The End of the World In Tierra del Fuego

With a bit of elementary school Spanish, you may translate "Fin Del Mundo" as "End of the World."

Ushuaia, Argentina, gets its nickname because it is the southernmost city in the Americas.

With the Coronoavirus Panic of 2020 in full swing, perhaps you feel like you're living at the End of the World.

One of the great aspects of international travel is that learning more about the world's history from alternative perspectives can help put our lives into perspective.

Another positive facet of travel is that memories of great trips allow us to escape the prisons of constant negativity in the news with pleasant daydreams about where we've been.

Our first stop after days cruising Antarctica was Ushuaia.  Those willing to pony up almost $4,000 per person boarded a small plane to return to Antarctica to do a bit of exploring on land, including a visit to a scientific station.

Because this was the type of trip many people do once in a lifetime, it was tempting to fly back, but the truth is that 11-hour excursion would have cost more than the 16-night cruise itself for most of us.

To keep that price in perspective, an expedition cruise to Antarctica, where you launch from the small mother-ship in Zodiacs to go ashore would cost considerably more than our Princess South America cruise including that expensive excursion from Ushuaia, and often not include South America ports beyond the jumping off point in Ushuaia.

Ushuaia is the capital of Tierra del Fuego, "Land of Fire."

As explained by historians on the ship and reiterated by our guide Pablo for our tour of Ushuaia, the native Fuegians --- as the Spanish called them --- actually broke down into two specific groups, the land people (the Selkman or Ona) and the water people (the Yamana).

The land people seem much like native Americans further north.  They were hunter gatherers who wore animal skins --- in this case guanaco (animals similar to llamas) skins --- as clothing to stay warm in the cold temperatures.  Put another way, they basically looked like what we might imagine Paleolithic cavemen (and by that I mean men, women and children) based on movies.

Their bows and arrows were no match for European guns and steel, but it really came down to things like a measles outbreak in 1884 and intentional genocide brought by the Spanish that killed off the tribes.  The last pure-blooded members died in 1982.

Of more interest to me were the Yamana, who lived most of their lives in small boats in which they built fires to keep warm.  They constructed temporary shelters on shore in about an hour, but those huts would only serve as home for three of four days before they returned to their permanent home aboard their boat.

In any case, the Yamana kept their fires burning constantly wherever they were, moving the fire from their canoes to the temporary huts and then back so as to never lose the flame.

It was the smoke constantly rising as they darted around rivers and onto shore that gave the eerie atmosphere to the area Spanish rightly called "Land of Fire," Tierra del Fuego.

Why did they never let fires die?

The Yamana obviously didn't carry propane tanks, charcoal fluid or matches, so starting fires in what much of the time is a cold, wet climate would have been difficult to say the least.

Being without fire would have been deadly, because the Yamana lived almost entirely naked with just small loin cloths not unlike Tarzan.  Instead of warm clothing, they would slather seal fat on their bodies, which served to repel water and help preserve body heat.

That seal fat allowed the women to dive into the chilly 50-degree water to collect shellfish.

The men would hunt seals with spears from their canoes, and again the seal fat helped keep them warm.

After such freezing work, it was natural that they would huddle around the fire to warm up.

And you thought it was tough sitting in your cozy living room trying to figure out how to watch "Outlander" on STARZ during the pandemic!

When missionaries came and found the Yamana nudists, they gave them warm clothing with presumably good intentions.  Unfortunately, once the wool or cotton fabric was drenched by rain and seawater, it retained the cold which was chilled further by the wind, and many Yamana caught pneumonia.

As you will hopefully see from the photos, Tierra del Fuego is a naturally beautiful region.

It doesn't come across as well in the photos as I would have preferred, but there is a rather other-worldly grey-blue-green tint to boulders in the clear lakes, hard-packed dirt, tree bark and leaves that makes it a unique landscape.

Decidedly not that color was the red woodpecker family we happened upon.

Our guide Pablo brought us to that woodpecker family as well as along many other nice trails.  With an early start on a private tour for just the four of us, we managed to stay a few steps ahead of what turned out to be several large buses filled with tourists, including passengers from a big MSC cruise ship in the midst of a world cruise.

Like the Yamana, we eventually needed warmth, so we headed to the warm visitor center and drank hot chocolate, which may not have been as good as that in Barcelona but still hit the spot. 

Architecture of the visitor center and in the city of Ushuaia as well reveals a German chalet influence, bringing to mind the phrase "alive and well and living in Argentina" from somewhere in my childhood memories.

In the park, there's a post office on a pier where you can send a postcard from "the End of the World," but quite frankly, it is a ripoff.

The old guy described by our guide as a quirky individual who sometimes gave souvenirs to guests actually charged $5 for a postcard and stamp in an overcrowded little store that's not worth entering.  Post a card in Ushuaia rather than that tourist trap in Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego.

Just in case the title made you think I would actually be writing about how Global Warming was melting Antarctica as the beginning of setting the world's climate and subsequently lands on fire, I will mention a bit about that.

According to the experts on board Coral Princess, Antarctica has been warming gradually since we started keeping track of temperatures with modern instrumentation, and ice core samples also reveal CO2 patterns which reveal warming and cooling over the eons.

Interestingly, deep ice core samples sometimes drill down to a point where they reach liquid lakes --- obviously warmer than freezing temperatures --- hundreds of feet beneath the layers of ice.

I have no trouble believing that human activity impacts the climate anywhere humans go, but I also would point out that volcanic activity and ocean currents, among other factors like the atmosphere's apparent self-correcting mechanisms, play perhaps more significant roles.

If you want to explore this topic further, near the bottom of this post I've embedded a Popular Science video narrated by our daughter Amy, which makes a strong case for taking action against global warming.  If like me you wonder about the statistics regarding "97% consensus of scientists" who agree that catastrophic global warming is caused by man made CO2, you might find the video below that to be of interest. 

I would like to point out that when politicians talk about sacrifices that must be made to combat climate change by eliminating CO2, they mean the types of sacrifices we as individuals and businesses are making right now to stop COVID-19 in its tracks....and more.

Or we could simply live like the Yamana.

And if you'd really rather not think about another crisis at the moment ---who could blame you for that? --- then you can just look at our additional photos pasted before those videos.

Julie's Other Photos in Chronological Order

Wes's Other Photos In Chronological Order