Happy to be speechless

Still wedded, if not welded, to my comfort zone, I was horrified yet impressed to see I had not only stepped outside it but I had actually left it, liquidated like a greenish witch at the end of a movie, melting in a puddle on the flagstones hissing, "Oh what a world, what a world".

What to make of it? Have I exchanged my character, Freaky Friday-style, with an adventuresome person? It was all very odd.

It threatens your identity, doing things differently, it threatens the people who know you too, because their ideas about you must shift. And if you start doing one or two things in a new way, putting yourself in situations you would normally avoid, will you, before the week is out, find all your systems rebooted, your ordinary saving routines swept aside, your very sense of self up for grabs, diverted, reinvented, unrecognisable? Well, maybe. A self-help guru I have a weakness for says the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. I've always thought that was nonsense. Can it be true?

All I knew was this: when I showed people a picture of me in Patagonia, standing reasonably close to the glacier at Perito Moreno, a vast area of ice that covers 97 square miles - 97 square miles! - all people seemed to say to me, me, who feels intrepid in a rowing boat on the Regent's Park lake, was: "Oh my God are you wearing a fleece?"

"That was not the half of it," I said.

The glacier was a pale blue colour on the morning we saw it. It was stately and inspiring and it was monstrous, a solid argument for something. It also made me think of the phrase "beautiful murderer". As the sun grew brighter, loud echoey cracks, like rockets or gunfire, could be heard at intervals and blocks of ice would break off and crash into the lake below. It was mesmerising, the best kind of alarm. We took a boat out to get a closer view and lingered at a respectful distance, shivering on deck, looking at the jagged icy skyline towering above our heads.

As you peered at the ice, you could make out caves and craters where patches of deep inky blue light appeared to be shining.

I thought of poems that featured ruined ships such as "The Wreck of the Deutschland" by Gerard Manley Hopkins: "Hope had grown grey hairs/

Hope had mourning on . . . "

I thought of Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain" with its chilling foreboding:

"And as the smart ship grewIn stature, grace, and hue,In shadowy silent distance grew the iceberg too . . . "

For a moment, yes, I suppose, I felt like an imperilled ship. I wondered if this almost-impossible-to believe-vision would have a medicinal effect on me. Could the ice cauterise something undesirable or uncertain? Freeze it out like that old-school treatment of verrucas that made it seem as though your foot was on fire.

I wasn't even quite sure how I happened to be at the glacier. I am constitutionally unsuited to travelling. My last holiday was an overnight stay in Bath. And yet, two days after that iceberg trip, I was in a boat on the inside of a waterfall, so completely wet that I thought the water had got on the inside of my skin. I was nauseous and angry. There are people with real problems out there, why are we creating fake hardship? I sulked. Yet the waterfall had caught my imagination. How ever much I looked at it, I couldn't make out its motivation. Was it furious, was it completely hysterical? Did it know best? I hummed a few bars of "Ol' Man River". We heard someone ask how much water was pumped around the site, in the belief that the 2km Iguazu Falls were some kind of amusement park attraction. The guide was kind but firm. On the way to the falls that morning, in the jungle, I had been told how to act if a jaguar should approach. I amused myself by imagining what they told the jaguar to do if it saw me.

I thought of Anne Tyler's unlikely hero in The Accidental Tourist, who writes guides on how to minimise the impact of any new place, how you can learn to set your internal compass so efficiently that anywhere in the world feels like home. On the cover of the first edition there was an armchair with wings.

And what about my motivation? I always thought the drama of the internal world far outclasses anything the external world can offer, so why had I come to sights so wondrous they would leave me speechless? Is it the only way I could stop myself talking?

[email protected], @SusieBoyt

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