Postcard’s from the edge
They spin in the wind, jostling to compete with cuddly toy penguins for tourists’ attention and money. Lured here by the romance of Patagonia’s Tierra del Fuego, a place popularly tagged ‘the End of the World’, eager adventurers queue for bus tours or to board vessels bound for Antarctica. Few cross the four-mile wide Beagle Channel to Navarino Island, a Chilean outpost that sits off the southern tip of South America. It’s a wild, remote place and on the wrong side of tourism’s most southern frontier; the island’s inhabitants don’t need postcards to remind themselves they’re living on the edge of civilization.
On a day like today, as the sun burns into my bare forearms and dust hangs over each turn, it’s easy to puzzle as to why Navarino is so unvisited. I grunt up another steep incline and muscle my wheels over a tangle of dry roots as
