Patagonia: Ushuaia

From Calafate, we pushed on with a second 36 hour bus ride, this time going as far as we could go by bus, to the end of the pan-American highway and the end of the continental world in Ushuaia. The trip wouldn't have taken so long if it wasn't for the 4 border crossings we had to make (leaving Argentina, entering Chile, leaving Chile, entering Argentina), each of which required us to move 54 people from a bus to an immigrations office where all of our luggage was scanned for drugs, weapons, kidnapped children, fruit, or meat products, and where a few of us were interrogated by border patrol. The process lasted anywhere between 45 minutes and 2 hours. Then there was the ferry crossing at the Straight of Magellan, at which we had to get off the bus and onto a large barge which held 4 or 5 more buses and traveled a distance of about 15 km in an hour. Eventually though, we did make it to the real end of our trip, in Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world.

On the first morning there, some friends and I woke ourselves early, called a taxi, and gave him the directions simply to take us as high up as he could. He did, and he left us by the side of the road in the mountains and left, though we were sure to check that we had service there and had saved the number of the taxi company that knew where we were. We spent all day walking up through the trees and snow, which proved to be hard, because walking on previously un-walked snow is sort of like trying to walk through a McDonald's ball pit, so we had to be inventive. We eventually found the lift and infrastructure of a ski resort that had been closed for a while, and a while later made it to the point where the trees stopped to grow. A few people who had grown miserable in wet shoes and pants, tired of plowing through snow with their bodies, stayed in a grassy patch to make a fire, and a friend and I, committing a second serious misjudgment of distance, believe that we could make it to the top of the mountain. It wasn't long until we surpassed the trees, and began to walk on a slope that looked much less steep from below, covered only by colorful lichens, moss, and rocks. From then, little time passed before we had to admit to each other that is was unbearably cold and we were having trouble breathing, so in 60 seconds we slid in snow patched down what it took us a good 2.5 hours to climb to a fire that was waiting for us below.

The following day in Ushuaia we took another bus trip to the Tierra del Fuego Nacional Park, which harbors the end of the pan-American highway (Alaska is 18,000 km that way) and as far south as can be traveled by conventional means of transportation (wheeled vehicle). The landscape there was sort of an odd combination of vast soggy marshland, pine trees, and mountains. When I say marshland, though, I don't mean anything like one would find in Louisiana or the Everglades, but rater flat plains completely covered by grass with a very saturated yellow hue, beneath which ran very clear, very cold water that covered the entire ground. Even in the places where there was not an actual layer of water present, the thick grass and saturated ground beneath gave the earth a sort of spongy feel. One of the more interesting things that I noted about the landscape at that point was the way that the mountains continued past the southernmost coast on into the sea. As we drove farther and farther toward the end of the continent, I kept wondering hen exactly the Andes were going to begin to sink back down into the ground, but alas, at the end of the world, the mountain range clearly extends past the edge to create an archipelago of small mountainous islands 

The end of the world

reaching onward to the horizon.