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 20 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 would’t get any more sleep before dawn broke, and had hit the road early. We texted him to say that we would catch up later. 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. Everything was soaked, and the rain had pounded down even longer than the music.
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 simply passing through. Rain-huddled cattle grazed on the scrubby, deforested land, and in two featureless hours, we found ourselves at a ferry terminal at lands end. From here, we would load 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, in a half hour’s time, we would cross 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 4 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 and 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 were crawling with bicycle tourists. We would have to spring for a hotel, and we were a bit downcast at the prospect. It was not the evening we had imagined we would have upon reaching the place we had inscribed on our tires 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 any 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” did not exist. I understood her concern, but stuck to my guns. Nathan sighed exasperatedly at our polite quibbling back-and-forth.
Villa del Mar had an entirely sea foam-colored room with a private bathroom, hot showers, and central heating, at a price that we no longer cared to be troubled over. The concierge handed me the usual, heavy, skeleton key we had become accustomed to receiving at our accommodations in Argentina. The national preference, 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 charming, 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 rest flush against the floor. The list goes on, and we clung to these observations because 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 heavy, 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 forests. We turned a corner and burst through an invisible dam holding back briny air. Then, two towers emblazoned with the word Ushuaia rose up before us, and we sailed through those too. 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 50 miles outside of town. We’d search for it later. For now, a creaky-knuckled, numb-cheeked selfie was in order. We found a tiny patch on the sign’s frame that was unoccupied by hundreds of travel stickers upon which to plaster our own, and 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.
A city map of Ushuaia. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
We set out to find Señor Velasquez, the elderly man who lived alone and rented out a few of the rooms of his family’s 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 had been thinking, Get to the end. Get to the end. Why did our sense of accomplishment 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, one year of planning and tying up loose ends, 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 and held back tears of overwhelm for every day and place that lay behind us. We toasted everyone who had befriended and helped us along the way. 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 peace within ourselves that told us we would always be sojourners, no matter where we found ourselves. So, why did our adventure suddenly seem so short? Why had our efforts suddenly seemed so inadequate? Doubts arose. We could have been braver. We could have been more grateful. We could have been stronger. From what deep well did this rumbling fear suddenly rise? Despite so many months of practice living in the present moment, our dinner paled in comparison to the horizons still within us and still captivating us. I hungrily 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. 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. If we had somehow been made less substantial, 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; we guarded against the kinds of tears that adults learn not to shed. Why do I have to go to bed? Why can’t I live forever? It was hard not to look at each other and say what the other was thinking. 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 the tacky souvenir shops and journaling over coffee. Men and women roamed the streets in old-time-y jailbird costumes advertising historic tours retelling the legend of Jeremy Button, a native Fuegino who was taken captive by English explorers, brought to England, and later chose to take up 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 relished shuffling 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 posting 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 tribes of the indigenous 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, wearing striking, hammer-shaped headdresses and bearing intricate body paintings, in spiritualist-themed murals. I didn’t recognize them, and wondered if they were figments of fantasy or archetypes common to some kind of plant-medicine vision. In fact, the regalia and adornment is historically accurate. But the people are gone. In the wake of ethnocentrism and epidemic disease, not a single person of full, indigenous Fuegino descent is alive today. And exploration and “settlement” of the region was so relatively recent that silent film footage and photographic portraits of its inhabitants, along with artifacts of Fueginos' own making, are virtually all that remain of them. By comparison, these culture, which quite accurately be considered lost, are richly-documented. Seeing how they moved their bodies, how they brushed their hair away from their faces; how they danced and laughed; how they candidly, or perhaps not-so-candidly, revealed their humanity just by living, just for a few moments in front of a camera, was moving in a way that was altogether different from a display of inorganic, archaeological remains. It lent a different feeling than does viewing a tool, a shoe, or a monument apart from or empty of the humanity that handled it, wore it, or built it.
Martial mountain range. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
The barbarism, greed, and moral superiority of conquest aren’t what I’m interested in arguing here, though these themes have sat heavily in our hearts throughout our trip as we learned about so many pre-Columbian empires. What was particularly 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. Their exploits have been over-sung. But aren’t there times in all of our lives when the stakes feel just as high, even within the comfort and relative-ease of our busy, modern lives? What is it that drives us to build them up or leave them behind? What has driven me here, if not to glimpse something of the eternal? Is it ego? Is it awareness despite my ego of something more sacred and holy? Is it both?
We sought some version of ourselves that might be akin to the less-complicated selves staring out at us from the photographs. 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 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.