Well, I’ve accomplished one of the mini-goals I set for myself on this trip. That is, I made it to Puerto Williams.

 PW (nobody refers to Puerto Williams using an acronym, but I’m a BLOGGER so I can do what I want) is a tiny town on Isla Navarino (or IN, as I think I’ll call it), an island in Tierra Del Fuego that belongs to Chile and is actually farther south than the Argentinian city of Ushuaia. This is interesting because Ushuaia makes a big deal about how its the southernmost city in the world. Puerto Williams usually gets kind of forgotten. And that kind of makes it a cool place with the backpacker set. I’ve talked to a lot of travellers who said things like “I really wanna get to Puerto Williams because it’s truly the bottom of South America” or “I really wanna get to Puerto Williams because everyone else is going to Ushuaia” or “I really wanna get to Puerto Williams because when the sun goes down there everyone turns into a muppet.” Also, the Lonely Planet Trekking Guide (which everyone who’s into the outdoors and is travelling down here has a copy of) describes a pretty magical-sounding hike that begins just outside of the town. So Puerto Williams has a bit of an aura to it, a place everyone knows about and talks about. But among all the people I talked to, nobody had actually made it down there. This is mainly because getting there is a bit of a pain in the ole necko (I’m assuming that’s how you say it in Spanish). The guidebooks all say you can either charter a boat from Ushuaia or take a plane from Chile, and both those options are fairly expensive and take quite a bit of planning. On their way down to the bottom of Patagonia, I think a lot of backpackers figure they’ll come up with some way to get to Puerto Williams, but then they get down to Ushuaia and just kind of realize they don’t have the time/money to make the trip.

But me, I was just like “I’m getting there.” And after not too much searching I found there actually is a boat service in Ushauia that goes across regularly. The fare was a bit expensive (triple what I’ve paid for any bus ride), but I hadn’t really made any outlandish spending decisions in the two months I had been travelling so i decided I was due. So last Thursday me and five other backpackers jumped on what looked like a glorified life raft and headed across the Beagle Channel. A half hour later we were on Isla Navarino, where we got picked up by a van driven by a little old Chilean man with no teeth and a colorful sweater and an hour after that we were in Puerto Williams.

 As soon as I got out of the van, I knew I made the right decision in coming over. I could tell I was finally off the gringo trail — the route all the foreign tourists follow. No chocolate shops or bus tours or packs of Eurpoeans with expensive cameras. Just a little town on the ocean where the wind was always blowing and all the houses seemed uniform and had likely been built by the military (Puerto Williams’ main purpose is to serve as a Chilean Navy base). Everyone has wood stoves in their homes and the smell of the smoke was oddly comforting. Like the entire town was sitting around a fire with no place to go. And maybe that was part I liked most of all. There really was no place to go. I went up into the mountains and camped for a night, but other than that I just hung around the hostel (basically just a guy’s house) reading and playing guitar and talking with a pair of British guys who came over on the same boat I did. I was on the island four days in total and would have stayed longer but apparently the boat company’s contract with the town was set to expire and if I didn’t leave when I did, there was a chance I could have been stuck on the island for quite a while…like until June.

So PW, I’m happy to have seen thee. I’ve been to the bottom of the bottom and now I’m headed back up.