The REAL End of the World

Being in the world's southernmost city is cool and all, but on Wednesday we pressed on and made our way down to Puerto Williams, the world's southernmost town, and probably the southernmost settlement that's not a research station. It really must be a thorn in Ushuaia's side, because it throws the whole "end of the world" claim into doubt, and all over a difference in latitude that amounts to maybe one kilometre. Seriously, if the water weren't so cold, you could swim there from Ushuaia. If I were Ushuaia, I'd be pretty bitter.

That being said, Ushuaia is a proper city, and Puerto Williams is... well, small. It has about 2,200 permanent residents, most of whom are navy officers. Everyone else is the husband, wife or child of a navy officer. The small size and total lack of economic importance means it's a little tricky to get there, with your options basically being:
a) charter a plane.
b) charter a zodiac.
c) go down to the yacht club and try to bribe sailors with beer to take you along if they're heading that way.

Naturally, we started with option c. We headed down to the yacht club (fancy southernmost microbrews in hand, as shown below) in the hopes of obtaining passage, but didn't wind up finding a boat.


Next, we looked into the plane/zodiac scene. Turns out it's actually cheaper to charter a tiny 4-seater plane from the local flight club than it is to take a zodiac across the channel. Expensive, windy, wet boat ride vs. slightly cheaper, substantially awesomer, private flight? Tough choice.


Mal's got tons of experience with tiny aircraft (the perks of being a geologist), but it was my first time on anything smaller than an Airbus. Man, is it different. Commercial airliners basically feel like big buses, with occasional turbulence. By contrast, my first few minutes in a small plane felt like a profoundly stupid decision. They are very small, wind is very strong, and the ground is very hard and unforgiving. Not to mention the fact that our pilot looked like he was about 15, and showed up for our flight wearing skate shoes. After a few minutes in the air though, and after realizing that the plane could indeed survive gusts of Patagonian-strength wind, it was an amazing experience. Flying in a small plane gives you the full knowledge that you are actually flying.

Puerto Williams itself isn't going to win any architectural awards (except maybe "Most Consistent Use of Corrugated Aluminum Siding"), but what it lacks in architecture, it makes up for in small-town charm.


We stayed at the "Hostal Paso McKinlay", which was a spare bedroom in a house belonging to an extremely friendly local family. Despite our very limited Spanish, and their very limited English, we had a great time there. They made us breakfast, afternoon tea, drove us around, and recommended the best restaurant in town. Mind you, that last one wasn't too tough, given the fact that there was really only one restaurant in town: the Dientes de Navarino. We heard rumours of another, but no one was able to confirm the existence of this mysterious "second restaurant". Luckily, the food at the Dientes was delicious, even if your ordering options are limited to "whatever the chef is making right now".


We spent our one full day in the area hiking up a nearby hill to get a view of the Dientes de Navarino mountain range (it's not just a fancy restaurant!). The views from the top were incredible, and the only thing that mitigates the experience of trekking around Puerto Williams is the incessant pounding your skin takes from all the UV rays pouring in through the big, gaping hole in the ozone layer overhead. Thanks, CFCs!


Puerto Williams also has a handsome children's park, rendered only slightly less usable by the wild horses that inhabit it.


The other big sight in town is the Club de Yates Micalvi, a strong contender (in our experience) for "coolest bar in the world". It started as a German munitions ship that ran aground about 10 feet offshore from town, and has since been converted into a bar/harbour for yachts passing through on their way to Cape Horn and Antarctica. It's got 6 foot ceilings, cushily upholstered couches, an ample supply of pisco, a thick haze of smoke, and a slight tilt towards port. Because it's not exactly an easily accessible bar, the clientele tends to be pretty eccentric - yacht captains of questionable sanity en route to Antarctica, their crew (of equally questionable sanity), and the occasional pair of Canadian backpackers.

On our first trip there, the wild horses from the park were all hanging out in front of the entrance, but we weaved our way through them anyways, partly so we could say "wild horses couldn't keep us away from this bar!". Mal gets full credit/blame for that line.

We heard some interesting stories there, including one from a couple of German guys about their journey from New Zealand to the Club de Yates, which involved a storm so bad it blew out their windows, and the subsequent 30 centimetres of water they had to deal with in the bottom of their boat. We also learned that to sail a private yacht to Antarctica, you need to bring 6 months' worth of food supplies due to the apparently very real danger of getting stuck in the ice and not being able to return until the next summer. Here's a dark picture of Mal and a few of our fellow non-yachtgoing travelers in the Micalvi.


We're back in the bustling metropolis of Ushuaia now, where we'll be spending the next few days relaxing and maybe even doing laundry. After that, we're headed to the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, followed by Santiago, followed by... Toronto?! Holy cow, we are almost home!

The End of the World

We've been almost criminally negligent of the blog lately. We're really sorry, we can change! We can be good bloggers! For real this time!

Since the last time we posted, we left Buenos Aires (reluctantly, it is an awesome city) and took a 20 hour bus ride to Bariloche. It's kind of the Banff of Argentina. Mountains, lakes, great views, tons of tourists, and (for some reason) like eighty chocolate shops. There were some great hiking trails around town, and we spent one day hiking up an insanely gruelling trail to get a view of the surrounding lakes and hills.


On our way down, we realized we had missed the actual, perfectly reasonable trail, and just scrambled up a cliff instead. Oops.

While in Bariloche, we met up with Alexis and Garett, who we'd met in Buenos Aires a few days earlier. They both had vague travel plans, so we were able, through the use of cunning, sophisticated arguments, to convince them to come to Puerto Madryn with us to see a million penguins. Our argument was something along the lines of "One million penguins!!!". Here are Alexis and Garett on the bus to Puerto Madryn, eating salami and cheese sandwiches.



Salami and cheese sandwiches have made up a worryingly large percentage of our diet lately. Most of the sandwich meat here in Argentina is that hyper-processed ham loaf stuff that comes in a big shrink-wrapped cube, but the salami is pretty tasty, and bread is really cheap. That, combined with the fact that we've spent like 80 hours in various buses over the last week, and the fact that sandwiches are very portable, has resulted in our all salami-cheese-bread diet. It's been working out well so far, except for yesterday when our salami got confiscated at the Chilean border.

We got to Puerto Madryn, rented a car, and drove to Punto Tombo, the biggest penguin colony in the world (outside of Antarctica). It was awesome. Penguins are hilarious animals. The waddle, the black and white colour scheme, the flippers, it all adds up to comedy gold. We walked around the colony for like 2 hours. You'd think penguins would get kind of old after that long, but I'll tell you when penguins get boring: never. They are always awesome. Evidence:



After Puerto Madryn, we parted ways with Garett and Alexis and headed south to El Calafate, which was like a smaller, even touristier version of Bariloche, which meant restaurants were kind of expensive (by Argentine standards), but also that most of the buildings were really cool log-cabin-style places. There was also some inexplicable graffiti.


El Calafate exists mostly because of the Perito Moreno Glacier, a huge, blue hunk of ice an hour away that is one of the last advancing glaciers in the world. We only had one day in El Calafate, so we made a beeline for the glacier, and it did not disappoint. It's a 60 metre tall jagged, savage wall of ice that juts into a lake and fractures explosively when the sun hits it in the afternoon. While we were watching it, we saw at least a dozen huge chunks of ice break off and crash into the water. It was by far the most impressive natural phenomenon we've seen on the trip.



Our next destination was Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world. To get there, however, we had to take a bus into Chile (losing our salami in the process), across the Straits of Magellan, and then back into Argentina. It was supposed to take 12 hours, but we wound up being delayed by an additional 10 hours when the ferry across the straits had to shut down due to insane wind. I don't know exactly how hard it was blowing, but we had to lean into it not to fall down, our bus was rocking back and forth, and I think I saw a couple of cows go sailing by in the fields. Here is Mal braving the gales for a picture.


We did finally get to Ushuaia, and it has been pretty great so far. It's surrounded by mountains, faces the Beagle Channel, and really does feel like the end of the world.


The only downside is dealing with the constant jealousy of meeting people who are headed off for Antarctic cruises. We really, really wanted to include one in our trip, but we couldn't justify the $8000-or-so price tag. It turns out you can get great last minute deals here for as little as $4000 for a ten day trip. I keep trying to convince Mal that we wouldn't be spending $4000, we'd be saving $4000, but I think we're going to have to leave Antarctica for next time. On the other hand, there is a casino right down the street...

In the meantime while we wait to stumble upon $8000 in the street, we've been keeping ourselves entertained by trying to do as many southernmost things in the world as we can. One we were looking forward to was Beagle Beer, the world's southernmost microbrew. Unfortunately, once we got here, we found several other Ushuaia microbrews claiming to be the beer from the end of the world too. We tried them all, you know, just to be sure. Here we are with a pint of Beagle Dark, the last on our list (which is somewhat apparent from the picture).


We're off now to go book a plane ticket to Puerto Williams, a small village on the south shore of the Beagle Channel. There's not much there other than some nice scenery, but seeing as how we are competitive people and also trivia nerds, we couldn't leave the area without making it to the village that challenges Ushuaia's claim to be the southernmost city in the world (whether or not it's legitimate depends on who you're talking to). Pictures to follow later this week!