End of the Road

Day 13, Thursday, January 2, 1997

It was pouring in the morning. With this kind of rain, there was no point going to Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego. Having seen the wonders of Torres del Paine and the Moreno Glacier, it's probably not a great loss to miss this park. Word we heard before was that it's just a park with trees. Ed planned to take a taxi into town to get his laundry done. I thought I might tag along if the rain's not too bad. By the time we finished breakfast, the downpour had become a drizzle.

We walked the fifteen minutes into town. Ed went to a laundromat. I went to the Aerolíneas Argentinas office to confirm our flight tomorrow to Buenos Aires. While we had had a tough time finding open shops and restaurants and had seen very few people on the streets yesterday, all the shops were open now and the streets were full of people. "Where did all these people hide yesterday?!" I wondered. The Aerolíneas Argentinas office was very crowded. I had to wait for forty-five minutes to get to a teller. It took forty-five seconds to reconfirmed our flight. "They are all confirmed," I was told. I picked up some postcards before I went to the laundromat to meet up with Ed.

Ushuaia is in fact much larger than I had imagined. I had thought that being the southernmost town in the world, it must be a small village that most of the world had forgotten about. Aside from the town center that's easily navigable on foot, a lot of houses spread out around the center into the surrounding areas. The reality is that a lot of tourists pass through here. Sixty percent of all cruises to Antarctica depart from Ushuaia. The town is aware of the tourist income and promotes itself as fin del mundo, the end of the world. Its centrally located tourist office is staffed with English speaking young ladies who readily pull out information sheets and brochures on pretty much anything a tourist might want to know about the city.

Oddly, Ushuaia is the only place on this entire journey that I had a very slight Venice feeling. The Venice feeling is a feeling that a place is completely overrun by tourists, that everyone there is either a tourist or someone serving a tourist, that everything is a show staged for the tourists, and that nothing is genuinely local and unaffected by the tourist dollars. (To be fair, I suppose Venice could be very nice in the winter when most tourists stay home.) Only a little worse than the Venice feeling is the Disneyland feeling, where everyone there is indeed a tourist or serving a tourist, and everything is indeed a show. In all the other places on this trip, I did not sense a concerted effort to promote those places to the tourists, despite the fact that some places like El Calafate see a lot of travelers passing through.

Ed and I walked around town, visited the tourist office again to get some info on buses to Tierra del Fuego National Park. Only a small section of the park was open to visitors and that portion could be easily covered on foot. We decided that rather than take a tour, we'd take a bus that simply drops us off at a campsite in the park. We walked past a restaurant, and I saw the Italian guy who was on our Torres del Paine tour sitting there sipping coffee. We waved and nodded. We talked around a bit more. We had lunch in the same restaurant later on, since there was still some time left before our 3:30 p.m. bus. After lunch, Ed went off to pick up his laundry and to drop it off at the hotel. I sat in the restaurant, watched people passing by on the streets, and wrote postcards telling some of my friends that I was at the end of the world - Fin del Mundo. I felt quite content and peaceful. I wrote the other two friends I had invited to join me on this trip that I really wished they were here. At the very early stage of planning, I had told them this trip would be three times as long, cost three times as much, and be three times as fun as the Yucatán trip. I believe I was right on every one of these three predictions. I thought that they had missed a lot of fun. Aside from the two summers that I had spent abroad, this trip was turning out to be by far the best vacation trip I had ever had.

We caught the 3:30 bus to Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego. Since the area open to visitors was very limited, there wasn't a whole lot to cover. We hiked around for a few hours on two fairly easy trails. There wasn't any breathtaking scenery here, especially since we had by now visited more impressive Iguazú, Moreno, and Torres del Paine. The park is nevertheless very beautiful. We walked to the end of La Ruta Nacional No. 3. A small tour bus of people were leaving just as we arrived. It confirmed my belief that it was a shrewd decision not to take a tour for this park. This is literally the end of the road. South of here, there are no more roads. This is the starting point or finishing point, depending on how you want to look at it, of the Pan American Highway - 17,848 kilometers from Alaska. I got the number from a plaque there, but I am not too sure from what point in Alaska, though. Alaska's awfully big, you know.

The highway ends near the water. Into the distant sea beyond the winding inlet is the Beagle Channel. We sat for a while. It was sunny by now and not particularly cold. Surprisingly, it's not terribly windy. It's a beautiful thing that we could feel alone in these parks to enjoy nature in relative solitude. Aside from the occasional hikers passing by, there are no hoards of tourists, cars, and RV's that completely overrun Yosemite or Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon. There was no Venice feeling.

By the time we got back to Ushuaia around nine, the most amazing thing had happened. There was no wind! The harbor was so calm the water mirrored the snow-peaked mountains, the buildings, the ships, ... The weather here was sure unpredictable like in the mountains. It was pouring in the morning but sunny in the afternoon. The unceasing westerly wind could on a whim turn calm.

We had dinner at Pizzería El Turco, a simple restaurant with simple services, but a long wine list. There were a couple of people, all wearing T-shirts of some expedition, talking excitedly in English two tables away from us. It's Ed's turn to be silent today and for the rest of the trip. He had developed a sore throat in the last two days, and avoided speaking as much as possible. It would get progressively worse in the coming days, all the way until the end of the trip. First I couldn't talk because of the bad cough after Iguazú. Now Ed couldn't talk because of the sore throat. Since Christmas, with the exception of the two or three days in Punta Arenas and Ushuaia, Ed and I had no conversation. Decision making usually involved one person laying out the options and the other person agreeing or disagreeing by nodding or shaking his head. At one point when I couldn't come up with a title for this article, Ed suggested "Speechless in Ushuaia." Then again, there are already too many allusions to movie titles in this travelogue.