El Fin del Mundo...

…is what they call this place at the tip of South America. Its main settlement, Ushuaia, is proclaimed as the southern-most city in the world – a (very long) stone’s throw from Antarctica. It’s also the furthest from home on my Churchill Travelling Fellowship travels, before the long trek home in a few days’ time.

Perched on steepening hillsides that emerge from the Beagle Channel to cloud-piercing Tolkien-esque peaks, the town is expanding rapidly. It does feel like the last frontier – like it and I shouldn’t really be here. I wonder how it looked when Darwin himself sailed up the Channel in the Beagle in 1835.

Exploring aimlessly the grid-pattern streets of the town, the population is a combination of locals and tourists, of all shapes, sizes and nationalities. The vast majority of Antarctic tourists embarks/ disembarks at Ushuaia, hence the enormous boats docked incongruously in the port. Unusually for my two-month journey, there are even some British people! The town’s buildings are a mixture of the old and the new. The old are generally one or two story buildings of corrugated metal or wood, often painted bright colours, with a preponderance of northern European architectural styles. The town centre’s newer buildings are typical of everywhere else you’ve ever been. A hint of wackiness reminds me I am still in Latin America as a splendidly decorated London double-decker bus turns the corner and rather gruesome graffiti converts bare walls into political messages I don’t understand. Dominating the western end of the water front is a powerful monument to Las Malvinas/ the Falkland Islands, with its own political message, back-dropped by yet another hideous casino.

Las Malvinas monument

The impressive Museo Penitenciario is the local museum housed in the old prison building, which was built as an isolated jail for Argentina’s 19^th century undesirables. The prisoners’ old cells exhibit the natural history of the area and its fascinating – and not-that-distant – human history and its reliance on the sea, Antarctic exploration and of course, Las Malvinas/ the Falklands. Life-size prison guard replicas watch menacingly over the traipsing tourists. The star of the experience is really the eerie, empty, unrestored prison wing as cold, grey and damp, as it was when the last prisoner left.

I figure I need some exercise after weeks of sitting in every imaginable mode of transport, so leave Ushuaia behind and head into the mountains on foot towards the Cerro Martial glacier. The multi-hairpin road takes the edge off the gradient, but I probably expend as much energy anyway over the greater distance. I walk, again, through re-growing, once-flattened forests although parts of it are being squeezed tighter to the snow-line as the town moves inexorably uphill. I take a cable car part of the way up – purely for the view you understand – and scramble the rest of the way over snow-melt streams and steep banks of glacial moraines. I then climb on all fours, over ice and rock, to get to the very edge of the glacial stub, in a stupendous amphitheatre of geology. The Cerro Martial glacier has receded rapidly over the last century and is now hardly worthy of the name, its icy remnants gripping the precipitous rocky bed at the head of its now over-sized U-shaped home. Supersonic clouds zip over the peaks behind me blown by a wind that I can’t feel as I eat my empanada lunch seated on a rock in the sun. The view down the valley, over Ushuaia and for tens of miles along the Beagle Channel to the west and the mountains of the very tip of South America to the south, is spectacular. Occasionally thicker clouds turn the landscape monochrome and the thermometer drops by several degrees. I have a long and more challenging walk back due to my old rugby knee injury, but take the time to stock up with calories at the best cake house in South America – the Casa de Te.

U-shaped to Ushuaia then east along the Beagle

 

Departing Ushuaia for a day on the Beagle

The next day I venture out on a boat trip 85km westwards along the Beagle Channel to Estancia Harberton, which was established by descendants of Thomas Bridges who came to the area in the 19^th century to protect the indigenous peoples from exploitation. It’s a full day’s sea travel, with two full days of weather, which changes markedly from benign but grey to squally showers and fierce winds. Our boat traces the invisible, wet frontier between Chile and Argentina, halting at various sites: the Faros les Eclaireurs lighthouse, southern sea lions/ fur seals, and, excitingly a colony of (mainly) Magellanic penguins. Our boat is deliberately beached so that intrepid tourists can snap photos like the Galapagos tourists I observed a few weeks ago – only with more insulation! OK penguins are cute, but to me the even more extraordinary site was the island where they hang out. The Isla Gable is about 8km east to west and almost crosses the entire channel. It is formed by the terminal moraine dumped at the snout of the stupendous glacier that gouged out the 105km long, 5km wide, 200m deep Channel (a terminal moraine marks the limit of glacier’s advance, where the rate of melting equals the rate of advance resulting in the rocky debris being deposited in the same spot, building up a ridge of rocky waste). A few miles beyond this is the wild South Atlantic Ocean and the direct route to Antarctica.

Penguins

Estancia Harberton

Sailing back on our half-empty catamaran, the weather has turned considerably for the worse! I seek solitude on the deck – stung by icy sea spray driven by an Abrutat-flattening wind as a net curtain of dark grey showers are pulled across the Beagle Channel by the invisible hands of a southern gale. Streamers of sea froth whip up from a frenzied sea as wind and chop try to stymie us – to no avail – this is a good boat.



Ushuaia from the Beagle Channel

On the Channel, it dawns on me that this whole Latin American journey has not just been “Chasing the Sun”, nor even just an appreciation of James Bond (Rio de Janeiro, Everglades), but most importantly, and unwittingly, has traced the expeditions of Charles Darwin – a personal inspiration.



Back in calm waters

It’s my last evening in Patagonia after two and a half weeks and, despite the threatening clouds, I saunter outside to catch my last sunset. It’s not a classic, but stunning nevertheless as the low sunlight turns clouds into a spectrum of dark grey shades tinted faintly with purples, blues and pinks, over the wild mountains and seas of El Fin del Mundo.

To The End of the World

It was the highlight of my mediocre Spanish to date; I had managed to negotiate my bus tickets for the two-day overland journey from El Calafate to Ushuaia and actually received what I asked for!

The parting from Lisi and Jane was unexpectedly sad. We had spent the equivalent of many days cramped in a mobile, small metal box, sharing our lives and the road trip experience of a lifetime through some of the remotest landscapes in South America – and it ended as I left the Nissan for the last time as they kindly dropped me off at El Calafate bus station. But, leaving and arriving is what travellers do and, for the moment, that is what I am. Gotta keep on keeping on!

It takes about five hours for the crowded bus to drive the (for once) tarmacked road between these two major towns of southern Argentina. The pace is frustratingly slow considering the road is good, empty and straight with a following Patagonian gale! With the Andes long since diminished over the western horizon, the landscape increases in blandness under a grey sky – I feel encapsulated in the muted greys and browns of the 1970s. The further east we travel, the flatter and more featureless the terrain becomes – an antipodean landscape of Bronte-esque bleakness. The highest visible structures are the fence-posts supporting thousands of kilometres of wire around vast estancias. Near settlements these wires fish litter from the wind leaving it fluttering wildly like a million scruffy prayer flags.

Through the bus window somewhere between El Calafate and Rio Gallegos

I overnight in the non-descript town of Río Gallegos, characterised by wind, dust and a general brownness. The entrance to the town was marked by a number of roadside caravans, all held down against the wind by thick steel cables and enormous iron pegs.

I rise early the following morning to catch the bus for a mammoth day of travelling across two international borders and the whole of Tierra del Fuego to reach the penultimate destination of my entire trip. At first glance the short distance on the map does not marry with the 12 hour time allocated for the journey by the bus company. This illusion is intensified by the fast, paved road heading south towards the Chilean border. It is when we reach the border that I realize that the international flirting with Chile at this southern tip of the continent is the main reason for the long day.

Making the border crossing into Chile takes two hours! This arbitrary line across the narrow end of the continent that separates nothing but politics means that my food supplies for the whole journey have to be either discarded or consumed immediately – they cannot be taken into Chile! So, I gorge myself on lunch and evening meal, and it’s not yet 10 in the morning, and I’ve only just finished breakfast.

Once across the border we arrive shortly at the famed Strait of Magellan – a memory straight from my early ‘80s, O-level geography text book. The landing craft-style ferry shuttles almost sideways to account for the perpendicular gale along the strait and struggle onto the landing ramp.

Strait of Magellan ferry struggling to the ramp through the Patagonian gale

From the ferry I watch a small pod of tiny, penguin-coloured (and almost penguin-sized), tiny dolphins, known as Commerson’s dolphins, twisting and porpoising around us. They are the smallest cetaceans in the world.






Poor pic of the "highway" across Tierra del Fuego

After the short ferry ride, the bus departs on one of the most bizarre bus journeys I’ve ever been on. For a couple of hours our bus twists and bumps along what we in Cornwall would call a farm track, complete with grassy strip down the middle, through a familiar, homely land of green, rounded hills. We do not meet any other vehicles in this part of Chile, and I guess the Chileans have no interest in upgrading a road to simply let travellers travel faster through their country between the two disjointed parts of Argentina. The dust from the road and the Strait of Magellan salt encrusts the windows making photos through them, from inside the bus, impossible (hence the lack of decent photos accompanying this blog posting).

We reach the north-south Argentine border on Tierra del Fuego (another hour or so of my life never to be recovered), then finally onwards on a decent road towards Rio Grande, through which we drive. My attention is captured by the prominent monument to Las Islas Malvinas (the Falkland Islands), proclaiming loudly over their sovereignty.

The road, the Ruta 3, parallels the Atlantic shore for a while before turning inland. The toe-end of the Andes gradually re-emerges – as welcome and reassuring as an old friend – and the landscape becomes hillier with increasing southern beech forest. The forest, initially stunted, soon comes to dominate, although the common Patagonian footprint of man’s forest depredations is obvious from mile upon mile of discarded, silvery, wooden skeletons forming a contrasting backdrop to the regenerating greenery.

A dog-leg around the eastern end of the Lago Fagnano and a steep mountain climb takes us on the last stretch to Ushuaia. We halt briefly at the Paso Garibaldi, surrounding by darkening mountain peaks as the sun sets, before descending a twisting, forested mountain road towards the Beagle Channel and Ushuaia – over 13 hours since setting off from Rio Gallegos.

Lago Fagnano

We reach Ushuaia, the mysterious pin-prick on the world maps I have poured over all my life, and I feel a sense of quiet contentment.