The road from Ushuaia to Punta Arenas includes crossing the border from Argentina to Chile but the landscape remains the same. Or rather lack of it...Only cold strong winds and few animals occupy these bare lands up to the horizon. Few houses and no trees, only fences, many fences stretching undisturbed for tens of miles. The straight dirt road seems to have no end and only sometimes disappears in a sand storm. And then when you think you almost there after 8-hour trip, the Magellan Straits ferry is cancelled because of 60 km/h winds... It will take another six hours to get there.
When experiencing this landscape from within the comfortable bus, one starts to wonder how people actually ended up living here... Punta Arenas is proud of its residences of former 19th-century sheep and cattle estancias' owners, the Brauns, Nogueiras and Menendez. They believed you can live isolated here as long as you "lived splendidly and remained in constant contact with the outside world". And they lived their rich men's lives until the wool prices remained high. Then just relocated to Buenos Aires. The others that could not afford moving stayed, for good and for bad, in their one-storey shaky houses. And only they should be treated as the true explorers of the Tierra del Fuego...
When experiencing this landscape from within the comfortable bus, one starts to wonder how people actually ended up living here... Punta Arenas is proud of its residences of former 19th-century sheep and cattle estancias' owners, the Brauns, Nogueiras and Menendez. They believed you can live isolated here as long as you "lived splendidly and remained in constant contact with the outside world". And they lived their rich men's lives until the wool prices remained high. Then just relocated to Buenos Aires. The others that could not afford moving stayed, for good and for bad, in their one-storey shaky houses. And only they should be treated as the true explorers of the Tierra del Fuego...
No comments:
Post a Comment