I caught a bus east to Punta Delgada, where we joined a motorcycle club for the ferry ride across the Strait of Magellan to the Chilean section of Isla Grande, Tierra del Fuego’s largest island. The first stage of my convoluted journey – made before the pandemic – started in Punta Arenas, a Chilean Patagonian city whose stately architecture is testament to the wealth generated by the sheep-farming boom of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Unless you fly, getting to Puerto Williams takes time, patience and a degree of luck. The more I learned about them, the further I wanted to explore. At the heart of these tales are the region’s often overlooked Indigenous communities. This redesignation allowed it to claim the coveted title of most southerly city on Earth from its far larger, and now rather miffed, rival Ushuaia.īut while I was initially drawn to Puerto Williams by its sense of isolation, during my three-night stay I found I became increasingly captivated by Tierra del Fuego’s turbulent history, which encompasses scientific expeditions, missionaries, gold rushes, ranchers, epidemics, repression, polar explorers and devastating rodents. Its little-visited capital, Puerto Williams, was upgraded to city status by the Chilean authorities in 2019, despite having a population of barely 3,000. But to really experience life in this far-flung region, you need to continue south across the Beagle Channel to the Chilean island of Navarino.

Once a missionary settlement, then a notorious penal colony dubbed the ‘Siberia of the South’, Ushuaia is the starting point for most Antarctic cruises. Most travellers only visit the Argentine section of the archipelago, flying in and out of the port city of Ushuaia. Divided between Chile and Argentina, Tierra del Fuego (‘Land of Fire’) is one of the world’s last surviving wildernesses.

Aside from a few Chilean naval officers on Cape Horn and a handful of scientists at Antarctic research stations, there was nobody between me and the South Pole.īeneath Patagonia, across the choppy Strait of Magellan, South America crumbles into a labyrinth of sparsely populated islands, rocky outcrops and serpentine channels before dissolving completely into the Southern Ocean. I snapped a few photos before turning 180 degrees to face the Dientes de Navarino, a range of fang-like mountains, the last gasp of the Andes. To the north, on the opposite shore of the Beagle Channel, was the Argentine side of Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America. Nearby, a stream of snow-melt trickled over the stony terrain, which was chequered with moss, the only plant hardy enough to grow in the sub-polar tundra. Still puffing from a precipitous hike through a forest of beech trees, I sheltered behind a half-collapsed cairn and watched a faded Chilean flag thrash at its pole like a fish on a hook. High above the glinting rooftops of Puerto Williams, the summit of Cerro Bandera – ‘Flag Hill’ – was dusted with snow, racked by gale-force winds and utterly deserted.

Hook fish and chicken