Here at the end of all things

I bet if Frodo and Sam were on a street corner on the tourist strip in Ushuaia instead of on a rocky island in a sea of lava on the side of an exploding Mount Doom, they wouldn’t have waited passively for what they believed (mistakenly, but that’s another story) was their inevitable exit from this world; instead they would have wasted no time in diving headlong into the molten flood rising towards them. At least, that’s how we felt, at times.

Now, Ushuaia as a whole is a very picturesque town, set in a gorgeous bay of the Beagle Channel with majestic snow-capped mountains rising behind and all around it. It’s got a colourful collection of buildings, and it rises along insanely steep streets away from the water, providing many a place to admire the view.

And it’s an unrivalled base for exploring the fantastic surrounding region of Tierra del Fuego. But despite the town being fairly sizeable it’s difficult to escape the main tourist street, San Martin. And this street is, more than anything else, Bizarro Niagara Falls. Tacky tourist shops are ubiquitous, and the sidewalks are narrow,  and everywhere there are people. Touristy, shopping-bag-toting people. Ushuaia port is the departure point for Antarctic cruises, and when there is a boat in the dock the place is overwhelmingly hectic. The steeply rising streets leading away from the water also add a sense of enclosure that prevents one from really breathing easy at their lower ends. We had one slack day in horrible weather where we spent the whole day in town, and by the end of it we were desperate to get out into the absolutely gorgeous surrounding landscapes. Which we did, and enjoyed immensely: a couple of day-hikes in Parque Nacionale Tiera del Fuego, and a boat cruise on the Beagle Channel to see wildlife and a lighthouse and take in the views on what must have been the calmest day in the icy passage’s history. It was just gorgeous. (Photos to follow, of all these things).

I think my favourite part of Tierra del Fuego, though, was the mythology surrounding it. Cruising comfortably though we were in our tourist yacht, the fact remained we were on the Beagle Channel, in the land of fearsome storms, brutal winters, epic journeys of exploration and “discovery”, and myriad shipwrecks that were testament to the less felicitous encounters between those sea-going men and the regions’s fierce weather. The bus we took out of the region crossed the Strait of Magellan, for crying out loud! (Again, the waters were calm and blue, and we were accompanied by a pod of Commerson’s dolphins to boot.) Awesome.