To The End Of The World — At Last

Penguins crowd together as cormorants fly overhead at a tiny island supporting a lighthouse.

- Susan Campbell Shell

A bicycle trip brochure was where I first read about Patagonia. It sounded like an interesting and challenging trip. I planned to do it “someday.”

Many years passed, and some friends and I were talking about traveling, and I mentioned my desire to go to Patagonia. One of my friends asked, “Why don’t you just do it?” And so I did this past January when it was summer in the southern Hemisphere — but not on a bicycle.

Patagonia is a region located in two countries, Argentina and Chile, at the southern tip of South America. It also includes the Tierra del Fuego Archipelago. It is a region of high mountains at the southern end of the Andes chain, spectacular glaciers, pampas grasslands and national parks. It is an area for those who like to explore the out-of-doors. The towns were mostly small and few.

It is one of the few regions in the world with coasts in three oceans. The Pacific Ocean to the west, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Southern Pacific Ocean to the South.

“It looks like home!” was our initial reaction as we saw big, dry fields covered with some kind of brush. We — my friend Cheryl Maher and I — were looking out the windows of the bus taking us from the airport to the city of Ushuaia, Argentina.

Tierra del Fuego National Park was on our way to Ushuaia, and we stopped to take a short hike. Only a small section of the park is open to the public, but it was our introduction to the jagged peaks, glaciers and forests of Patagonia. It is known as a unique park at the End of the World.

We made a second stop to taste the calafate berry. It grows on a thorny bush and was what we had seen growing wild in the fields. Its berries are about the size of a blueberry, and have an interesting, sweet flavor. We later had calafate flavored ice cream.