Beyond The Last Border: Ushuaia
For years, this has been the ultimate goal. When you meet people on the road, something that has become increasingly frequent as we continued south of Mexico, we have always been “heading south”. As soon as you hit this continent, Ushuaia is even more on the radar. Most people know where it is; it’s something of an icon. The ultimate destination and accomplishment. While no one’s journey ever really ends there—at the very least people need to return a few thousand kilometres north to ship out of the continent—it is somehow still the end of many trips. Every breakdown I vowed to myself that I would get Ruby to Ushuaia, to the end of the world. And today was going to be that day.
We spent a quiet night on the banks of the small River Ewan, just south of Río Grande, where we had found shelter from the wind. We were only a few hours away now, and the landscape of Tierra del Fuego had just started to get interesting. After weeks of driving through the endless monotony of the pampa, now we had trees. Lee said that he had always pictured being the one driving as we arrived, and I had no problem letting him. In a way I was weirdly distant to the whole event now that it was imminent.
We had talked previously about how it was such an epic milestone; we were so happy that we were actually going to achieve this. We were proud that we had done it on a tiny budget, overcoming some huge setbacks. We were sad that Lizzie wasn’t here with us. It should have been an event loaded with emotion, and until we got there I couldn’t tell if I was going to be crying my eyes out or staring blankly at the sign. A small part of me didn’t want to get there at all. It almost felt like it had been our focus for so long that I didn’t know what would define us afterwards anymore. It was with all these emotions swirling around that we bumped our way back out to the main road and turned southwards again.
I might have had more time to ponder my existence if the landscape had remained as dull as it had been for the previous month. However, we were soon greeted with epic mountain ranges looming in the distance and bright blue expanses of beautiful lakes. The largely dead tree forests around us were beautiful too. They added to the sense of the remote, the wild, and the untouched as they lined the roadsides. Their leaves, now long replaced by lichen, blew in the ever-present wind. The scenery took my breath away and drove out all thoughts of where we were actually going.
For the first time in what felt like an age, we climbed over a small mountain pass, leaving the stunning lakes behind us. From the top we started our final descent towards the city, dropping down between the peaks and following a roaring green river through the valley. The place was already a tourist hotspot; campers and hitchhikers everywhere.
When “our moment” arrived, we weren’t really ready for it at all. We had put the city in as the destination; we hadn’t really got as far as thinking what we were going to do once we got there. The first thing, undoubtedly, would be to take that iconic photo that everyone takes beside the sign. What we didn’t realise is that this is actually at the outskirts of the village—as I suppose you would expect a sign to be—and our sat nav was taking us into the centre. Therefore, as we turned a corner with a seven-minute drive remaining, we were a little thrown to see the sign. I didn’t feel like I was quite mentally prepared for the moment. On either side of the road were towers bearing the name. Already parked up in front of it were two other campers. We pulled in behind them; we had to wait our turn, but sure enough, we had made it. I think it took me a good few days to really process the thought, though.
After we passed through the pillars and into the city, we decided that a bottle of champagne was definitely in order, and we headed to the nearest La Anónima supermarket to make it happen. With our shopping completed, we headed to the opposite side of town to camp at the train station. This seems to be the place to be—an old municipal campsite that basically consists of a large lumpy field on the side of the river. It’s free, and with the river nearby we were all set. We imagined that several other people would be out there too. Our German friends Christine and Horst, as well as our Colombian friends Carlos and Marce and our longest-term friends Matt and Cinta, were just a matter of hours behind us.
Sure enough, there were already several campers there, as well as many more parked up along the seafront in town. It was definitely a popular destination for Christmas, and we had arrived on the 20th of December, giving ourselves a few days to settle in before. Just as we had planned too. We blagged ourselves a spot on the side of the river. Crystal-clear, freezing water from the nearest glacier flowed past. This would do just fine.
Over the next few days, the rest of our friends arrived. We met some new friends too, including Andy in his Land Rover, the first Brit we’ve seen with a vehicle on this continent. We also met Kate from Australia, and funnily enough it turned out that the Argentinian/Swiss couple we had met just up the coast had been the ones who had brought her old van. It’s a small world as it turns out. As is normal for the rest of Europe, there were plans to celebrate Christmas Eve from the German side of things. We were invited for mulled wine over by Ivo, and then we had some rather lovely Bavarian whiskey given to us by Peter and Mika. We brought over some cauliflower cheese, as we suddenly had a lot of cauliflower. Mika had given us hers as they were about to enter Chile and didn’t want to try and cross the border with it.
Back at Ruby, we made a mushroom pancake creation to share with everyone and added it to the table of food. Between us we made an awning structure to hide under from the encroaching drizzle. We plonked Horst and Christine’s fire pit in the middle of it and enjoyed a lovely sociable evening.
It was a truly huge turnout, and so people made their own little gatherings all over. The Argentinians made an enormous asado, the German Unimog village was doing something else. There must have been over 30 vans here. We were happy with our little gathering. To us it was crazy that after two and a half years we had arrived here with people who we started this continent with, but with no planning at all. It was probably my favourite Christmas so far.
The following day, which is naturally the day we celebrate, we planned to cook our huge three-course meal. We kicked off the day with a grapefruit Bucks Fizz served alongside smoked salmon and scrambled eggs on giant handmade crumpets.
This was a pretty substantial brunch, and so when we got snacky later we heated up a Camembert, drizzled it with honey and seeds, and went to town on that. Then we decided we’d postpone the rest of the food until the next day as we didn’t really need a three-course meal. I had already made us a nut roast as well as a leek and potato terrine for that. We had already eaten quite well, but wanting to be social, we went to say hi to the Argentinian section. We refused food—we had already eaten, we told them—but they weren’t having any of it. So we politely accepted our second dinner. Horst joined us and also had a large plate of meat plonked down in front of him. In the spirit of sharing, I brought over our bottle of homemade Baileys, which quickly disappeared, and the evening grew loud and late.
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