Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

54 degrees 48 minutes S 68 degrees 17 minutes W

Ushuaia. The last city in the Americas. The end of the Panamanian Highway. Filled with fin de mundo gift shops, hats, restaurants and a certain pride in being the last. As Sergio, our guide for today, pointed out when we arrived at Lapiata Bay, the southern most point in Tierra del Fuego, “That (indicating a green building shaped like a shipping container) is the last bathroom.” A stock line, I’m sure, but it brought howls of laughter from the bus. We were an easy audience.

As I write this, I’m looking out our cabin, through our floor to ceiling glass doors and ahead of me is a just darkening sky, 9:24 pm, four snow capped peaks of the last remnants of the Andes which disappear into the Atlantic here, and a series of commercial buildings and homes, white with red roofs, all tin. On the only avenue in this town of 50,000 the traffic has its lights on and their lights echo in lights on the dock here.

At the dock with us are the Akademik Sergi Valvov, an all white Russian ice breaker bound for Antarctica, and Ocean Nova, an expedition boat that takes adventure travelers to Antarctica. Ushuaia has 90% of the world’s traffic from the other six continents to Antarctica.

This makes Ushuaia different than you might expect. It has several high end expedition outfitters, a Northface and a Timberland, plus other sources for packs, sleeping bags, tents and hiking boots fit for an Antarctic foray.

It also has several 4 and 5 hotels including a brand new Sheraton, located high up over the city and overlooking the Beagle Channel. It is not yet open in case you were thinking about reservations.

Tonight is Saturday night and I went downtown, a ten minute walk from the pier, to find something to eat and check out the shops and the people.

A few drifter types, back packers whose route had brought them as far as they can go by thumb, wandered around with vague menace, long hair and smoking. Others were young folks who looked like athletic academics perhaps down for a seminar on the Humboldt Current or to take part in a dig in a Yamana midden heap. Clots of teenage girls in tight jeans with cute purses, strolling, watching for watchers. Boys trying to figure out what to do with their presence. And failing. In other words, teenworld anywhere.

Sergi spoke with some feeling about Ushuaia in the winter months when the cloud cover is constant, the nights very long (this is the equivalent latitude of Hudson Bay) and the temperature around or just below freezing. On this latter point it is the moderating effect of the maritime location of Tierra del Fuego, an island, that keeps the temperatures mild. “It is depressing,” he said. And since he had played us for laughs before we laughed. “No, really,” he said, “Our hospital has done studies on mental conditions. Suicides. All up in the winter.” I thought of Iceland.

On June 21^st, the Winter Solstice and the longest night of the year, the Federal and local governments throw a party with bands from Buenos Aires, lots of food and drink. “And we dance until we feel better.”

Ushuaia is the exclamation point to the exclamation mark that is Patagonia. Here civilization peters out. There are a few small settlements, at least one of them is a military base, a few islands, but buses and restaurants and teenagers walking the streets on Saturday night ends here.

This is an inflection point for our trip as well since tomorrow we sail around Cape Horn and head for the Falklands, back north.

On this last I should add. Along the pedestrian way into downtown from the dock there is a sign in Spanish and English. It refers to the Argentinian law which put the Malvinas islands under the province of Tierra del Fuego. In the next paragraph then goes on to say that it must be acknowledged that the Malvinas (aka Falklands) have been illegally occupied by the United Kingdom since 1833. Just to be clear.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

54 degrees 54 minutes S 68 degrees 32 minutes W heading 077 NEE

We left Punta Arenas at 8 pm yesterday in the bright sun of late afternoon. The crew had moored us to four floating buoys as well as capstans on the pier. Watching them unburden the ship of its ties to land became interesting as the wind picked up to 60 kph gusts, pressing the bulk of the Veendam against the ropes tethering it and tightening them. The crew created slack on the buoy ropes while a Punta Arenas tug, Atlas, scuttled over to it, backed up and unburdened itself of two crew who hopped on the buoy and lifted the great hawsers free. The Veendam sucked them back up through the water.

As night fell, we sailed south through the Magellan Strait, then into the Cockburn Channel. In the night we entered the channel named after Darwin’s famous voyage, Beagle Channel.

When we got up, snow covered sharp mountain faces behind sloped and green rock with trees. As we went up to the Lido Deck for breakfast, I noticed a glacier coming up on the port side. I moved onto deck 12, then sky deck, a flat circular deck that marks the highest point passengers can go on the Veendam. It offers a platform for taking in scenery on both sides and in front of the ship and therefore is ideal for photography.

Four huge glaciers appeared over the next 40 minutes, somewhat evenly spaced apart. Rivers of ice. Even after the Amalia glacier, this phrase did not come to mind. Until. These. Now the blue ice runs, courses, screams out of the mountains, pushing, out of my way rock I’m moving on, as it heads for the salty waters of the Beagle.

Four of them, in a row, magnificent, wonders of the natural world. These are world shapers, lake makers, river cutters, earth movers, boulder scatterers. The essence of a stream is to flow, of a mountain, mass, of ocean, to fill, of land, to separate, of a glacier, to create. These are ur-entities, those who come before others and their quiet presence belies their power. Glaciers are the strong, silent type writ large.

In all the sailing we’ve done through the Chilean fjords we’ve done I’ve seen only one house. I have a picture of it. It is the most splendidly isolated structure I have ever seen. The only way to get to it is by boat or ship and the closet inhabited area is hours away. A great place to write.

In Ushuaia, our next port, the Museum at the End of the World graces one end of the road that fronts the ocean. It’s an apt name, for this is the largest community of the far southern end of the Americas. There a couple of small outposts of civilization otherwise, but this is a functioning community.

The Chilean fjords and the geography of the archipelago surrounding the Beagle channel make it easy to imagine that if this is not the end of the world you can see it from here. And, you can.

It’s a remarkable feeling to be at the bottom of the map, a sort of geographical weightlessness, as if the burden of land has almost been lifted and we could float free, unbound to land anymore.

This afternoon, at 2 pm, we begin to explore the Beagle channel on a smaller boat.

Sunset here is at 9:14 pm. The winds are 39 mph. We 262 nautical miles from Punta Arenas and with 9.5 nautical miles of Ushuaia. The sun rises at 5:23 am.