How the World Ends: One Day in Ushuaia
A writer saw it with his own eyes
When I arrive at the end of the world, the first thing I see is a Hard Rock Café.
Where are the fires that Ferdinand Magellan saw on his explorations—which led him to name this region Tierra Del Fuego? The “uninterrupted silences” and “untamed heart” that Roberto Bolaño wrote about? As a young travel writer, I heard of the windswept port city of Ushuaia in an almost mythic register everywhere. Capital of the Land of Fire, it was exalted in the diaries of Bruce Chatwin for its end-of-the-world status.
As my Uber (a Fiat Cronos) cruises along the Beagle Channel, the window taking in vast drags of cold subantarctic air, fin del mundo shimmers in a lucid ecstasy. When the rest of the world promised me a taste of its famous king crab, Ushuaia will serve me a taste of what it really tastes like. For now, it is vegetable and ricotta cannelloni with bolognaise and Fernet-Branca with Coke.
The following morning, at the behest of the beguiling sinuous lights in the sky, I grab my camera and make for a walk along the promenade hugging the Beagle. It is a windy Sunday and soon, the sun rides up overhead, bringing residents out for their morning runs and cycle routes. But with the austral summer slowly leaving the region, the weather in this city, situated on the glacial slopes of the Fuegian Andes, is growing perceptibly colder.
This capacity for taming the boldest spirits was what Julio Argentino Roca, former President, utilised for the prison colony his government established here in 1896. One of the world’s harshest correctional facilities, it was designed for recidivists and military convicts (including the anarchist Simón Radowitzky), who were also enlisted to build much of the town.
The blue and yellow stripes of the scrubs, found on souvenirs as well as resin figures on landmarks and streets, is a constant reminder that its prisoners, beleaguered by harsh cold and difficult terrain, built modern-day Ushuaia. A distillation of this experience is available at the Museo Marítimo y del Presidio. Any historical exploration in Fin Del Mundo concludes at the pavilions of this museum that was born inside the erstwhile Prison of Ushuaia. Among the many mystifying legends of this cold remoteness, as Andrej, a Brazilian traveller of Ukrainian origin tells a crowd assembled in a hallway, is about how a fugitive inmate, starving and lost in the Patagonian wilderness, eventually began starting fires so that he could be found and rescued.
Like in any remote place, entertainment started off as myth here. Later in the day, Fabrizia, owner of a shop in the downtown where I stop by to pick up a bottle of Tres Plumas, regales me with legends around Laguna Del Diablo—Devil’s Lake. Fugue states after disappearances, ‘taken’ stories, figures in the mist seen about the storied water body. The beloved lake, which freezes over in the killing Patagonian winter for local Fuegians to go ice-skating, has claimed several pet animals in the past. So when during a hop-off on a bus tour, I find a local chilling out here with her two huskies cavorting merrily, it’s a reassuring anticlimax.
The windows of the said doubledecker, painted in the bright blue of the Argentine flag and upholstered in tartan, are intent on becoming screens playing an end-of-the-world show for a city coolly nonchalant about it. As it hums through the city, an audio guide announces landmarks: grand old St Christopher Shipwreck, author Lucinda Otero’s residence, the ozymandian municipal cemetery, the naval pier... The epiphanic finale is at Monte Gallinero, where the Italian barrio stretches away with the Chilean Andes in the backdrop.
Back in downtown, in its gear stores and countless souvenir shops flooded with fridge magnets, dulce de leche jars, penguin plushies, prison-themed onesies and yerba mate gourds, Ushuaia returns to enacting departure. Close to one lakh travellers undertake Antarctic expeditions each year via Ushuaia. Those in the last lap of their stopovers here are unmistakable: milling about trying to make the most of the End before travelling onward, just like myself.
Before joining their ranks, I decide to see something that has to do with arrival, for a change. It’s a general store started by Luis Pedro Fique—the first Argentine to settle in Ushuaia. Prefect Fique arrived in the city when the region was inhabited only by a handful of Anglican priests. A low, corrugated-metal structure painted in a chalky blue, with a green pitched roof, emblazoned with the sign ‘El Primer Argentino’, the store burned down in 1946.
Around the same time, Prefect Fique had a coastal walkway built in his honour here. Stretching 600 metres in the Beagle Channel, the footbridge is something most day-trippers don't get the chance to do, but probably should. At any rate, a grand completion and beautification phase will soon be underway, as one may find in the local news. Because even at the end of the world… things are always only getting started.
The author was in Ushuaia, Argentina at the invitation of Ibex Expeditions, in partnership with Quark Expeditions, for a voyage to Antarctica.