During the last ten-fifteen years, the southernmost city in the world has grown twice. Further to the south, there are settlements, but they are no longer the city.
Ushuaia is kind of the world’s end. There is a seven-kilometer railroad that previously connected the prison and labor camps. It is called this way: “The train to the end of the world”. A lot of tourists come to Ushuaia. Some of them go further – on yachts or large cruise ships to Antarctica. Twelve people can travel on yachts, on the ships – more than a hundred. On the ship the waves are barely felt, you can swim in the swimming pool, watch TV, sit at the bar and the like. On the yacht, you have to cook, clean, stand in watch, lock and bar the doors – so that nothing falls or knocks. However, due to environmental restrictions, the number of permitted tourist disembarkation, as well as disembarkation sites are strictly regulated and divided between the vessels. If a particular voyage books disembarkation in a certain place, but due to bad weather, none of the passengers don’t want to take advantage of the opportunity, in any case, this disembarkation is believed to be credited and it isn’t passed on to others. It is easier with yachts. Due to the small number of people aboard, everyone can disembark wherever they want to. I can tell more about the advantages and disadvantages of sailing on a yacht in the next material.
In winter the tourists come to Ushuaia to ski since the mountains are high and beautiful here. Jan was born here, in Ushuaia. He’s 28 and he was living 14 years in Buenos Aires but recently he has returned to the native city. He had studied for a photographer but dropped it because it was very expensive. In Argentina, there are both paid schools and paid universities. Paid schools give the best education. Universities, for the most part, too, although the National University of Buenos Aires takes a good position on the quality of education. When Jan left Ushuaia, the city was twice as smaller than today. About 80 thousand people live here now.
The city was founded on the Tierra del Fuego to proof the affiliation of this land to Argentina. The first building is considered to be the strict-regime prison. Already after its construction, the town itself began to emerge.
With the increased number of tourists, a large airport has been built here, central streets were flooded with numerous shops and cafes. In this sense, the city is like some kind of ancient European tourist town, which has established a calm life, has gained the glory of a wonderful resort and gradually rubbed the authenticity with universal stores of well-known and unknown brands, souvenir shops, etc. Actually, Ushuaia doesn’t look at all like Europe, even though both the climate and the bay literally inspires with the smell, similar to the Mediterranean, and figuratively – with the atmosphere of the south. In fact, this is south but it might be something like Italy, Cyprus or, for example, Slovenia, where everything is fundamentally different.
Willing to classify and to nestle the new piece of the world into your understanding, you unconsciously look for associations and parallels. The important thing for comparison is architecture. Here again, separate features resemble southern European towns, the rest – something new. Something echoes with wooden houses in eastern European small towns. The structure, the authenticity of omnipresent colorful signboards, big windows, low-rise buildings could resemble the frames of the American movie. Instead, the use of artificial materials which is so unusual for Europe and so frequently used on the post-Soviet Union territories seems appropriate here. Although intuitively it seems that nobody intentionally cares about aesthetics but it exists by itself. Local. Special.
After all, roads and transports are other demonstrative things. The railroads are bad in Argentina. The local told me that one of Argentina’s presidents had had a brother who owned a bus company. So relatives destroyed the railroad to eliminate the competitor and increase revenues from bus transportation. Such an approach to business could be similar to the Ukrainian one. Anyway, the buses are really good here as well as the roads. This can’t always be said about the sidewalks. The situation is unlikely to be repeated in every city, especially in the capital, but in Ushuaia, for example, the sidewalks are rather narrow, often overgrown with grass, often broken in the remote from the center areas. I think that the explanation is simple: people walk in the center but outside the center – no. The country is too big not to use the car. They are here, of course, near each house. The range includes a lot of durable vehicles, including pickups.
To get here from Europe, you have to fly to one of the capitals of Latin America, and then get on the domestic flight here. Of course, you can get here by car. By the way, Trans-Argentina road which crosses the country from north to south ends right here.
It’s logical to fly here from Buenos Aires, however, one of the participants of the journey on the yacht “Selma”, on which I chanced to sail to Antarctica, flew from the capital of Chile – Santiago. The flight from Buenos Aires lasts 4 or 5 hours, depends on the flight. Let’s compare, from Warsaw to Paris it’s 2 hours. From Krakow to Cyprus it’s 3 hours. And we fly across several European countries. Here, you have to fly longer and it’s not the biggest country of Latin America.
The flights to Buenos Aires often go through Madrid, Rome, Istanbul, Amsterdam or London. If there is a visa-free passport, then, of course, it’s easier to fly not through London. I chanced to fly with a stopover in Rome. The stopover in the capital of Italy lasted approximately 14 hours. This time wasn’t enough to dive into the atmosphere of one of the cradles of European civilization but you can manage to have a glimpse of several important sights and to walk around the city. Same with Buenos Aires: the stopover doesn’t necessarily have to be on the same day, so theoretically you can at least glance at the city.
Just in case, it’s worth remembering: it’s summer here now. The temperature in Argentina is similar to that in Rome. It feels like 25 degrees. Although the air in Buenos Aires is different from European. It is likely to be due to its proximity to the ocean. Even when it’s hot, the air is fresh here as we have after the downpour in Ukraine. Even though the sky is clear and the sun is blazing. Ushuaia is believed to be quite cold in Argentina. It’s hot even in a single T-shirt under the sun, but the weather is very changeable. It can start and stop raining several times in a day. There is high humidity, but indeed, the main factor of the cold or its absence is the wind that can suddenly pick up and blow so heavily that it takes you lightly from the road to the bay, and then it dies down at once.
The next day after this text had been written, the yacht entered the Drake Strait and went to Antarctica. So the next text will be about the transit across the strait and anticipated arrival at the Ukrainian Antarctic station Academic Vernadsky.
Markiyan Prokhasko
