Tuesday, February 4th, 2025

Waking up on shore was, strangely, not that much different from waking up on board. That is except for one thing – about a metre above my head was a slatted wooden “ceiling”, which was the baseboard of the upper bunk. Our room had four bunks and, due to my innate clumsiness (and the lack of a “safety rail”) it had been gently suggested that the top one was not for me ….. My nearest and dearest, needless to say was slumbering peacefully on the top bunk of the other pair.

We got up and wandered down the stairs to get our meagre breakfast. Strangely, a few slices of toast and a pear did seem to fill me up, but there was probably still most of a sheep lurking beneath my tea shirt !

We checked in for our flight which, uncharacteristically, seemed to be at the same time and going to the same airport in Buenos Aires that we expected.

Our plan for the morning was to hike the second piece of the high ridge line that stood between the city and the ring of surrounding mountains. We set out and began to climb the steep (and I do mean steep) slope towards the tree line in the half distance.

The ascent, ironically, took us through the progressively descending social structure of Ushuaia. The higher we climbed, the worse the roads became. The metalling deteriorated and eventually vanished altogether to packed dirt. Plus, of course, the tattier the housing became. By the time we approached the edge of the trees, we were in a barrio where the dwellings (to call them houses would have been an aggrandisement) were obviously composed of whatever those who had constructed them could find laying about. What they must be like to live in, particularly during the Winter, was something we did not care to think about. The construction also appeared to be totally random and unregulated. It seemed that, if you could find a few a few bits of old plywood and corrugated iron, all you needed was to go to the edge of the forest and cut down a few trees to make a space to build. If you could somehow attach the wood and metal together, you could live in the resulting shack. It was also necessary to strew some rubbish randomly around your tiny plot and to get a mangy dog to guard it.

This haphazard (non-existent) construction control meant that, in order to get to the marked path, we actually had to squeeze through somebody’s tiny garden on some very rickety steps. I was afraid that, should I stumble and accidentally put my hand on the wall, the tiny house of cards might simply collapse.

Actually getting into the trees did not really help our cause. Felling, most likely for firewood, had eradicated any vestige of the path and the forest floor was criss-crossed by rubber hoses that led from tanks, into which other hoses, from still higher up, brought water. It was a total mess and still very steep. We slogged our way ever upward and it seemed to take forever until, right where Lucie’s Czech map program said it would be, we did come to the path.

We were in ancient woodland. It was not as dense and wholly impenetrable as we had seen in Tasmania, but it was obviously not the “managed” forest that we see in the Czech Republic. The path was usually, just about discernible and although we did make a few wrong turns, we worked our way steadily east. In the dense trees, both Ushuaia, quite close on our right and the mountains, quite close on our left, were totally invisible. It was not really that remote, but it felt as if it was.

After a while, we came to a large area of peaty bog which did, at least, offer us a view of the mountains, but Ushuaia may as well not have been there.

The way soon became a boot sucking bog and, once or twice, when an incautious step put a foot in deep squelchy mud, I was glad my boots were high ones,. We had not seen a single other person, but there were the odd boot prints, in both directions and, of course the ubiquitous tracks of mountain bikes …..

We entered an area of really dense trees. In some places the path was very faint and we had to duck below low branches or squeeze between close trunks. It seemed to be just the two of us. As you do, I commented to Lucie that we were doing and seeing things that none of our other expedition passengers would. It was lunchtime. We had no food with us, but that did not matter, because I soon got to eat my words.

We had just achieved a slightly wider path when a fellow hiker appeared around a twist in the track. But, not just a fellow hiker, a fellow former Plancius expedition member. It was a Swiss guy, Gilbert, who was not a member of our gang, but with whom we had, on several occasions, nonetheless, conversed. If this is not the pot calling the kettle black, he was a bit weird and had claimed that all of the exceptional luck we experienced on our trip was down to his personal “Guardian Angel”. We all recognised each other immediately and we had a brief and merry chat before setting off in our opposing directions. Gilbert had no map or map App on his ‘phone and was wearing, what we both considered to be, wholly inadequate footwear. They were really just shoes …. He claimed to have worn just the same shoes on an ascent of Kilimanjaro, so maybe he really does have a Guardian Angel. We hope he that he does and is not still wandering around, somewhere in those wild woods.

At one point, high in the almost impenetrable trees, we came upon two wrecked and abandoned cars. They were ordinary saloons, not beefy 4x4s, so how they had ever got up there was a mystery, The track was just wide enough, but it was really steep. It must have been noted as a problem locally though because, at the bottom of the slope, tree trunks had been driven into the ground to prevent the ingress of vehicles.

We walked down hill on a far more frequented track that ran across the ridge line at a lower level, but obviously not all the way. Here we did meet a few people, mainly couples strolling.

Finally, we did come back into town, but in a far nicer area. The houses looked as if they received at least rudimentary attention sometime this century and there was a large new school under construction. We wound our way through the maze of streets and finally found the Avenida San Martin and, joy oh joy, the Café Martinez. Even though my iPhone said we had only walked about nine kilometres, we were tired, hungry and thirsty. Sadly, the “B” team was on duty, but eventually I did get a nice sandwich with bacon. Lucie got a Passion Fruit cheesecake to go with her ristretto and we both enjoyed a rather nice lemonade.

We walked home. Somehow, after our recent exertions, even the final climb felt like nothing. We took our TND photo for those reprobates back in Prague and utilised, at last, our tripod (“little tripey”) which we drag everywhere we go and never think to put into our rucksack.

Then we spent the rest of the afternoon in prayer and contemplation (asleep).

Our original plan, if you can call it that, was to revisit the fish restaurant where we had first met Wanda on the night before we boarded the Plancius. However, even though we had been denied the three meals a day regime of the ship, we both found that we were not really that hungry. Instead, we walked into town and eventually located the place on Avenida San Martin (Pizzeria “El Rinco del Bely”) whose selection of empanadas we had enjoyed shortly before boarding Plancius. We sat there, intermittently ate empanadas and, in that football mad country, I was able to watch Arsenal sticking an incredible five goals past Manchester City and Nottingham Forest getting no less than seven, to massacre Brighton, on a large screen tv.

We lingered a bit and it was full dark by the time we left the pizzeria. Then it was back up the hill to the Portal Antartico for the very last time. I tried not to trudge. In the distance, high above the city, the lights of the barrios twinkled like stars in the darkness. As in La Paz, the gleaming served to distract from the poverty that it would have dimly illuminated up close.

We had an early start the following morning, the first part of our trek home. In all probability, I would not even get my two, humble, slices of toast. It really was all coming to an end.