The ship had barely pulled out of Punta Arenas when the talk turned to Cape Horn. Would we really get there? It felt like a mythical place, all treacherous weather and shipwrecks. Not quite the southernmost tip of the world when you look at the map, but definitely the most extreme in my imagination. It was our final destination, but there was no guarantee we’d get to land there. But like all great quests, we were promised, the journey would be as exciting as the destination.
Cruising Tierra del Fuego
I was sailing on the Ventus Australis, on Swoop’s Wildlife, Glaciers & Cape Horn Cruise. In five days, we would sail around Tierra del Fuego, the wild archipelago that sits at the foot of South America, ending up in the Argentinian city of Ushuaia. The region has some of the wildest landscapes in all of Patagonia – gnarly crooked mountains and dark forests that feel like they’re something from Lord of the Rings.
You can forget about roads here. This is a place where the only practical way to get around is on the water. Tierra del Fuego is criss-crossed with straits and channels – leaving Punta Arenas, we sailed south along the Magellan Strait, and later we’d dip into the Beagle Channel, named Charles Darwin’s famous ship, which first traversed it in the 1840s.
Darwin wasn’t the first here of course. Thousands of years before the great naturalist arrived, it was home to the Yaghan and Kaweskar people, who used birchbark canoes to get around and lived off the rich coastal waters. Only a few of them survived contact with Europeans but those who did still proudly maintain their culture here (after my cruise I spent time with a Yaghan guide on nearby Navarino Island).
Those who came after the Yaghan recognised that this was a land for tough people. Colonists were reluctant to flock here – for many years, Ushuaia was best known as a bleak penal colony. Now, the characteristics that once made Tierra del Fuego seem so unappealing are exactly the reason why adventure cruises here are so thrilling: the untamed mountains where glaciers snake down into the sea and the promise of getting close to nature at its rawest.
Glacier Alley
We got an early taste of just how untamed Tierra del Fuego was on our first full day at sea, on a visit to Pia Glacier. It was truly breathtaking– a giant tongue of ice slowly pouring down between the raw crags of the surrounding mountains, on a scale that was hard to imagine.
To get close, we got into zodiacs, hard rubber inflatable boats, that took us to shore to explore closer on foot. As we disembarked and set out across the bay, a pod of dolphins appeared out of nowhere and swam around us, dipping under the boats and between the chunks of ice floating in the water. It was impossible not to laugh with glee.
Later, we were treated to sightings of some of their larger cousins. Pia was only one feature on the perfectly named Glacier Alley, where every other inlet seemed to be crowned with cliffs of glistening blue ice. As we cruised slowly through the strait, we heard the explosive sound of a humpback whale surfacing nearby. Then another and another. For an hour, I didn’t know quite where to look, rushing from one side of the viewing deck to another, swapping between views of the glaciers and the whales. It was an extraordinary scene, but I soon learned that every time I stayed out on deck for any significant length of time I’d see wildlife of some sort – dolphins, sea lions and even albatrosses that would effortlessly follow our ship.
Getting prepared
Every day on board we had excellent talks from our guides about what we were seeing. As we got closer to Cape Horn, we learned exactly why it was a place that had struck terror into the hearts of sailors of so many centuries. Like a lot of my fellow passengers, I hadn’t spent much time thinking of it as anything but a place of the imagination, so I was surprised to learn that Cape Horn is actually one of a series of tiny islands hanging off the furthest tip of Tierra del Fuego.
This is a place where nature plays on a truly epic scale. The islands – of which Cape Horn (or Isla Cabo Horno as it’s called locally) is the furthest flung – sit where The Brazil Current from the north meets the Antarctic Circumpolar Current coming in from the west. The latter is accompanied by the strong winds of the Furious Fifties latitude, and a shallow sea floor funnelling all the water quickly through a narrow spot, and it was immediately obvious how Cape Horn had got its fearsome reputation as a mariner’s graveyard.
Thankfully, the captain reassured us that a modern steel ship like ours meant that we had nothing to be afraid of. But the talk also underscored why our guides had been so insistent that whenever we had done landings in the zodiacs, we were as fast and efficient as we could be. They had been subliminally training us for our mission: that small window of opportunity we’d have to land at Cape Horn if the weather was briefly kind to us.
Landfall at Cape Horn
On the final full day of the cruise, we got the chance to put our skills to the test. The skies were clear and the seas were calm as we anchored in a small bay off Cape Horn. The call came in early: we were ready to disembark at seven in the morning. Breakfast would have to wait.
We came onshore in a rocky cove, and followed a steep set of wooden steps up to the brow of the cliff. Cape Horn at last! The landscape was gently rolling: on a clear day like this it actually felt quite benign, but there wasn’t a tree or bush to be seen. The constantly scouring wind meant that nothing can grow here apart from tussock grass.
A wooden walkway took us towards a large diamond-shaped monument – the Cape Horn sign that we all wanted to have our photos taken next to as proof that we’d made it. Its centrepiece was an enormous silhouette of a wandering albatross. It was enormous – and life-sized. The wingspan was nearly 11 feet, or over three and a half metres. We’d seen albatrosses from the ship but it was impossible to get a sense of perspective on how big they really are. But for such a windy place, they seemed the perfect emblem for the island.
From here we filed along the walkway to Cape Horn’s other sight, its lighthouse. All the time we were on shore, the guides were radioing the ship and checking the weather to see how much time we’d have. Others of the group seemed more oblivious – a few keen birdwatchers looked for signs of the rayadito, a tiny endemic songbird that has abandoned life in the forests of the mainland to nest in the grass in the shadow of albatross nests.
Meeting the locals
The lighthouse contained perhaps the biggest surprise that Cape Horn had to offer: the island’s only residents. We were greeted by José Luarte of the Chilean Navy, along with his wife, who is Cape Horn National Park’s official ranger, and their two small children.
José gets his supplies brought in by helicopter every few weeks. While some people might be worried about the isolation, life here obviously suited him. Most servicemen stationed here only stayed for a year, but he had already done two and had just applied for a third year. Behind the lighthouse, he pointed out a sturdy little house that was the family home. While his children took their schooling on the mainland, holidays meant that they had the freedom of an island at the end of the world as their own private playground. Sofia, his 12-year–old daughter was clearly also an eager entrepreneur, selling the pictures she’d painted of Tierra del Fuego’s birds to several passengers.
Next to the lighthouse there was a tiny wooden chapel, barely larger than a shed. It was called Stella Maris (‘Star of the Seas’) and is South America’s southernmost church and is dedicated to the many mariners who lost their lives at sea here over the centuries.
There wasn’t much time to linger however. Almost as soon as we felt like we were getting settled and could make a morning of it, it was time to go. The weather had been kind to us, but there was a light rain and the wind was picking up, so it was clear that our guides didn’t want to push our luck. Heading back to the zodiacs, they congratulated us on getting even an hour at Cape Horn. The ship before us hadn’t managed to land any people at all.
But that hour was a thrill. As the zodiacs took us back to the ship, everyone was buzzing. We knew that stepping foot on Cape Horn was always going to be a roll of the dice, but we had made it. Some things in travel are exciting because you can plan for them – the glaciers we’d seen were more than proof of that – but this was one of those moments where you put your faith in the travel gods and they rewarded you for making the journey.
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