The end of the wörld

There we are at the end of the world…as the Argentinians call it. It is marked by a big wooden sign that marks the end of the ruta 3, that we have been travelling almost since Buenos Aires. We have a real love hate relationships with this road, since it was the lifeline of our trip to the south, but than at times the out-of-nowhere-potholes or a completely disappearing pavement made it hard to love the ruta 3. In the end it was a weird feeling to be at the end of the road, especially since it also mentions the distance to Alaska. 

Of course it is not the „end of the world“, since the earth is round….:-P…. and since there are places that are more south than Ushuaia. After Argentina started to claim the „end of the world“ title Chile just established the little village Puerto Williams on the southern side of the Beagle Channel and destroyed Argentinas claim of the most southern city. Nevertheless, the end of ruta 3 is the most southern point we can reach with Rosi, without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to ship Rosi into the Antarctica. For us it felt like the end of the road and we were pretty proud. But it was not enough for Linda, so we started a hike along the south boundary of the Nationalpark for a Geocash, that was really at the most southern point we could get to. Geocaching is a little like a treasure hunt for a logbook, you can sign when you find it, sometimes there is even a little treasure in the container. There is a huge Geacashing community and millions of „cashs“ world wide and every now and then we look for some of these. Linda has been doing it for a long time and „of course“ the gamification factor and „rewards“ you earn for special cashes is also a factor.

This all (including the end of the road) happened in the National Park Tierra del Fuego. The National Park is really nice and the lakes and little islands look amazing. What is not so amazing is the crazy end-of-the-world tourism. Every day a lot of huge busses cross the dirt roads and tiny bridges of the national Park to bring people to the sign at the end of the road, where they can do a little 200m walkway to than return to the huge bus. It seemed surreal to us. Especially since the road passes the only camp ground of the park where we stayed for one night. It is just a beautiful little meadow in between rivers and lakes and if there would not be a big bus coming by every 30 min, you could feel like at the end of the world. When it got dark the busses stopped passing and it was a really nice night at the „end of the wold“, of course with no one else camping there, as pretty much everywhere we go. The next morning we did another little hike through a mystical forrest, before we headed to Ushuaia. 

In Ushuaia we made a little walk along the harbour and had to admit that the view of the surrounding mountains and the beagle channel was pretty nice. The town itself is cute, but pretty touristy, so we did some touristy stuff:

Everybody told us that we had to taste the King crab that is typical for the waters here and after we saw that a full king crab would be at least 100€, we decided to order a king crab stew and weren’t disappointed. It had a distinct taste and we both liked it. Than we bought and wrote some post cards (what better place than the end of the world to write a post card?) and I bought a mate cup. This seems like a small purchase, but for me it wasn’t. Since we have started the trip I saw people everywhere drinking Mate and after I bought a bombilla (straw) in Uruguay and we had tried the Mate in one if our cups it was clear that I need a „mate“ (also the name of the cup). But here my never-ending search started. In every market in every town and every shop I looked for the right cup. It needed to be the right colour and design to fit to my flask (they had to be matching like everyone in Uruguay had them). But also it needed to be small enough for the smaller Mate portions Linda and me would drink, but still big enough to fit in the cup holder of Rosi. Also it needed to fit into the existing cups we already have in the van to not take extra space. I also wanted it to be with a double wall to insulate the mate…. and with that easy requirement I searched through half of Argentina before I bought a simple, black cup from stanley cup (but the smaller version) in a gift shop in Ushuaia…. I have to admit, that I am really happy with that purchase and we use it a lot. It is the perfect road trip drink, but my addiction to look for mate cups is weirdly enough not satisfied…I am still checking them out everywhere. :-D.

After our short shopping and coffee drinking day in Ushuaia was over we headed back the same way way we came into the direction that will lead us roughly until the end of this trip: NORTH

We stopped in the little village Tolhuin over night and next morning Linda did the unspeakable and jumped in freezing cold conditions (1 degree celsius outdoor temp) in the Lago Fagnano to fullfill her own challenge to go swimming in every country we pass. The first dip in Uruguay I was still joining, but this was definitely too cold for me.

A while after leaving Tolhuin, we passed again the „tree border“. South of this border there were a lot of trees everywhere on fire land, north of this border there was again the big nothing of just grassy hills and some small bushes and wind….. a lot of wind. A different level of wind. So much wind that the few moto bikes, that passed us, basically were leaning in a 45 degree angle into the wind while driving straight. Every time they passed a car, that covered the wind, they jumped a meter in the other direction, before they leaned again in a weird angel. It was crazy to see and was a good preview of what we will experience in Chile.