Mexico, Central & South America > Argentina > Tierra del Fuego > Ushuaia > Fishing > Articles > The End of the Road

You can see similar mountains, glaciers, waterways and forests elsewhere in the world besides the distant island of Tierra del Fuego, and the native penguins, sea lions, and albatross can be viewed on other, more easily accessible continents.

But nowhere else has that magical tag ‘most southerly point in the world’, and the name alone, which translates as Land of Fire, is enough to have Indiana Jones rushing to book his ticket - indeed, visitors from Charles Darwin to Bruce Chatwin have described their fascination with the place.

Tierra del Fuego is the size of Ireland, divided north-south down the middle between Chile and Argentina, and until the 20th century it was avoided like the plague by most travellers. Only seafarers rounding Cape Horn and a handful of zealous missionaries were prepared to take on the often ferocious weather and equally daunting landscape. However, these days increasing numbers of travellers are rolling into the island’s main settlement Ushuaia, the most southerly town on Earth.

I had made a whistlestop tour across the island whilst covering the Camel Trophy endurance event, a rather macho affair involving Land Rovers, skis, kayaks, mountain bikes and lots of testosterone, which had covered the 5,000 kms from Santiago in Chile to the finish in Ushuaia in just three weeks. So I hadn’t had time to see very much other than what whizzed past our windscreen.

As a result I decided to stay on in Ushuaia after the event was over and take a more leisurely look around on the premise that it’s not every day you find yourself at the end of the Earth. To reach this southerly outpost of urban living you cross the Straits of Magellan by ferry to land on the Tierra del Fuego’s north shore, and travel for several hundred kilometres on paved, then unpaved roads, with little if any sign of human habitation other than the bleak and windswept town of Rio Grande, some 200 kms north of Ushuaia. The top half of the island is a grim, flat yet powerful landscape of unrelenting brown plains and equally unrelenting icy winds, but in the south this passes into mountains and forests reminiscent of Scotland’s west coast, until eventually you arrive at Ushuaia, and pretty much the end of the road.

The world’s southernmost town comes as something of a surprise, especially if you arrive by road, in winter, as I did. This far from ‘civilisation’ you don’t really expect to find a settlement of 42,000 people with every facility you could require, from a smart new airport to a half-decent public bus service (not that there are many roads for it to use), some excellent hotels, an efficient and friendly tourist information office and even a casino.

With a climate very much like that of northern Britain in mid-winter I felt surprisingly at home considering I was in Argentina. The streets were busy with traffic, as were the shops selling tourist goods and duty free products. Summer, no doubt, is even more frantic, for Ushuaia has realised that with its landscape and wildlife it has a major tourist attraction on its doorstep, and is actively although quite conscientiously exploiting it.

Ushuiaia is situated on the edge of the permanently ice-free Beagle Channel (named after Darwin’s ship which sailed through here in 1834), and the mountains behind the town rise straight up from the sea to almost 1,500 m, whilst a few kilometres to the west are the forests and glaciers of the Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego. To the west of this is Chile, with the border marking the western boundary of the national park. The terrestrial wildlife of this part of the world is somewhat disappointing - foxes, beavers and rabbits are pretty much your lot - but offshore things are rather different. Boat trips along the Beagle Channel visit sea lion and fur seal colonies, and there are extensive penguin and cormorant colonies too. If you look up you may also see Andean condors and black-browed albatross along with other less spectacular species such as terns, oystercatchers, grebes and kelp geese. One of the best ways of seeing the wildlife along the Beagle Channel in summer - as well as literally wallowing in the scenery - is by kayak. You can get details of organised trips graded according to the level of difficulty, and kayak hire, from the tourist information office in Ushuaia.

Winter sports have also gained a tentative foothold in the area. You can ski at the most southerly ski resort in the world, Centro de Deportes Invernales Luis Martial, which is 7 kms outside Ushuaia. It boasts all of one lift (which goes only slightly faster than walking pace), and one blue run (red if you really try hard to find difficult lines), and whilst it may not have the most spectacular runs in the world the views across the Beagle Channel to Isla Navarino, and east to the splendid peak of Monte Olivia (1,470 m) more than make up for this. And as Juan, the local snowboard instructor informed me, there are plenty of challenges for anyone prepared to go off piste. The only problem with this is that it usually involves a major climb on foot from the top of the chair lift, but the tracks in the snow above the lift indicated that the locals were well into making the effort.

There are also a number of places where you can go cross-country skiing, which is an excellent way of getting to see the wild back country areas. One of these venues is Valle de los Huskies, where perhaps not surprisingly I came across a sled dog team in full training for the local races. The noise issuing from these beasts was not unlike most people’s idea of what hell must sound like. Any dog not in harness was howling and yelping to be put in one, and even when harnessed they continued with their wretched wailing until they were off and running. Even on the trail the dogs can barely contain their excitement, and would probably continue to make enough noise to make your ears bleed if they had the breath to do so.

I was a little wary about getting too close to these ice-blue-eyed relatives of wolves, as you hear all sorts of stories of huskies eating pretty much anything that comes near them other than their owner if they’ve got out of the wrong side of their snow hole that morning. However, I took the risk of putting a hand close to a yowling muzzle and was greeted with a cold nose and a non-committal snuffle before the full-on baying started again. In winter you can take sled dog rides from Valle de los Huskies, which is 17 kms from Ushuaia.

Outdoor activities obviously become more accessible in summer, when long hours of daylight and a relatively mild maritime climate provide far more options than the short, cold days of winter. In the summer season (October - April) trekking to the Glaciar Martial is a popular activity since there’s a marked trail from the centre of Ushuaia, and as you climb up above the town the views become ever-more inspiring.

I made a half-hearted attempt to get up to the glacier on snow shoes, but a late start, lack of a map and winds howling straight up from Antarctica once I got up above the tree line resulted in me turning back before I made it. There are better places to spend a winter’s night than half way up a snow plastered mountain just north of Cape Horn…

In summer, however, it’s a different matter. There are a few marked trails in the national park, where you’ll encounter the area’s typical mix of lakes, bays, rivers, forests, peaks up to almost 1,500 m and glaciers. The trails are generally rather short and don’t provide enough for a multi-day outing though, although there is one route through the Sierra de Valdivieso mountains to Lago Fagnano, just north of Ushuaia. This covers a distance of at least 30 kms, and you should take the sort of gear you’d use if doing an overnight walk through, say, the Cairngorms in summer.

Mountain biking is also taking off, and there’s some excellent terrain on which to get in some off-road action. The constant winds and frequent rain of the region can be a nuisance, but to anyone who’s used to riding in the west of Britain you’re unlikely to come across anything you haven’t endured on a bad day there.

At least two operators organise trips out of Ushuaia, ranging from day-long rides in the national park to week-long tours over and around the surrounding mountains and lakes.

For more sedentary visitors fishing is very popular (but every other form of ‘hunting’ is banned), and although it meant nothing to me as a non-fisherman, I was reliably informed that the trout and salmon in this part of the world are more than worth the mere $10 a day fee required to fish for them. Also on the water canoes or kayaks are an excellent way of exploring the lakes and channels in summer. One of the girls working at Ushuaia’s one-run ski resort told me that this was her favourite way of spending a weekend in the summer - apparently it let her “get away from it all”, although I already thought we were about as far away from most of it as it was possible to get.

The fact that Ushuaia is so remote has left it with a number of relicts of the days when the area was used by the Argentine government as a place to keep troublesome citizens out of sight and out of mind. In 1884 nearby Islas de los Estados was established as a military prison with the obligatory harsh and brutal regime, later being transferred to the Presidio de Ushuaia at the east end of town. This was closed in 1947, and incorporated into the town’s naval base, from which the ‘General Belgrano’ sailed in 1992 on it’s ill-fated mission during the Falkland’s War. (There’s an impressive memorial on the waterfront to the 300-plus sailors who died when the ship was sunk, and plenty of reminders elsewhere in street names and graffiti that Argentines still consider the ‘Malvinas’ their own.)

You can now visit the Presidio, and a few blocks away in the ‘Museum at the End of the World’ are some absorbing mug shots of various stripey-shirted residents of the Presidio when it was a jail. You also get some idea of just how far removed from the rest of the world Tierra del Fuego was until relatively recently. Pictures of native Yahgan Indians dressed in traditional skins and living in tents were taken as recently as the 1920’s, so within the lifetime of some of the older residents of Ushuaia an entire way of life has disappeared.

This disappearance of the traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle of Tierra del Fuego means that the island has also lost the reason for its name. The ‘Land of Fire’ was so named in the 16th century by European explorers after seeing the ever-present fires of the Indians, one of their few means of keeping warm as they wore little or no clothing, despite the harsh climate.

To experience today the sense of remoteness these early explorers must have felt today is impossible, but by travelling to the end of the most southerly road in the world, a hundred kilometres or so south-east of Ushuaia, you can at least try. If you take the time to walk past the small Argentine naval base and along the shoreline beyond the end of the road, you can sit and look out over the waters of the South Atlantic, forests and mountains at your back, and nothing to the south other than Cape Horn, the screaming winds and steely swells of the Roaring Forties, and, eventually, the frozen continent of Antarctica.

That’s when you know you’re a long way from home - but at least you’re at the start of the road that will take you back there.

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