On my most recent trip to Patagonia I sailed to Cape Horn from Ushuaia in Argentina, disembarking in the Chilean port city of Punta Arenas. It was a great trip but it left me with something of a dilemma: what was the best way to get back to Ushuaia to catch my international flight connections? I decided to add a little overland journey to my adventure and take the bus across Tierra del Fuego.
In truth, the bus is the only practical solution (much as I would have liked to take the same five day cruise in the opposite direction. Many travellers are surprised to discover that there are no direct flights between these major southern cities, despite there being only 250km (155 miles) between them as the condor flies. Thankfully, Patagonia’s long-distance buses are efficient and comfortable, making it easy to stitch these two destinations together, as long as you put aside a day to complete the journey.
My trip started just before 8am in Punta Arenas bus station, just as the sun was beginning to rise on a late Patagonian autumn morning. I’d bought my ticket in advance, which gave me a little change out of US$50 – good value for a trip that was set to last around 12 hours.
Coffee in one hand, I handed my ticket to the bus attendant with the other, who also checked I had my passport and my Tarjeta de Turismo – the tourist card all visitors are issued with on arrival in Chile. My bags were tagged and I sunk into my assigned seat ready for the trip.
The first thing to note about the buses is that the seats are really comfortable. They recline without overly disturbing (or being disturbed by) your immediate neighbours, giving you a lot more space to relax on an internal flight with an airline like LATAM or Aerolíneas Argentinas.
Pulling out of Punta Arenas, we followed the road as it looped north in a slow semicircle towards the ferry to Tierra del Fuego. There would be a variety of stops en route, and in classic Patagonian fashion our first call was at a gas station on a road junction seemingly in the middle of nowhere. This was Campo La Avena, where the highway met the road from Puerto Natales and where we picked up more passengers heading for Ushuaia. Several of them had just been hiking in Torres del Paine – a reminder that this bus service can be used to stitch together quite disparate parts of a trip in this region.
As the sun brightened, the wide grassy expanse of the Chilean pampa rolled past the bus windows, dotted with sheep. The wool trade is still big business in this part of the world, but who these animals could belong to in this great nothingness was impossible to say.
Just under three hours after leaving Punta Arenas we reached our first major stop at Punta Delgada. This was a symbolic halt as well as a physical one. This wasn’t the border crossing into Argentina but something to spark the travel imagination instead: taking a ferry across the Strait of Magellan, leaving behind mainland South America to step onto Tierra del Fuego, its largest island.
This ferry crossing was one place where the great remoteness of Patagonia really spoke to me. There was barely anything there to speak of – a slightly forlorn lighthouse, a cafe that sold sandwiches, pastries and hot drinks, and a low ramp leading into the water for the car ferry.
The one attraction was an abstract sculpture of a clock that lots of the Chileans on the bus rushed to take photos of. It was erected in October 2020 to mark the spot where João Carvalho had become the first European to set foot on what would become Chilean soil exactly five hundred years earlier.
I’m not sure what Carvalho would have thought of my comfy airline-style seat and the bus’s onboard toilet, but half an hour later I got a tiny taste of some of the things he might have experienced on his trip half a millennia ago. Dolphins! From the deck of the ferry, we watched a school of dolphins dance through the strait, then continue on their way as we crossed over to Tierra del Fuego.
The ferry crossing took about 45 minutes. I sat out on the deck for most of it, enjoying the fresh air with another coffee from the on board cafe.
There were no explorer’s fanfares when we reached the other side of the water. This was just a natural border after all – the official border was another two hours away at San Sebastian. There were no sheep here, but in a delightful touch nature had laid on a herd of guanacos grazing near the customs buildings to remind us that we were somewhere pretty remote.
In total it took us a couple of hours to clear immigration on both sides of the border. We weren’t the only bus so there was a decent-sized queue to leave Chile. To my surprise, the Argentinian border boat wasn’t immediately next door – we had to get back on the bus and drive for ten minutes until we could see the blue and white stripes of the Argentinian flag welcoming us forward.
Despite the large customs dog coming onto the bus to slowly sniff everyone and make sure no one was carrying anything they shouldn’t, getting stamped into Argentina was a lot more briskly efficient than being stamped out of Chile. To make sure your own process goes quickly, make sure you have the address of your hotel in Ushuaia on you when you hand over your passport.
By the time we hit the road again it was nearly nine hours since we had left Punta Arenas. But it has never been boring. Staring out at pampa had its own strangely hypnotic attraction, and now the highway switched to run alongside the Atlantic coast. The sight of the sea is always welcome in my book.
After a couple of hours, the scenery began to change again. As we skirted past the town of Rio Grande, the gentle landscape started to burst into hills that were the early outliers of the mountains that surround Ushuaia.
At 6.30 we made our final stop for the day at the town of Tolhuin, on the eastern tip of the enormous Lago Fagnano. Here we stopped for half an hour to properly stretch our legs and briefly explore the market. This was the place where I felt that the Tierra del Fuego I recognised from my cruise really started to appear properly – the town is backed by mountains covered in thick forest, at this time of year with leaves turning into crisp reds and golds. Everything suddenly seemed so much bigger.
If I’d travelled in summer, Patagonia’s long days would have meant that I arrived in Ushuaia in daylight, but as it was, I had to settle for enjoying the sunset on the bus instead. I missed the views we would have had in the last 90 minutes as the road wound up into the mountains, but I’d already spent some time exploring the area before my cruise: there is pretty much just one road in any out of Ushuaia, so any excursions you might take around here will ensure you enjoy the scenery in daylight hours.
My bus pulled into Ushuaia at around 8.30, a little over 12 hours after pulling out of Punta Arenas. As I jumped into one of the taxis waiting at the coach park to meet us, I looked forward to a shower and a meal. A week on from sailing out of the port on my cruise I had completed a massive circle across the region to arrive back at the southernmost city in the world. T. S. Eliot once wrote that the goal of exploring was to arrive back at where you started and to know the place for the first time. I’m not entirely sure about that, but I did feel a new appreciation for just how epic this region could be.
Then again, I also knew exactly where I was going to go for dinner that night, so maybe Mr Eliot was right after all?
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Whether you’re flying, cruising or catching the bus to Ushuaia, Swoop Patagonia are the experts on this farthest corner of South America. Visit the Tierra del Fuego page on our website to find out more.
