Last stop, end of the world: Take a train to the tip of Tierra del Fuego
Standing at the end of the world felt a lot like home to me. At the train depot, overlooking evergreen forests and a bay of mountains, I stopped to grasp the scene. The piercing morning sun stalked low, out of sight behind the summits of Tierra del Fuego National Park. But for the signposts in Spanish and unfamiliar trees – Magellan's beech, not Atlantic oak – I could have been on Scotland's rugged west coast.
I'd come south – all the way south – to the Argentine city of Ushuaia, at the southernmost tip of South America, in search of epic landscapes, adventure and a historic frontier in train travel. Tierra del Fuego National Park, the shoreline trails of which I was exploring, is home to the 'End of the World' train (El Tren del Fin del Mundo), and it is a fragile leftover from one of the world's most remote penal colonies, of which more later. It also represents a profitable money-spinner for the blossoming tourist industry in this complex region of wild sea channels, twisting fjords and ferocious winds on the borderlands between Argentina and Chile.
For my part, I've had similarly thrilling train experiences across the continent. A journey on the Machu Picchu train 25 years ago in Peru; a rooftop ride on Ecuador's zig-zagging Devil's Nose railway; a sunset visit to Bolivia's 'Great Train Graveyard', near the pearly salt pans of the Salar de Uyuni. But this one on Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego is by far the toughest to get to and so has a particular air of abandon – and freedom.
The irony is that this is the railway line first built in 1909 by convicts as a 24-kilometre freight line to transport materials by steam locomotive between sawmills and Ushuaia prison. As local guide Grisel Guerrero tells it, no one wanted to live in this far-flung region with little or no opportunities in the 1890s. But the overflowing jails in Buenos Aires, nearly 3200 kilometres away, presented the unlikely solution.
'It was our Siberia,' Guerrero told me, while we strolled Ushuaia's waterfront that morning. 'Like the history of the British in Australia, our government formed a penal colony, sending many of the worst offenders here. It would
take up to six months to arrive by ship, so before then it was almost impossible for the Argentinian government to populate this land.'
Surrounded by the Beagle Channel and hemmed in by the Fuegian Andes, the landscape is far more dramatic than Russia's vast and unwelcoming North Asian province. As improbable, hard-to-believe-in places go, it's also worth the expense and time to get to. Lining this largely unpeopled coast are empty beaches and river estuaries teeming with brown trout. There are silvery sawtooth peaks and abrupt glaciers. In such beautiful surroundings, it's small wonder that many prisoners decided to stay after earning their right to freedom. By 1952, following an earthquake and landslide, the train had closed.
These days, the UK-built convict train – revived in the mid-1990s as a heritage railway – wouldn't rival many for glamour. Nor would it match any Tube line in London for efficiency. The distance you travel is only eight kilometres, with one intermediary stop at gently gushing Macarena Waterfall. Besides that, the toy-town-like train takes one hour to reach the end of the line. In Ushuaia itself, the former prison complex, Museo Marítimo y del Presidio de Ushuaia, now charts the intriguing time line of the country's early penal colony.
But the rewards of riding the slowest train in South America are profound. After the clanking of gears, there is the screech of wheels on the 500mm gauge track and the shrill blow of a whistle carried on the wind. The ride from platform to national reserve is admittedly the stuff of a theme park, with staff garbed in cosplay inmate uniforms, but you realise, excitedly, that this is also an invitation into one of the wildest corners of the Americas.
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For me, the highlight was the intricacy of land and sea that surrounded us at journey's end within Tierra del Fuego National Park. On board, you only have to look out of the window to feel awe.
'This is the end of the world for us,' Guerrero told me, upon the train reaching its last stop. 'Some say that's a negative way of describing Ushuaia, so now we also say it's the beginning of everything. South America, the Pan-American Highway, the start of our lives here. There is no shortage of opportunity and adventure.'
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