We went to bed that night hoping for solid rest. It would be a long ride to make it to Ushuaia the next day and catch up with Kito, but we were eager to get there. However, the campsite was host to a family birthday party, and, in typical Argentino fashion, it didn’t really get going until after 1 am. Every twenty minutes, it seemed, we were woken up by the most atrocious, accordion-heavy, death-polka “music”, and it went on until 6 a.m. Kito had realized that he wouldn’t get any more sleep before dawn broke, and had hit the road early. We texted him to say that we’d catch up later—everything was soaked, and the rain had pounded down even longer than the music. We gulped down some yoghurt, slurped some coffee, and set to work shaking as much rainwater out of our camping and riding gear as we could.
These ducks had no complaint with the weather. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
After what seemed like an eternity, we arrived at the border of Argentina and Chile. We declared our remaining bread, powdered milk, and cheese to customs, and found ourselves in Chile. Nothing besides a few houses sporting Chilean flags and a single bodega serving cazuela, Chile’s national dish, differentiated the landscape from that of the country we had just exited. And everyone who passed though, it seemed, was also simply passing through. Rain-huddled cattle grazed on the scrubby, deforested plains, and in two, featureless hours, we arrived at a ferry terminal at lands end. From here, we loaded ourselves onto the ferry, incurring the same fare as a horse—which was, in fact, a very moderate one—and officially crossed the threshold of Tierra Del Fuego. The entire region of Patagonia had been hotly contested between Chile and Argentina until the mid-1980s, when they were at the brink of warfare. As such, half an hour later, we crossed yet another national border back into Argentina.
Kito had texted us a couple of hours before—he had made it to Ushuaia! But we had only just reached the town of Rio Grande. Ushuaia remained four hours away, and while the southern summer sun was setting around 8pm, generally speaking, it was growing dark for us, specifically. We would have to find accommodations for the night. Ushuaia would have to wait until morning.
The famously run-aground tugboat in Beagle Channel. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
All three hostels, which supposedly offered camping for a lower price than a room, were crawling with bicycle tourists. We would have to spring for a hotel; the prospect made us feel a bit downcast. It was not the adventurous evening we had imagined we would have; it was not how we envisioned such closeness to our goal when we inscribed our destination on Horace’s front tire, back in Guatemala—El Fin del Mundo. The End of the World.
The innkeeper of the third fully-booked hostel suggested that we inquire at the hotel Villa del Mar.
Vee-sha, she enunciated heavily, in her Argentino accent. I understood her meaning, but pronounced the word as Vee-ya in repeating it to Nathan, to avoid confusion as he entered the words “Villa del Mar” into the Google Maps search field. However, the pronunciation Vee-ya, in Argentina, would have indicated the word Via, and the hotel “Via del Mar”, the innkeeper insisted, did not exist.
Sí, sí, señora. Yo entiendo. I understood her concern, but I was obstinate and tired and it never once occurred to me to just spell it for Nathan in English. Nathan sighed exasperatedly at our polite quibbling back-and-forth.
Villa del Mar had an entirely sea foam-colored room—walls, linens, upholstery, and all—with a private bathroom, a hot shower, and central heating, at a price that we no longer cared to be troubled over. The concierge handed me the usual, charming, heavy skeleton key we’d become accustomed to receiving at accommodations in Argentina. The national preference for, or availability of locks and keys had evidently not changed since the colonial period. Nor had door-hinges been tightened or adjusted since then; we would reach Ushuaia without encountering a single door that shut properly in the entire country. It was one of Argentina’s endearing, yet inexplicable quirks; one that we added to the list of national, hardware-related quirks we had amassed for each of the 17 countries we had visited. Mexico—stinky sinks and shower drains. Guatemala—DIY faucets. El Salvador—no toilet seats. Colombia—no dustpans that rested flush against the floor. The list went on, and we treasured these observations. They signified all the time we had spent with our eyes open to these, and other, fine details one was likely to forget. I dropped the spindly, cumbersome key into my jacket pocket and set out with Nathan for Fantas, burgers, and fries.
Late the next morning, we climbed a winding road through snow-capped mountains and coniferous forest. We turned a corner and suddenly burst through an invisible dam that had been holding back briny air. Two towers emblazoned with the word Ushuaia rose up before us, and we sailed between them. Here was the sea and the sun glinting off it. Brightly-painted fishing boats lilted placidly in the harbors of Beagle Channel. We were here. El fin del mundo.
The sign not really at the end of the world. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
An unsightly, carved wooden sign that looked like a slab of frosted gingerbread stood in the center of a little courtyard among a cluster of tourism agency offices. From here, you could cruise to Antarctica or book tours to the Parque Nacional de Ushuaia. But we had been told that this was not the “real” sign, and that the “real” end of the road lay about fifty miles outside of town. We’d search for it later. For now, a creaky-knuckled, numb-cheeked selfie was in order. We posed for a few photos—not without being harried by the throng of other travelers who had also gathered to be photographed next the sign, though. We had to laugh. It didn’t matter. After all, for every person to get down here, there was a route and a style and a mode and a reason in doing so. We found a tiny patch on the sign’s frame that was unoccupied by hundreds of other travelers’ stickers upon which to plaster our own.
A city map of Ushuaia. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
We set out to find Señor Velasquez, an elderly man who lived alone and rented out a few of the rooms of his family home. The accommodations were quaint, but the rooms were well-heaped with wool blankets, and the company was warm.
For over a year, we had been moving along with the motive, Let’s see. What’s over there? Let’s see. It was only over the last few weeks that we’d begun thinking, Get to the end. Get to the end. It was hard to pinpoint precisely when our sense of accomplishment had come to require this particular milestone. What would we find there, at the southernmost edge of the Americas? It had taken three years of dreaming, saving, and questioning. It had taken another year of planning and tying up loose ends. It had taken fifteen months of exploring and opening our hearts to whatever might present itself. We toasted our arrival on that first night with a fancy seafood dinner. We toasted everyone who had befriended and helped us along the way. But we held back tears of overwhelm for every day and place that lay behind us. Some kind of ending was at hand, we knew. But what exactly?
Many times along the road, had we come to know a sort of quiet certainty that told us we would always be sojourners, no matter where we ended up. And yet, doubts arose at the table. Our adventure suddenly seemed to have been cut short, and all our efforts suddenly seemed inadequate. We could have been braver. We could have been stronger. We could have been more grateful. From what deep well did this rumbling fear suddenly rise? In spite so many months of practice living in the present moment, our white tablecloth dinner paled in comparison to the horizons still within us and still captivating us. While our bodies felt solid and heavy within the warm, cheerful ambiance of the restaurant, our spirits seethed, frothed, pounded against the cracks of our beings. I mechanically ate my broiled trout in herbed cream sauce, but I held on to the stem of my wine glass on the table. I grasped its stillness and stability. If only we’d somehow been made less substantial; then, we could be everywhere at once. We could roam without end. It was as if all the anguished whys and whats of childhood were close at hand. Why do I have to go to bed? Why can’t we live forever? We could hardly look at each other. I don’t want to go home.
Martial glacier gleaming above the southernmost city of the world. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
Over the following three days, we resolved to enjoy ourselves and the respite from the warmest period of the year in Tierra del Fuego. We spent our time perusing tacky souvenir shops and journaling over coffee. Men and women roamed the streets in old-time-y, jailbird costumes, advertising tours that retold the legend of Jeremy Button, a native Fuegino who was taken captive by English explorers and brought to England, and who later reclaimed his indigenous way of life upon his return. Rain thudded down relentlessly, pausing only to allow us a squelching hike up to nearby Martial glacier. As soon as we placed our hands on the gritty ice, the clouds opened up again.
One evening, for the first time in months, we tucked into bed and browsed Netflix. We were tired, and it felt good to shuffle around the warm Velasquez house without our shoulders locked around our ears. We relished being able to spread out layer upon musty layer of clothing to dry by the radiator. We relished gazing upon one another’s form unobscured by shabby, protective gear.
We waited, for the first day or two, before sharing the photo of the two of us with the sign. It was a sensible thing to do, in retrospect. When we did, we received numerous, kind, joyful messages of congratulations on a job well done. Done, the comments read.
A Selknam man prepared for the initiation rite of Hain in his regalia. NYBooks
We tried to assuage our sense of discombobulation with a visit to the Natural History Museum. Black and white portraits of the Selk’nam, Yanama, Ona, and other indigenous tribes of Tierra del Fuego stared at us from the walls. Land of Fire, Magellan had called the place, supposedly upon sighting towering bonfires along the coast from his ship as he rounded what would later be named Cape Horn. Unwittingly, we had seen the idealized figures of native Fueginos before, in spiritualist-themed murals. I didn’t recognize them, then, in striking, hammer-shaped headdresses and bearing graphic body paintings. I’d wondered if they were figments of fantasy or archetypes common to some kind of plant-medicine vision. In fact, the regalia and adornment depicted in the murals were historically accurate. But the people are largely gone.
In the wakes of ethnocentrism and epidemic disease, not a single person of full, indigenous Fuegino descent is alive today. European overland exploration and settlement in the region was so relatively recent that they could capture silent film footage and photographic portraits of its inhabitants. Indeed, the Fueginos are richly-documented. To watch how they moved their bodies, how they brushed stray hair away from their faces; how they danced and laughed; how they candidly, or perhaps not-so-candidly, attested their humanity just by living, just for a few moments, in front of a camera, moved me in a way that was altogether different from how a display of archaeological remains can move. It lent a different feeling than does viewing a tool, a shoe, or a monument removed from or empty of the humanity that handled it, wore it, or built it. But this documentation, along with artifacts of Fueginos' own making, are virtually all that remain of them. They cannot bring the cultures back to life.
Martial mountain range. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
The barbarism, greed, and moral superiority of conquest aren’t what I’ll argue here, though these themes have sat heavily in our hearts as we learned about so many pre-Columbian empires throughout our trip. But what was also noteworthy to me, in that museum, was the sense of spiritual exigency that had led many conquistadores and missionaries to seek such challenging extremes and unforeseeable dangers. Tales of their exploits that do not look squarely at exploitation have been over-sung, and can and should be revised. Survivors’ and descendants’ accounts, in the modes of accounting that are authentic to them, must be sought out. And yet, there are times, for so many of us, when we perceive the stakes of our personal endeavors to be as dear as conquest and salvation, even within the comfort and relative ease of our busy, modern lives. What is it that drives us to build up those stakes? Or to leave them behind? Was I not also driven here, with my notebooks and armor, to glimpse something of the eternal?
As we wandered around the exhibit, we sought versions of ourselves that could be kin to the less self-conscious selves staring out at us from the photographs. It is hard to imagine that a person who lived so much closer to the land than Nathan or I could also be a stick-in-the-mud, an egomaniac, a romantic, an ass, when they are no longer able to speak for themselves or consent to doing so. And we also sought some version of ourselves that would risk everything for something like glory. There are so many sides to this story, our story, and every story; so many more than our own two eyes to see through. Of the people whom we’ve met and remembered, who will remember us and in what light?
We had thousands of miles to go and would have to retrace many hundreds of miles before reaching Chile’s Carretera Austral, widely purported to be one of the most beautiful stretches of highway in all the Americas. And with a gander at a paper map, we finally shook off our sense of anti-climax and loss. Chile and Argentina were long landmasses, and only one month remained before we had to reach Santiago. It was almost a relief, then, to question whether we had enough time to cross such a distance. So much was yet to be demanded of us, and, still, adventure lay ahead.
Ushuaia remains a bustling harbor. Photo by Nathan Sharp.