Vermont Chile Round Trip: End of the Road

Arriving at the end of the road

End of the Road, Bahia Lapataia, Tierra del Fuego National Park, National Route 3, Argentina. The most southerly point you can drive to. The most austral I will ever be.

We didn't really plan to come here, but we didn't rule it out either. In July last year, when I set up our blog, Luc and I talked about what to call it. This was about the closest we came to goal setting. We considered names that included Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego, but decided that even Patagonia wasn't a goal we wanted in our blog name because we weren't committed to a particular destination other than to see our friends in Chile. We were in Vermont. We were certainly going to Chile. We were coming home. Round Trip. That's enough. Vermont Chile Round Trip.

Everyone we meet is on his own journey. Luc is often asked if his bike ride is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. At the Tierra del Fuego national park, we met a man at our campground, Jonathan, who wore a brand new, over-sized, bright orange Ushuaia tee shirt over his long johns. He said he had been traveling for 20 months, from Switzerland to Germany, by boat to Baltimore, to Alaska and finally to Ushuaia. Despite the tee shirt, he was not what I think of as a "been there, done that, got the tee shirt" kind of guy, but he got me thinking. He was traveling alone. I asked him what that was like. "Everything has two sides," he said. He didn't have much English or much Spanish, he said. When I decide to go home, he told me, it will be for the conversation. I was glad to learn that his daughter would join him soon in Mendoza where she had been an exchange student. He will certainly have some good conversation there. The next morning we saw his van parked at the base of the hike we were doing. We veered off to follow the lake. He must have taken the "dificultad: alta" route to the top of Cerro Guanaco. I'm sorry we missed him, I hope we talk to him again.

Arriving in Tierra del Fuego

Lago Roca, Ushuaia

Lago Roca

We ended up staying a day longer than we had planned in Ushuaia. Though we didn't say it aloud, it was hard to take the first step in the other direction. There was snow in the pass yesterday morning - we look up from the edge of the Beagle Channel (less than 1 foot above sea level, surely) and wondered whether it was a good day for Luc to ride the bike above the visible snow line. We went into town for propane, visited a strange 5-in-1 museum in a prison, then ended up going shopping for some end of the road stickers. Suddenly it was 6 PM (and a cup of coffee, a fleece, and a pair of hiking boots later), and we were sitting in a parking lot playing cards while waiting for the battery to recharge on a trickle charger.

Grele in Rio Grande

This morning, we were getting our last blast of wood stove and internet before finally starting (starting out? starting home? starting back? starting the narrow road to the deep north (my current book)?). A number of groups had come through our close-to-town campground: a few days of hot showers and woodstove, a few days of National Park camping. I overheard a conversation, pulled up a website from my favorites, and confirmed that the authors of Seventeenbysix, one of my favorites travel blogs, were sitting at the next table. Paula and Jeremy Dear have been traveling in South/Central America for more than two years. I have quoted them in previous blogs. They were my best (and at one point, only) source of camping information until I heard about iOverlander from Astrid in Peru. The Dears were on their way this morning to the end of the road. We gave them some tips, they gave some to us. It was so nice to finally meet them and realize that, well, we have become travelers just like them. They were as interested in our stories as we were in theirs (or did an excellent imitation). We had waved to each other a few days before in Tolhuin. We waved to each other again on the way out of Ushuaia. I hope we see them again too.

The Dears

This got me thinking today as I drove that we we are all on separate journeys. We meet a lot of guys (and a much smaller number of women) on motorcycles. Some have 3 days off, some have been traveling for more than 3 years. There are all sizes and shapes of camper vans with license plates that may or may not be where they are from. (Martin, a german, driving a van with CZ plates he had bought in Buenos Aires, told me this morning that they had received a message written in Czeck on the dust of their rear window. It apparently said hello and wished them well).

This is how bikers lean into the wind

Brazilian bikers at a border crossing

Luc, on his bike, sees different things than I do in the van. In Ushuaia, he saw a lot of memories of the time he was here with a group of kids and coaches that he particularly enjoyed. "Here is where we skied, let me take a picture for Marty. Here is the bar we played music in - Jim played percussion with the forks on the table. Here is where Zach Barkan went swimming." I saw other kinds of things: Here are the Andes lined up, west to east. Here must be the most southerly rugby club, wouldn't my boys enjoy this. Here is a grocery store where I will not see old friends in the aisles. But where I found a bottle of wine whose label reminds me of a dear friend we have recently lost. He brought it to our house for a Christmas dinner, and Luc had coincidentally bought one from the same vineyard. They concurred on many things, including the perfect temperature for those bottles.