Ushuaia, Argentina, the southern-most city in the world, known as the city at the end of the world, has an air of unreality about it. After the long journey down from Buenos Aires, in our case by plane, flying over huge swathes of uninhabited wilderness, the town appears like a mirage against the snow-capped mountains.
It is the last stop before Antarctica, the last outpost of civilisation, and everything about it is suffused with a sense that you have already stepped off the end of the world.
Seven kilometres outside Ushuaia in the Tierra del Fuego national park, sits the romantically named Post Office at the End of the World. The story of this Post Office fascinated me.
The convict train
The route to the Post Office starts on the End of the World Train, a steam train that runs 8km into the Tierra del Fuego national park on the old route taken by convicts from the prison in Ushuaia, giving the train its former name of ‘the convict train’.
The prisoners were given the task of cutting down the trees in the area, that were then used in the construction of Ushuaia itself. The legacies of this labour are the pale tree stumps that cover the ground, ghostly reminders of the past. You can almost hear the axes ringing out.
Inside the park the road ends, quite literally. Ruta 3 which runs for 3, 079km down from Buenos Aires, and which you can join all the way from Alaska 17,848km away, abruptly comes to a stop as the land runs out. The most visible sign that now we really were at the end of the world!
The Post Office at the End of the World
The Post Office itself is located on the shore of the Beagle Channel, named for the boat on which Charles Darwin visited the area in 1833. The building is constructed precariously above the water on stilts that extend out into the channel. It was set up on the initiative of the current post office employee, Carlos de Lorenzo, in 1997 and was originally located further out into the channel on the Isla Redonda, where it served as a stop off point for sailors and adventurers who could send signals of life to loved ones.
But once global communications improved the Post Office no longer served a useful purpose out there on the Isla Redonda, and so it was moved to its current location, where it is more accessible to tourists.
Inside it appears as if time has stood still. There is a wood-burning stove in the corner, indispensible in this part of the world where at the height of the southern hemisphere summer we were wrapped in thick coats, hats and scarves. The walls are covered with postcards, souvenirs for sale and posters. Marine relics hang from the ceiling, such as the cormorant wing over the counter. There is also a display of the different postmarks you can get when you mail your postcard from the end of the world.
Most people turn up to get their postcards stamped with those postmarks, popping them into the post box with an air of magical thinking, hardly believing that they will make their way from this outpost at the end of the world to the ‘real world’ out there past the water and the mountains. But ours made it, and quickly too!
The hidden country
However, there is more to this Post Office than its location, and more to its owner than Post Office employee. And once you know the secret of the Post Office at the End of the World you can spot all kinds of clues that were right before your eyes all the time.
Check out the front door again for example, and there you’ll see a sign reading ‘Embajada del País de Isla Redonda’ (Embassy of the Country of Redonda Island). Then look behind the counter and you can see posters of Evita, Che Guevara, Salvador Allende, hints of the political leanings of Carlos de Lorenzo. And those postmarks. If you look closely you’ll see that some of them reference the País de Isla Redonda.
So, little known to us we were in the presence of a Prime Minister, as Carlos de Lorenzo styles himself. País de Isla Redonda, that little island out in the bay where the Post Office was originally located, is 50 hectares of land surrounded by the waters that reach out to the Pacific. If you check out this link you can find more information about it. I'm fascinated by these people who decide to 'claim' territories for themselves. It seems like the essence of self-aggrandizement, but Carlos didn't give any hint of this as he politely served us our stamps. Hard to believe we were in the presence of an usurper!
Carlos, who refuses titles and insists that everyone addresses him by his first name or by the informal ‘you’ in Spanish, rails against authority, declares himself a libertarian or anarchist and says that in his country there is no government interference in the lives of its citizens - well there are only two of those aside from Carlos himself, his two sons. His defection from Argentina, about which the government seems little concerned, is an attempt to assert his freedom in the face of authority. I found it funny though that he continues to work for the Argentine Post Office!
Disappointingly, for lack of time, we could not make the boat trip to visit Carlos' country. But I loved discovering this apparently little known story about his other life.
Land of Magical Thinking
You can understand how living here for decades at the end of the world could affect your way of thinking, turn the strange into the normal and fantasy into reality. And the Post Office itself definitely has an air of unreality about it as it hovers above the surface of the water.
There is no doubt that the end of the world is a place to dream, and a place to imagine. It rewards travellers who go with an open mind and are ready to look beyond the surface. You never know what you might discover.
