Travel: 4-day itinerary to explore Argentina's resort town of Ushuaia

We stood on a peak of the Andes mountain range and sipped on a beverage even as a wicked wind seemed to gouge us. Saw-toothed peaks encircled us, bulging over the Earth like swollen distended bellies while our chopper stood by blades whirring. Below us spread the Argentinian resort town of Ushuaia, a charming jigsaw of buildings on a steep hill, which bills itself as ‘the end of the world’.

And ‘end of the world’ is not mere tourist brochure hype. Located at the tip of the South American continent, between the snow-shawled Andes and the Beagle Channel which flows into the South Atlantic, Ushuaia is the gateway to Antarctica, a thousand kilometres away. On that mountaintop, we felt like we were the last survivors on Earth; knowing that nothing stood between us and the icy wastes of the Antarctic. We clicked a mandatory selfie and then flew back to Ushuaia, over the channel and the charming Bay of Ushuaia, glimmering at dusk with an incandescent light.

Soon after, the town’s restaurants, glittering stores and casinos stirred to life and its lively pulse seemed to find echoes in our own. Ushuaia has the swagger of an uncertain teenager on the brink of adulthood.  However, it also has the confidence that comes from knowing that its location makes it special.

Located on Isla Grande, an island in the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, only a third of the island belongs to Argentina and the rest to Chile. Inhabited for millennia by indigenous tribes who missionaries sought to “civilise” by teaching the men cattle breeding and the women, knitting, Ushuaia lured explorers like Ferdinand Magellan, naturalist Charles Darwin and more recently, writer Bruce Chatwin who were charmed by its unvarnished lonely setting. What makes Ushuaia an undeniable magnet is its other-worldly feel and pace and the gorgeous sights that sprawl beyond it.

In the late 19th century, a penal colony was established in Ushuaia and thus among the city’s first settlers were dangerous criminals, serial killers and pirates who were sent to what was then known as the Siberia of Argentina! Every day, the prisoners chugged 30km on a train pulled by oxen, over make-shift tracks to log timber to build a high security prison for themselves and the town of Ushuaia. The prison was closed in 1947, and is today an imaginatively done museum with one corridor of cells left untouched… peeling paint and creaking doors that gave us goose bumps. Did we imagine the pitiable groans and cries of men chained in those cells, echoing in the corridors, or were they for real?

On our first morning in town, we travelled on the End of the World Train (the planet’s southernmost steam train), which was the repurposed prisoner train but fitted for comfort with grey-blue upholstery, mahogany fittings and glass windows. The narrow-gauge train chugged out of the station, and across the stunning landscapes of the Tierra Del Fuego National Park, through valleys, past rivers, lagoons, waterfalls and snow-garbed mountains that resembled huge defiant bunched fists.

Stallions galloped in the distance across tawny grassland bordered by scrub and bushes. A raptor perched on a tree, in a forest of beech and coihue trees, ready to swoop down on prey. The train sighed to a stop at the Macarena Waterfall, where we sipped hot chocolate wrapped in a sense of impenetrable seclusion.  We disembarked at the last station near an old saw mill in the Tierra Del Fuego National Park, the world’s southernmost national park, 12km west of Ushuaia.

We then drove deeper into the park, along Ruta 3, the last stretch of the PanAmerican highway that connects Ushuaia with Alaska (17,848km), down which trudge many adventurers even today, laughing and crying for having done the journey of a lifetime.

Back in Ushuaia, in the warmth of the cosy Andino Gourmet restaurant, we had an honest-to-goodness Argentinean steak with herbs and mashed potatoes and a breast of chicken in mushroom and mustard sauce — the portions were large enough to feed a dozen prisoners in the Ushuaia prison!

The pace doesn’t let up in Ushuaia where history, legend and stranger-than-real-life tales are related against jaw-dropping backdrops. Our evening trip to Ushuaia Blanca, operated by the company of the same name, turned out to be an entertaining cocktail of revelry, pioneer tales and singing cowboys (called gauchos in Argentina) that played out against a primeval setting of forests and mountains in Ushuaia Blanca, 25km away. We trudged with miner’s lamps strapped to our foreheads through a ghostly beech forest to arrive at a wood hut which was a replica of the bolt hole of the region’s first postman, Ernesto Krund. We had walked across a minuscule part of the trail that Ernesto would have walked to deliver mail.

In the cosy hut, we dipped into lamb stew and sipped hot beverages by a wood fire as a wannabe cowboy in flared pants strummed a guitar and sang local folk songs.

On our last day, we cruised down Beagle Channel’s gin-clear waters, chased by cormorants and sea gulls. In a spectacular finale that took our breath away, an albatross, the bird with the longest wing span (3.4m), whizzed overhead as though to bid “goodbye” to the tourists gathered on the open deck. Their stunned looks of wonder said it all.  

wknd@khaleejtimes.com