"Tierra del Fuego - the Land of Fire. The fires were the campfires of the Fuegian Indians. In one version, Magellan saw smoke and called it ´Tierra del Humo´, the land of smoke, but Charles V said there was no smoke without fire and changed the name. The Fuegians are now dead and all the fires snuffed out. Only the flare of oil rigs casts a pall over the night sky.
"Until 1619, when the Dutch fleet of Schouten and Le Maire rounded the Horn and named it, not for its shape, but after the Hoorn on the Zuyder Zee, cartographers drew Tierra del Fuego as the northern edge of the Antichton and filled it with suitable monstrosities: gorgons, mermaids and the Roc, that outsized condor, which carried elephants. Dante placed his Hill of Purgatory at the centre of the Anticthon. In Canto 26 of the Inferno, Ulysses, swept on his mad track south, sights the island mountain looming from the sea as the waves close over his ship - infin che l´mer fu sopra noi richinso - destroyed by his passion to exceed the boundaries set for man. Fireland then is Satan´s land, where flames flicker as fireflies on a summer night, and, in the narrowing circles of Hell, ice holds the shades of traitors as straws in a glass. This perhaps that is why Schouten did not land."
So Bruce Chatwin´ introduces this fabled extension of the South American continent, as excerpted from Chapter 53 of `In Patagonia´ (1977, Penguin). Though those intrepid Dutchmen did not land, we did. Descending from the sky in the modern version of a Roc carrying an elephant, we landed in a jumbo on the long narrow strip of tarmac beside the Beagle Channel in the southernmost city in the world, Ushuaia. Our flight from Buenos Aires had been a 12 hour whistle stop tour of the Patagonian capitals: Comodoro Rivadavia, El Calafate, Rio Gallegos, Rio Grande and Ushuaia, and it was with some relief that we stepped onto the tarmac into the fresh blasting wind.
We set up camp at La Pista del Andino, a winter ski club high above the city on pleasant lawns surrounded with foxgloves. From our tent we had a wide view over the city, which as twilight laid a purple shroud over the wide waters and the distant mountains of Isla Navarino, would send up columns of woodsmoke and sparkle to life with a thousand lights. In this eyrie, we spent a number of idle days curled by the pot belly stove in the warmth of the Refugio, Dale set up with Isabel Allende´s ´Paula` and I with Charles Darwin´s ´Voyage of the Beagle`, the good ship of which sailed past here in 1834, well before the foundation of Ushuaia.
"Ushuaia began with a pre-fabricated mission house put up in 1869 by the Reverend W.H. Stirling, alongside the shacks of the Yaghan Indians. For sixteen years, Anglicanism, vegetable gardens and the Indians flourished. Then the Argentine Navy came and the Indians died of measles of pneumonia. The settlement graduated from navy base to convict station. The Inspector of Prisons designed a masterpiece of stone and concrete more secure than the jails of Siberia. Its blank grey walls, pierced by the narrowest of slits, lies to the east of the town. It is now used as a barracks." (Chatwin, In Patagonia, Chapter 53)
Today that barracks is a musuem and the city, founded for the virtue of its isolation at the extremities of the world as a prison, much like Port Arthur in Van Dieman´s Land, now proudly advertises itself as ´El Fin Del Mundo´ or the End of the World, as a tourist attraction in itself. Cruise ships returning from the Antarctic stop here, and the main strip is a colourful jumble of souvenir stores, hostels and restaurants. Along the waterfront, container ships feed this remote place from afar, and a monument stands reminding all that Argentina regards Ushuaia as the capital of Las Islas Malvinas, otherwise known to the Brits as the Falkland Islands.
From Ushuaia as our base, we set off on two walks in the Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego:
Our first jaunt was an enchanting day walk along the Beagle Channel to Lapataia to where the 3063 km Ruta Nacional 3 ends in a wet meadow. The littoral zone of the Beagle Channel is a beautiful strata of blue water meeting the slate grey rocks, where the shore is striped with purple mussels, the coppery kelp, lichens brightly yellow and red, ending where the deep forest begins. The lenga and nirre trees (species of southern beech, of the genus Nothofagus) that grow by the channel are cast in bonsai by the wild weathers, and make a magical world in miniature . It was here that we experienced our first delights at how the nirre splay their delicate branches in tiers of tiny serrated leaves, that being semi-deciduous, colour green, gold and red and make a beautiful carpet as they fall to the damp earth. Deeper into the forest, the lenga grow taller and
more watchful, growing long beards of grey moss and knobbly lumps like goitres in their twisting trunks twist, and send writhing brown roots across the path to snatch at those who dare to pass beneath the forest´s eaves. The landscape was right out of Tolkien´s Middle Earth, and walking slowly through the magical atmosphere of glade after glen, it took us almost four hours to complete the 6.5km Sendera Costera. The trail then left the coast and joined the road, which wound through broad meadows, the grasses grazed close by an army of hares that would pop out at every corner and go bounding away.
Our second outing was our first multi-day trek, up the Valle del Andorra, which lies to the east of Ushuaia and connects at the Paso del Oveja (800m) with another valley running down to the Beagle Channel west of Ushuaia. The hike, the first commended by our trusty Lonely Planet ´Trekking in Patagonia´ guide, commenced with us stomping along a muddied horse track in the rain, through thick decaying forests, by broad red moors that felt like live sponges beneath the foot, under enigmatic mountains that would occasionally loom from the clouds to show their glacier crowned heads. It had the intrepid trekkers first setting camp in drizzling rain at a damp site on the confluence of two streams amid dead trees heaped with moss, a gloomy camp indeed. In the night, we thought we heard, above the dripping rain and the gurgling stream, the voice of young girl singing, which spooked us severely and even now sends shivers down the spine. The following day though was brighter and had us climbing to above the tree line, where the forest peters out in wind whipped nirres, to alpine meadows full of flowers and up to a jewel of lake, the Laguna del Caminante. From here we climbed higher and higher through a desolate valley of broken shingle to reach the top of the pass, marked by a chest high cairn, where the wind blew the whiskers out of my chin. Leaning into the gale, we descended into the Cañadon del Oveja, a steep sided valley where small neves nestled under the mountain tops send waterfalls of long silvery threads down over 500m into the valley. In the loose scree above the tortured talus of the tree line, we missed the turn off to the first camp and pressed on to find ourselves in a horse paddock at the edge of the National Park, which served a fine camp, but for the minefield of dung all about. That night, the wind howled out of the valley like a ´woman wailing for her demon-lover´ as horses snuffled around our tent. The following morning, a light snow fell as we walked tired miles back to camp.
Charles Darwin, when passing by in 1834 as the man of science aboard the HMS Beagle, and as the gentleman companion of the Captain Fitzroy on its second voyage, went a-walking in a forested valley of Tierra del Fuego on its southern coast and describes the experience in Chapter X of his journal, which is so resonant with our walk that it is worth here excerpting:-
¨The next day I attempted to penetrate some way into the country. Tierra del Fuego may be described as a mountainous land, partly submerged into the sea, so that deep inlets and bays occupy the place where valleys should exist. The mountains´ edges, except on the exposed western coast, are covered from the water´s edge upwards by one great forest. The trees reach an elevation of between 1000 and 1500 feet, and are succeeded by a band of peat, with minute alpine plants; and this again is succeeded by the line of perpetual snow, which, according to Captain King, in the Strait of Magellan descends to between 3000 and 4000 feet. To find an acre of level land in any part of this country is most rare. I recollect only one little flat piece near Port Famine, and another of rather larger extent near Goeree Road. In both places, and everywhere else, the surface is covered by a thick bed of swampy peat. Even within the forest, the ground is concealed by a mass of slowly putrefying vegetable matter, which, from being soaked with water, yields nearly to the foot.
¨Finding it nearly hopeless to push my way through the wood, I followed the course of a mountain torrent. At first, from the waterfalls and number of dead trees, I could hardly crawl along, but the bed of the stream soon became a little more open, from the floods having swept the sides. I continued to slowly advance for an hour along the broken and rocky banks, and was amply repaid by the grandeur of the scene. The gloomy depth of the ravine well accorded with the universal signs of violence. On every side, were lying irregular masses of rock and torn-up trees; other trees, though still erect, were decayed to the heart and ready to fall. The entangled mass of the thriving and the fallen reminded me of the forests within the tropics - yet there was a difference; for in these solitudes, Death, instead of Life, seemed the predominant spirit.
¨I followed the water course till I came to a spot where a great slip had cleared a straight space down the mountain side. By this road, I ascended to a considerable elevation, and obtained a good view of the surrounding woods. The trees all belong to one kind, the Fagus Betuloides. This beech keeps its leaves throughout the year, but its foliage is of a peculiar brownish-green colour, with a tinge of yello. As the whole landscape is thus coloured, it has a sombre, dull appearance; nor is it often enlivened by the rays of the sun.¨
...Darwin then retreats, and returns the following day...
¨We followed the same water-course as on the previous day, till it dwindled away, and we were compelled to crawl blindly among the trees. These, from the effects of the elevation and of the impetuous winds, were low, thick and crooked. At length we reached that which from a distance appeared like a carpet of fine green turf, but which to our vexation, turned out to be a compact mass of little beech-trees about four or five feet high. They were as thick together as a box in the border of a garden, and we were obliged to struggle over the flat but treacherous surface. After a little more trouble we gained the peat, and then the bare slate rock...
We obtained a wide view over the surrounding country: to the north a swampy moorland extended, but to the south we had a scene of savage magnificence well becoming Tierra del Fuego. There was a degree of mysterious grandeur in mountain behind mountain, with the deep intervening valleys, all covered by one thick dusky mass of forest. The atmosphere, likewise, in this climate, where gale succeeds gale, with rain, hail, and sleet seems blacker than anywhere else. In the Strait of Magellan looking due southward from Port Famine, the distant channels between the mountains appeared from their gloominess to lead beyond the confines of this world."
So from the confines of the Antichthon, we planned to leave by those same distant channels. Time to move on, we had a boat to catch...
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