At the Bottom of the World

Having been reacquainted at last with Footloose Lucy, our Land Rover Discovery, we boarded the ferry to Tierra del Fuego on Sunday 21^st January, very pleased to be on the road again.

After a two hour ferry trip across the Magellan Straits we arrived in Porvenir and then drove some 90 kilometres along a desolate coastal road. The landscape was bleak and almost entirely featureless with not a tree in sight. We both agreed that it would not be a good place to come if you were feeling a bit depressed.

Then we arrived at the Parque Pinguino Rey and we saw the King Penguins! The King penguin is the world’s second largest penguin and is mainly found in the Antarctic and South Georgia but in recent years a small colony has become established on Tierra del Fuego. In order to protect and conserve the colony, tourist access is very limited, but we were able to view them perfectly well from behind a hide.

The pinguinos were absolutely lovely! There were about 100 of them and they were standing around looking rather like an upper-class cocktail party saying things like ‘So glad you could make it’ and ‘Gosh, it seems an age since we saw you’ and they were being terribly nice to their big fluffy brown chicks that were bumbling around the place.

King Penguins at cocktail party

King Penguins with young

Once we had ooh’d and aah’d at the sight of these wonderful birds for some little while we set off again for San Sebastian which is the border crossing between Chilean Tierra del Fuego and Argentinean Tierra del Fuego.

We stopped some 500 metres short of the border and had a memorable night camped on the side of the road next to the police station. It characteristically started raining as soon as we got there (not having rained for the best part of two weeks) and it got very cold and windy. However, we cooked up a very good meal and had a bottle of wine and were very cosy and warm in our tent even though it did get blown about, so that was all right.

'Exclusive' campsite by the border

The border crossing on Monday morning was reasonably painless. We had a little trouble on the Chilean side of the border on the basis that we were missing the bit of documentation that proved our vehicle went from San Antonio to Punta Arenas. Alan laid the blame squarely on Sabrina’s shoulders and they reluctantly let us cross.

By Monday afternoon we had driven 100 kilometres through the stark windswept landscape and arrived in Rio Grande, a sprawling modern coastal town. There being nowhere suitable to camp we checked into the imaginatively named Hostal Argentino.

Anyone who is the slightest bit interested in fly fishing will know that Rio Grande (the river, not the town) is a bit of a Mecca for fishermen, it being renowned for its abundance of large sea trout. Whilst most keen fishermen pay huge sums of money to stay in expensive lodges, we were only passing through, so Alan made it his business to find a fly-fishing agent who could organise a day’s fishing for him on one of the estancias. This was duly arranged for Thursday 25^th January.

In the meantime, we explored the area to the south of Rio Grande. Once we got off the main road onto good dirt road the landscape became much more interesting. There were hills and trees, neither of which we had seen much of since arriving on the island, also a very nice lake where we had lunch. We came across many herds of guanaco which were much to our liking. Looking like something between a llama and a large deer, they are exceedingly elegant creatures but also very shy. They ran off as soon as we got anywhere close, so they were virtually impossible to photograph. We also saw an Antarctic fox and a very small wild cat, both of which disappeared into the undergrowth like a dose of salts.

Herd of guanacos

Lunch stop at Lago Yehuin

Lago Yehuin

Family of guanacos

Guanaco

As arranged, Alan had his day’s fishing on Thursday. He was taken by his guide, Peter, to the well renowned Estancia Maria Behety where he paid an exceedingly large amount of money and then they went down to the Rio Grande.

The river was certainly full of large sea trout and it was not too long before Alan had hooked a five pounder which fought like blazes and he duly got himself photographed next to it with a silly grin on his face. Then, after about an hour and a half, the almightiest thump at the end of his fly line heralded the arrival of an exceedingly large sea trout.  Peter was almost as delighted about the whole thing as Alan was.  He was running up and down the bank, jumping up and down and shouting “Bueno” or words to that effect until the fish was brought to bank and had its hook removed. The fish weighed in at just over ten pounds which he never in his wildest dreams imagined he would catch, but there it was!

Alan with five pound sea trout

And this is what a ten pound sea trout looks like!

Alan fished for a solid twelve hours at the end of which he was cream crackered but exceedingly happy. He caught a few more fish during the day though none as large as the ten pounder but he was very keen to point out that it was not easy fishing. Apparently, the wind was blowing like the wrath of God behind him and that made casting a fly inordinately difficult.

After such a wonderful day’s fishing we now know why the Rio Grande of Tierra del Fuego is regarded as the finest sea trout river in the world.

Having ticked that off the bucket list, we left Rio Grande on Friday morning and made our way south to Ushuaia. The countryside became increasingly more interesting and by lunchtime we had reached the large and beautiful Lago Fagnano. We drew the vehicle up on the shingle bank at the eastern end of the lake and watched the two foot waves crashing on the shoreline.

On the road to Ushuaia

Ushuaia is the southern most city in the world and its location is certainly quite dramatic situated on a hill overlooking the Beagle Channel and with the mountains behind. We did not find the city much to our liking however. It appeared to us as a large shambling place built around a cruise liner port with no architectural merit to recommend it. The main streets were teeming with tourists, many of them from the cruise ships, and when we came across the Hard Rock Café we decided not to stay.

Instead we continued along the road another twelve kilometres or so beyond Ushuaia until we reached the Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego. This protects over 600 square kilometres of snow-capped mountains, beech forest, intricate lakes, and coastline.  We wild camped at a lovely spot on the banks of a fast flowing shallow river close to a mountain, the top of which was covered in snow.

Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego

Our campsite in the national park

We spent a wonderful couple of days in the national park, walking the various trails which took us through beech forests by the side of the various lakes and inlets where we sat and watched steamer ducks, grebes, and families of Magellan geese on the water. In the evenings we were joined at supper by a pair of roadside hawks who were trying to bum a free meal and a magnificent crested caracara on a similar mission and they all managed to acquire some fish from us.  At night we went to sleep listening to the river gurgling away and occasionally the wind whacking the tent.

Roadside hawk

Crested caracara - portrait

Arty shot of caracara

Fuegon snipe

Caracara hoping to hitch a lift

On Sunday we left the Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego and, there being only one road, we retraced our path back past Lago Fagnano to Rio Grande, back across the border into Chilean Tierra de Fuego to Porvenir and then once more on the ferry across the Magellan Straits to Punta Arenas.

Typical derelict buildings, Porvenir

Fishing boats, Porvenir

Fishing boat, Porvenir

The end of a long day

Yesterday, Wednesday 31^st January, we bid farewell to Punta Arenas and drove 250 km north to Puerto Natales where we are staying now. From here we plan to explore the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine and so our adventure continues.