Journey to the End of the Earth

Ushuaia, Tierra Del Fuego, or as it is widely known throughout the Americas, 'The last town on Earth', certainly the last place on earth where you would want to be stuck without a means of escape.

Here you can not only experience all four seasons in one day, but more particularly over the space of an hour. The town is blanketed in snow nine months of the year and the architecture reflects that environment. Small compact houses made of durable concrete block with sharply sloping roofs of corrugated iron that keep the constant snow flurries from settling and brightly painted buildings that can be easily picked out against the frequent white-out conditions.

Somehow, 40,000 people live here, sustained mainly by tourism. There were three ships in the day we were there. We were constantly buzzed by helicopters and light aircraft doing excursions up and down the channel while a constant stream of taxis and buses ferrying people to the surprising number of tourist hotspots involving vast arrays of wildlife and terrain-linked expeditions.

Here, there is also a small, but growing technological industry assembling of all things, televisions. A government driven industry introduced to encourage the younger generations to stay rather than losing them to the warmer and more hospitable locales of the north.

To describe the scenery here as majestic is a vast understatement. Cocooned in a valley surrounded by towering snow clad mountains, you are distracted from the bleakness and formidableness that is the Andes Mountains, by the sheer beauty of nature. Colossal peaks reaching far into the sky, with swirling vapour sweeping up and down the escarpments constantly changing the colours and light so that the giants appear, just as the locals claim, to be sleeping.

The settlement began when the Argentines wanted to protect their territory and towards the end of the 19th century set up a penal colony. The harsh and generally terminal life here left few of the inmates any hope.

There was little chance of escape other than a permanent option - the old prison graveyard is full of inmates who couldn’t deal with it anymore and took a quick alternative rather than the slow death of the work-mill and lash of the bullwhip. They had to endure the harsh weather and environment whilst building the still existing infrastructure as part of their tenure. A prison, accommodations, roads and a railroad that’s ramble is titled, 'Train to the End of the World'.

Recently the narrow gauge steam train had been restored and we caught it to the edge of the National Park, through a lavish landscape of waterfalls, marshland, forest and farmland finishing in an area called Ensinada. One of the inlets of the Beagle channel. Quite rightly the ride is now listed as one of the great train rides of the world.

Interestingly there was a lot of graffiti in the city aimed at the British. Tension and feelings run high here even 34 years after the Falklands War and appears to show little sign of abating. Right outside the port where we berthed was a large sign that when translated, demanded the “British Pirates keep their hands off Argentinean Land and return what they stole”. And the sign was sponsored by the local council.

We were warned not to engage the locals about the politics between the two countries and one of the excursion buses paid the price of the animosity by having a brick thrown through a window. There was no such terror on my excursion save the constant twitter of birdcall and tooting of the Puffing Billy chugging through the marshlands.

After, we departed the Town at the End of the Earth to sail towards the Pacific Ocean and more friendly skies.

The fog closed in and hovered over the cliffs dwarfing the ship as we traversed the channel passing oozing glaciers and frolicking seals, the environment looking every bit of the reported 3 degrees outside…and here it’s the height of their summer.

I’ll never complain about New Zealand’s summer temperatures again. (ROSS THORBY)