Cruising Tierra del Fuego

There can’t be a more thrilling single destination than Tierra del Fuego. Even the most jaded traveller would relish the feeling of being at the ends of the earth; the tip of South America is as far south as you can go before hitting Antarctica.

Actually, cruising the Beagle Channel on the expedition ship Mare Australis beats cruising the Antarctic on a vast ice-breaker hands down. Tierra del Fuego has all the glaciers, ice castles, penguins and seals one could hope for, but its shores are close enough for passengers to be able to disembark daily and get close to nature’s wonders - the opposite of Antarctic cruising with days between ports and only acres of ice to gaze upon.

Life On Board

Expedition cruising has an intimacy and charm you just can’t equal on a big liner. There’s a real houseparty atmosphere on a small ship, and on the Mare Australis the excellent free cocktails dispensed by a skilled barman more than made up for the lack of nightclubs and beauty salons.

Staterooms were cosy without being cramped, and food was wholesome and plentiful, if not grand luxe. But what you are really paying for on a ship like this is the expertise of the crew, who brief passengers thoroughly on the flora and fauna they are about to encounter, conduct them safely from ship to shore in robust dinghies and point out the wildlife on the beaches.

The Mare Australis and its sister travel weekly between Punta Arenas, the principal city of Chilean Patagonia, and Ushuaia on the Argentinian side, the southernmost city in the world. Both three- and four-day itineraries are available, and some passengers love the experience enough to stay on board for a week’s round-trip. There is only one real port - the enchanting little town of Puerto Williams; other trips involve landing on coves unvisited by man except for the Australis passengers, who have special permission to land in small groups on virgin territory.

Southern Excursions

Our first stop was Ainsworth Bay, with its Marinelli glacier and a visit to a beaver dam in the midst of a magical Magellanic forest. Elephant seals could be spotted here, after which our Zodiac boats pulled into Tucker islet to view stripey penguins gallivanting at the edge of the beach. A highlight was the voyage through majestic Glacier Alley, with individual ice castles named for France, Spain, Germany, Holland and Italy. It’s not till you get up close and personal with the ice that you discover the blue canyons within the depths of the glacier are no optical illusion, but impossibly real.

Thousand-year ice is put to practical use by the crew, who chip it off to put in the whisky that’s on offer, along with flasks of hot chocolate, for a warm-up at the end of a walk on shore, for which cumbersome wetsuits are provided. I, for one, found it easier to do without.

There is not always ice on the ground or even cold to contend with....the sailing season runs through Patagonia’s spring and summer, and weather in late October - and on a subsequent visit to Isla Magdalena in February - was sunny, glorious and crisp, with temperatures often in excess of 20 degrees.

Isla Magdalena, included in some itineraries, is incredibly worthwhile for anyone with a soft spot for penguins; there are more than 120,000 of the comical birds here, and being beak to beak with whole families is an experience that can’t be equalled anywhere in the world. Cape Horn, also only on certain itineraries, can be somewhat less rewarding in squally weather.

One of the most interesting stops our ship made was actually a substitution when the threat of bad weather drove us off-course - a sort of ghost ranch inhabited by just one mountain man and his dogs - he had a herd of sheep across the peaks on the other side of the bay that must have taken him a day of walking to reach. Seeing the simple cabin where he lived on the beach without electricity and only the most basic facilities for cooking the meat from his own herd which was the basis of his subsistence was a rare peek at a very different, yet in its own way idyllic, way of life.