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.