Punta Arenas, Chile: The Far Side of the World

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

Our ship the M.V. Mare Australis pulls into the dock. The ship is being replaced by a more modern one, the M.V Stella Australis, in December 2010 and -- we are a long way from home!

You really can’t go any farther than this. Punta Arenas, Chile claims to be “the globe’s most southern city.” A bus trip of about 11 hours to the east, however, brings you to Ushuaia which wears the Argentina title of the most southern town in the world. If you go you’ll probably take the bus. Although it’s only 155 miles, air is very expensive because it’s an international flight. Plus if you bus it you get to meet the locals!

The claims of which location is the farther south are confusing. If you glance at the tip of South America on a map Ushuaia surely looks closer to the South Pole but its population is only 60,000 and Punta Arenas has more than 150,000, so there you are: Big is Better!

Tourism today may have become a country’s best clean and green product but here it’s clean and white. And cold. There’s not much drop-in business and impulse shopping in these parts -- and most visitors are on their way somewhere else often to tours of Patagonia or cruises to Antarctica. Punta Arenas, for example, has gone through periods of both fantastic wealth and discouraging poverty. In the old days of sail it was a required stop for ships to take on supplies and water – and carry out repairs as Cape Horn could savage ships and, even today, can create weather to make cruise ship passengers crawl across the cabin floor for their Dramamine.

Ships didn’t have to stop here once the Panama Canal opened in 1914. The city correspondingly went into a pronounced funk. The merchants’ mansions were boarded up and Punta Arenas lost its sparkle. “In the mid-1950s,” our guide tells us, “Someone with experience with sheep farms fortunately looked at the vast landscape, had an idea and went to New Zealand. He came back with a flock of sheep. A new industry was born that once again made our residents wealthy.” The subsequent development of synthetic fibers then killed most of the sheep industry.

We are standing beside a statue that commemorates this era: it shows a hard-working shepherd with his flock of sheep and his equally hard-working dog. “Sheep and oil are still important industries here,” our guide continues, “but our ranches suffered in the late 1900s. There was such nationalistic talk of ‘reclaiming our country’ from immigrants and foreign investors that local natives rose up in mobs. They murdered some of the wealthy German ranchero owners. The ranches were then neglected; cattle died, crops withered – and some never recovered -- but our pathetic left wing seemingly was triumphant and satisfied it had regained its country.”

She sighed then took us off to walk the city. We came to another statue, one of Magellan himself, the celebrated Portuguese sailor who discovered in 1520 the main navigation route between Europe and the coasts of the Pacific, waters now called the Magellan Strait.

A young woman crosses in front of us and reaches up to rub Magellan’s foot. “That is a tradition in our city,” says the guide pointing to the woman, “Sailors crossing the Magellan Strait for the first time and facing its frequent dangers often kiss or caress the statue’s foot for good luck. Want to try it?” She smiles encouragingly.

We had done a similar thing in Brussels and in Boston. We nod and go for it. So now fortune will smile on our bus trips around the tip of South America.

But first we have to explore the navy museum in this city that has so many nautical connections. We study what to the people of Chile is a famous sea battle, we check out polar expedition artifacts and wine bottles reclaimed from a shipwreck; then we depart for a tour of some of the historic mansions and the local cemetery.

We have another two hours before our bus leaves so we walk past the statue of the two Perons -- that for some reason stands here in Chile not Argentina -- and check out the souvenirs stores.

At the end of the bus trip about 12 hours later we get a quick look at Ushuaia. It is most photogenic.

Then we turn our back on the direction of the South Pole (it lies about 2,500 miles behind us). We line up behind locals with their chickens in cardboard boxes, laundry in baskets, and sandwiches in greasy bags. Boy their food smells good! Then we board our bus again for regions as remote but farther north.