Visiting Chilean Tierra del Fuego, Part 1

How I crossed the Beagle Channel and got stranded indefinitely

When I first started planning my research trip to Tierra del Fuego, I knew I wanted to make my way to Puerto Williams, the Chilean city on the southern side of the Beagle Channel. For the novel that I was researching, I wanted a broader experience of the story of the Bridges and the Yahgan than just the Argentinian perspective.

Plus, the main community of remaining Yahgan is on the outskirts of the Chilean city, and there’s an important Chilean museum of Yahgan culture that I wanted to explore.

On the map, Ushuaia and Puerto Williams are just a short distance from each other, the only cities in a vast area of wilderness, so I figured it wouldn’t be hard to find transportation across the channel. There weren’t any puddle-jumper flights listed online, but surely there was a local ferry that could take me, or a fishing boat, a commercial merchant, or a tourist sailboat I could pay for a spot on deck.

There was a lot I didn’t understand before I visited.

You can barely see the Beagle Channel on this map, but it’s the thin strip of blue behind the horizontal-ish section of the black line that marks the border between Chile and Argentina. Ushuaia and Puerto Williams are less than 30 miles apart. (Most tourists who visit Patagonia go to Torres del Paine National Park or the city of Punta Arenas, and those are remote spots surrounded by wilderness—but Ushuaia and Puerto Williams are even more so.)