Ushuaia calls itself the end of the world and puts it on the signs, which is the sort of thing that would be tiresome anywhere else. Here it is more or less true, and in any case the town has other things to say for itself.
It sits on the north shore of the Beagle Channel with the Martial range directly behind it, and the range still has snow on it in January. From the water the town is a band of coloured roofs — reds, greens, corrugated blues — climbing the lower slopes, with the harbour in front and the mountains going straight up out of the back of it.
On the waterfront the tour boats are lined up along the pier, half a dozen of them, white with blue trim, all of them selling the same run out to the sea lion colonies and the Les Éclaireurs lighthouse. Behind them is a building with a sharply pitched black roof that would not be out of place in Norway, and next to that a half-timbered hotel with painted panels and hanging signs — Bavarian, in Tierra del Fuego, on the Beagle Channel.
The town from above
From the road up behind the town you see the whole thing at once: the airstrip on its peninsula, the bay beyond it, the ranges on the far side of the channel in Chile, and a band of low beech forest in the foreground. It is the most southerly city in the world by most reckonings, population then around 50,000, and it exists because Argentina wanted it to. In the distance, four expedition cruise ships are visible – Holland America’s Rotterdam, Hapag-Lloyd’s Hanseatic, the residential cruise ship The World, and my ship, obscured and dwarfed by the Rotterdam.
MS Nordkapp is alongside. She was built in 1996 for the Norwegian coastal route, 123 metres, and she is the same ship I sailed north on two winters ago from Bergen to Kirkenes. In the southern summer Hurtigruten works her down here. It is a strange thing to walk up a gangway you already know, in the wrong hemisphere, in daylight at ten at night.
Cabin 350. There is a blue expedition jacket laid out waiting in it, with a note asking me to try it on tonight and swap it in cabin 333 if it does not fit. Embarkation at five, snacks in the Svalbard Bar on deck seven, the safety briefing at seven, the lifeboat drill at eight.
The other thing on the sheet is the one that matters. Every landing in Antarctica is made in groups of thirty-two, and you sign up for a group at the information desk after the drill. Sign up before ten and you choose who you go ashore with; after ten you are assigned at random. Nobody on this ship needs telling twice.
The programme says we sail at nine. I have the town going past in the long grey twilight and no idea any more what hour it actually was, because the camera’s clock is telling me one thing and the ship another, and on this trip the ship is right. Down the Beagle Channel, then, some time in the late evening, and the next land is a day and a half away.
