End of the Year at the End of the World

Day 11, Tuesday, December 31, 1996

We went to Casa Braun-Menéndez in the morning. Now a museum, it was once the the opulent family mansion of the Braun-Menéndez family, the largest landowner in Patagonia in the nineteenth century. The museum has a pictorial display of the early history of the settlement. I was surprised to learn from an old census that the early immigrants were of a mixture of English, Germans, Irish, and other Europeans. The Spaniards claimed South America first, but a lot of other Europeans came afterwards. The Italian guy we met on our Torres del Paine tour told us before that there are a lot of Italian descendents in Argentina. That's why people usually say the very Italian ciao rather than adios.

The couple whom we saw on the bus from Puerto Natales and on the penguin colony tour yesterday was at the museum too. She saw me and joked, "We just can't get away from you," to which I replied, "Yeah, misery loves company." Travelers have a way of finding each other. We would somehow keep bumping into the same fellow travelers again and again on our trip.

The tour of the family quarters was guided. I was one of the last to join the group and had to catch up. Ed was nowhere to be found. I saw some people holding guide sheets in Spanish and some in English. A Chinese couple had an English version in hand. She whispered to her husband, "Look, a Chinese," in, of all languages, Shanghainese. Fortunately they weren't commenting on how silly the cloth slippers we had to put over our shoes looked. They had asked the guide something. She replied in Spanish that Braun was ruso, Russian. They didn't seem to understand at first, so I took the opportunity to strike up a conversation. They were a little surprised to find a fellow Shanghainese in this corner of the world. I chatted with the husband for a few minutes, while the wife filled out some survey. They had moved to Santiago a few years ago. They wanted to have a vacation, so they came down here to see Punta Arenas. He's a taciturn fellow. When Ed finally caught up, we bid him goodbye.

Next we went to Club de la Unión, another European style building that was once the Braun mension. It has a restaurant in it nowadays. A few rooms on the first and second floor were open to visitors. There wasn't much there, and we had a quick walk-through. In front of the building, with siren blasting, a few people in firefighter uniforms and cheerful spirit were handing out flyers. No idea what they were about. One of the women saw us and bowed with hands together palm to palm. Ed and I thought it was kinda funny. We saw them here yesterday, when we were running around this area a couple of times chasing after plane tickets.

We went to Quijote again for lunch. We had the same waitress. She remembered us, smiled, and asked if we again wanted the set menu (different from yesterday's though).

After lunch, we went to see the port, several blocks away from Plaza Muñoz Gamero. There were a couple of boats docked along the pier. One of them seemed to be a vessle for Antarctica research. We also spotted a container belonging to the Chinese expedition. We walked all the way down the pier to have a better view of the Strait of Magellan. Nothing looked extraordinary. Nothing looked extraordinary when I looked at the Strait of Malacca two years ago. It's hard to appreciate their historical significance just looking at them.

We walked around a little more and ended up at the Plaza again. We sat for a while. Pop music was blasting out of the loud speakers. Some European backpackers were dancing to the music in front of Magellan's statue. I was impressed that some danced with fully loaded packs on their backs.

Once in a while I hear people say that cemeteries are great places to learn about the history of a place. I agreed in principle, but I never followed up on that advice. No one is particularly fond of visiting cemeteries. But on this day, we had nothing better to do, so we decided to visit Punta Arenas's Cementerio Municipal.

The cemetery is a bit far from the city center but still within walking distance. It's not all that big. Besides the usual tombs, there are a lot of mausoleums, some of which are quite new. Many of the prominent figures of Punta Arenas's history are probably buried here. Among those, the large and well-maintained mausoleum of Menéndez is very close to the entrance. The word "bury" is a bit funny to use here. I was used to the images of caskets being lowered into the ground. The idea of sealing them inside an above-ground mausoleum was a little new to me. If you could conjure up the images of morgues where bodies lie in file-cabinet-like drawers, the mausoleum for the common men near the edge of the cemetery looks very much like those. There must be at least eight levels of slots. (I don't remember very well now. We didn't take any pictures in the cemetery at all.)

Most of the tomb stones have inscriptions in Spanish, but a number of them are in English or German. One set of tombs belong to the Felton family from the late nineteenth century. The wife died in her thirties shortly after giving birth to a son. The infant died about two years later. The father died several years after that. I wondered what the story was behind this family. I wondered about the personal hardship they had endured in this harsh environment. It reminded me how fragile and transient life is. It reminded me of my own mortality. The time will come sooner or later for anyone and everyone. No one is exempt.

There were a few other people coming to the cemetery with flowers. As we were leaving, a processing of people, led by a car, moved slowly towards to cemetery. No one was crying. A few people at the end of the processing chatted normally and didn't conceal a few smiles. I suppose death needn't always be sad.

I got rid of my last few pesos on some pastry. We picked up our luggage from the hotel, and caught the transfer bus to the airport. The flight to Ushuaia was the last leg of some longer flight. Our hop was very short. On the plane we saw the same guy who was on our bus from El Calafate to Puerto Natales. Déjà vu.

By now we have flown VASP, Aerolíneas Argentinas, and LanChile. Ed and I agreed that Aerolíneas Argentinas has by far the prettiest and blondest stewardesses. (Yeah, yeah. If I were PC enough to say flight attendants, I wouldn't be making this comment here.) I can't think of any U.S. airline that markets itself as having the best-looking flight attendants. (Okay, okay.) Try tell a judge presiding over an equal opportunity employment case that you rejected an applicant because you don't think she's pretty enough. Hopefully, not all airlines are under U.S. jurisdiction. Singapore Airlines, for instance, has been cultivating in their stewardesses the idealized image of the Singapore girl with great success.

Things felt a little funny while I was waiting to get my passport stamped at Ushuaia customs. Then I realized that I was drowning in English. Lots of Americans. Mostly older folks, and by extension affluent for taking such a package tour. We seemed to be one of the few people not with the tour. LP says that one can walk to town from the airport, but the town looked a bit far with a backpack on my shoulders. We took our first taxi on this trip. It was a very short ride to LP's "enthusiastically recommended" Hospedaje Fernández.

The owner was exceedingly friendly. Her family lives here and they were having a New Year's Eve dinner party. There was only one room left. It was kinda rundown and the bathroom wasn't all that clean. It was late, so we took it. The owner told us that her dad's restaurant Mi Viejo was having a New Year's Eve party and that we should go there for dinner and the countdown to 1997.

From our limited experience, it seemed that following LP's recommendations had gotten us to pretty friendly hotels. The problem is that the friendliness of a place doesn't always positively correlate with the cleanliness of the place. The lessons from Hotel Natalino hadn't really sunk in for me. By the time we got on our way to the restaurant, I realized that it's such a mistake to check in at a hotel so far away from the center of the town. It's only a fifteen-minute walk, but it's still a hassle to walk the boring fifteen minutes at least twice, if not more times, a day. I read too much into LP's adjectives and went against our experience in Buenos Aires and Iguazú that we should go for centrally located hotels.

The other problem that night was that, contrary to what we were told, Mi Viejo was closed. Most restaurants in town were closed. We ate at some Italian restaurant. Being one of the few open on New Year's Eve, it was very busy. It was so busy that we ordered our food in 1996, but didn't get served until 1997, literally.

The important thing was that finally I was here in Ushuaia despite the near disaster in Punta Arenas. I was finally here at the end of the world at the end of the year. The problem was that I couldn't really feel the latitude. I mean I can be a hundred kilometers into the arctic circle and I can notice that the satellite dishes there all point towards the horizon, but I can't feel my location. I can be at Ushuaia, look at the map, know that I am at the southernmost town in the world, but I can't feel my location. Maybe migrating birds with biological compasses can detect their locations, but I just can't feel it. Maybe the trained eyes can look up into the sky, see a different layout of the constellations, and immediately feel it, but I just can't feel it. Maybe someone supersensitive to gravity can feel latitude, but I just can't feel it. (Assume that the gravitational pull is of uniform magnitude over the globe and pointing to the center of Earth. Part of the gravity has to act as the centripetal force that keeps us moving in circles around earth's axis. Since this centripetal force is of different magnitudes at different latitudes, and its direction is not pointing towards the center except if one's on the equator, an object on earth should be feel the pull differently at different latitudes.) It's not like altitude. Going up high I can feel the shortness of breathes and the dizziness, but I can't feel anything going south. So here I was in Ushuaia, the southernmost town in the world, the prize of my trip, and I couldn't tell that it is the southernmost town in the world.