about studying French and thus expanding my search capacity, but I didn't dare. Studying a language was always difficult and doing it just to satisfy my curiosity for some islands on the edge of the world seemed disproportionate to me.

I could talk about the vicissitudes I had to go through to choose the career I had to study once I reached seventeen years of age and the end of school was approaching. But whatever analysis or excuse you say will lead to the same conclusion, I ended up studying geology. It was eight long years where I lived all kinds of experiences, and I graduated with more than decent results. However, in those growing years I never forgot the islands at the end of the world that had so intrigued me in the past. From time to time the memory of that disappointing balloon motivated me, in turn, to look for data on the French southern lands, as an experience that arrives and does not leave me free.