38 years of daily practice getting cars on a ferry would have suggested a more orderly process, but in the hour before the 9am departure, the little ramp in punta arenas was witness to a mayhem of officials pointing and shouting into walkie talkies, cars with reservations haphazardly reversing into an excuse of a queue and cars without places scrambling for position.
the malinka’s engines fired up and we were off. we were crossing the straights of magellan, that remote bit of water i first learned about in a history or geography lesson that i never imagined i’d ever see. and in two and a half hours, we were going to be in tierra del fuego, the ‘uttermost part of the earth’; another place you’d hear about and file in the least accessible parts of your memory – like Kamchatka, that northeastern strategically relevant asian territory in the board game Risk.
the passage was uneventful and unusually calm, the captain told us as he took a break from his newspaper crossword. she was an old but regularly renovated ship and as we approached the golden, barren island a school of jumping dolphins appeared alongside, escorting their big friend to shore as apparently they always do.
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when magallan arrived in 1520, he saw pillars of smoke rising across the island and wrote to his king from ‘the island of smoke’. carlos II replied there was no smoke without fire and renamed the island ‘tierra del fuego’. the smoke came from indian fires which were eventually put out through war and european disease.
porvenir is the chilean side’s largest town, boasting a population of 5000. we put only enough expensive chilean diesel to get us over to the argentinian side, restocked on Sahne-Nuss and set off eastwards to Rio Grande, once the prosperous capital of argenitian tierra del fuego, but now a poor cousin to the tourist fuelled boom-town of Ushuaia.
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55,000 people live in Rio Grande and there must have been a shop for every one of them. assembly plants and company headquarters were here to take advantage of its duty free status, and skilled labour from the mainland and abroad was flown in on a temporary basis. we had arrived on a Tuesday when employees tag teamed their colleagues and as a result every hotel in town was fully booked but one. it was soon clear why this hostel was the outlier: our three-bed bedroom was served perfectly chilled and the rarely heard, delicate click of the communal bathroom’s door opening was like a starting gun to the hotel guests’ 100m bog sprint. too tired to compete, i hung round the toilet, toothbrush in mouth. i knocked twice before a grumpy long haired guy came out in a release of steam. wrapped in a towel round his waist he paused to look at me, grunted and disappeared down a corridor. the floor was soaking and the mirror was fogged. i grunted too, and farted before returning to our room. a shivery half hour of trying to fall asleep in the face of loud laughing from the immediately adjacent livingroom (nothing’s that funny), i finally got up and ripped the blankets off the spare bed to cover us up. e-j was already ‘out cold’ but it took another miserable half hour for me to warm up and finally relax into oblivion.
