Punta Arenas

Punta Arenas is a place whose best days are long gone.

For a hundred years, ships goings around Cape Horn would stop at Punta Arenas, resupply, trade, and move on. The city exploded when thousands of men booked it as fast as they could during the California Gold Rush, stopping in Punta Arenas on the way.

Then, someone discovered the surrounding hills were perfect for herding sheep. Land owning families made fortunres when demand for wool grew as Europe and the US industrialized. Immigrants from all over Europe flocked to Tierra del Fuego.

Then, as soon as it began, Punta Arena´s fortunes ended.

First the Panama Canal made the trip around the Cape unneccesary.

Then, the massive increase in wool supply resulted in a global glut, and prices crashed.

Finally, synthetic fabric largely made wool a niche product.

And now Punta Arenas is a city without much of a purpose - people fly through to go north or south, on their way elsewhere. Package tours pass through town. The military bases supply a few jobs. And there´s still the wool industry, although its a shell of what it once was.

You can see the signs of the past - beautiful colonial architecture and gaudy graves.

Old school colonial architecture.

Used to be a busy place back in the day...

He remembers when wool was a big deal.

The board walk - for teenage girls and their kid brothers...

...and lonely women looking for sea shells.

The graveyard in Punta Arenas is an attraction all of its own - guides call it one of the most beautiful in Latin America.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Menendez family´s mausoleum - wool baron, sailor and settler.

Immigrants from Eastern Europe.

English immigrants.

Czech (i think?) immigrants.

If you can´t afford a mausoleum of your own, there´s room in the cubicles.

German names, Spanish prayers.

German names, German prayers.

A whole section is devoted to children's graves. The silence and the passing of time give the place an especially tragic aura.

The Pampa

A land of millions of sheep and fluffy white clouds.

It stretches from Buenos Aires to the tip of South America.

Flat, dry and windy windy windy.

The road from Ushuaia to Punta Arenas... miles and miles and miles of the same...

Gah.  12 hours on a bus.  For some reason Chile hasn't paved the last 100 miles to Argentina.  Awesome.

8am flight tomorrow to Santiago.  Need to start figuring out how to buy this motorcycle...

In one of history´s great ironies...

... a ex-Soviet spy boat, piloted by an ex-Soviet attack submarine captain, drives old Europeans and Americans around Antarctica.

True story.  Our boat was built as a Polar ¨Research¨ (e.g. spy) vessel.  Our Captain patrolled the Atlantic for U.S. nuclear subs.

Then, the Soviet Union fell apart. 

Then, an entrepreneur figured out Antarctic tourism was booming while Russia´s military was desperate for money.  Hello, Soviet crew, Soviet boat, and Western social-security money.

El Capitan on the bridge. 

The Captain ¨like very much¨the charts.

50% Tchaikovsky, 50% Russian Techno for the bridge.

The 2nd mate.

If you love ice, cold and penguins...

...Antarctica is your continent.

Other trips on smaller sailboats.  You can see the scale of the glaciers here - most had 80 - 200 feet of ice hanging into the water.

Millions of penguins - we must have seen a couple of thousand in just in a week.  Late February is getting close to the end of the breeding season, and these chicks will soon take to the sea.

Penguins, snow and ice and the Polar Pioneer, our home for 11 days.  The shack is a refuge maintained by the Argentinians in case of an emergency.

Austere and beautiful.

None of the wildlife seems to mind humans too much... this is a fur seal looking annoyed.

Almost 2 months since leaving a civilized life in Boston.