Voyage on the Beagle

A boat tour of the islands in the Beagle Channel is pretty much de rigeur for visitors to Ushuaia. Obligingly, we hit the cluster of tour operator shacks at the marina to find a boat. The first place we went to had a small yacht and sold us on its virtues: closer approaches, fewer people and less competition for railing space. We felt compelled to suss out at least one other option, since these folks were just a shade pricier than the competition. The second folks we talked to ran a catamaran with room for 300, but, bizarrely, sold us on the virtues of the other company. Either the kid behind the desk hated his job, or else he figured we young folks were not the target audience of his company, but either way he was pretty sure we'd have a better time with the first boat. That was all the convincing we needed, and we went back to Patagonia Adventure Explorer, to sign up for the next morning's excursion. The boat would leave at 10am.

We woke up in good time the next morning, and got organized, and left our lodgings with, we assumed, a good twenty-five minutes before the boat left. However, on casually checking our watches we realized that somehow we had fifteen minutes. It was a twenty-minute walk to the port. And so we started running. Even running it was going to be tight, but it was worth a shot. What happened next was the first in a series of fortuitous transportation-related events that have led us to believe the transportation gods might just be on our side, at least so far on this trip. What happened was, at the very first intersection we came to, there in that hilltop neighbourhood, where nobody else was awake (or at least on the streets) and even the dogs weren't up yet, we found a taxi stand, with a queue of taxis, no less. Impressing upon the driver the urgency of our situation, we careened down Ushuaia's vertical streets and made the boat with two minutes to spare.

And then, and then: the voyage! Calm, smooth waters, barely a breeze, barely a cloud; the day was ideal. It had snowed the day before on the mountains stretching endlessly into the distance on both shores of the channel (Chile on one side, Argentina on the other, due to the wonky border hereabout) and their slopes were dusted with more white than usual. To sum up we visited: three tiny islets that were home to colonies of sea lions and/or various species of cormorants; the misnamed "lighthouse at the end of the world" (there's one on Isla de los Estados, a few miles past the eastern mouth of the channel, that is the true title-holder); and another less tiny island where we disembarked and took a short walk to the high ground for a panoramic view of the whole shebang -- town, mountains, islands, channel. This last island was also notable for being strewn with what appeared to be rocks covered in a layer of tiny flat little plants but which were, in fact, vegetables the whole way through and distant relatives of the carrot. And true to the company's  claims, the boat got seriously close to the wildlife. We practically grazed the rocks of the islets, while the catamarans idled a hundred feet out; and while their railings were crammed with spectators our twenty-five fellow passengers were distributed with plenty of elbow-room on the yacht's deck and, er, roof-deck.

And the experience did not disappoint. It was stunning, and delightful, and unforgettable. The landscape was just fantastic, and the wildlife was abundant and awesome to see from so close, and we were on the Beagle Channel, for Christ's sake! It took white folks like three hundred years from when they first came to the region to chart it accurately; we were in a boat, in a place where ships wrecked as recently as eighty years ago. Seriously, if I come back to Tierra del Fuego it will be with a 4x4 with a Zodiac in tow, and I will explore the sounds and bays and channels and isles looking for 300-year-old boat skeletons. Someday... someday.