"Late Light" - Travels by Tim

A Journey to the End of the World by Tim Ghazzawi:

I’d asked a simple question about the best way to get to my hostel from the airport. I’m arriving late, I’d said, sometime after 10, and am worried about navigating a new city in the dark. My hostel responded with an even simpler answer: taxi. Nothing curious about the email exchange until I read the salutation. “El Fin del Mundo” it was signed by the manager. “The End of the World”. I was headed to Ushuaia, indeed the place often heralded as the world’s southernmost city and gateway to the Antarctic. As my plane descended beneath the clouds to land, however, the darkness I’d been worried about never grew to be. Instead a glow hung in the air. The streetlights shone. The white snow that capped the surrounding landscape sparkled. It was almost summer in Patagonia. Turns out that summer in Ushuaia, being so far south, also means an end to normal darkness hours.

On the short taxi ride to my hostel (I might have even walked), there seemed to be no rush amongst the people I passed. The city was dining. Finishing errands. Walking the streets as if on an afternoon stroll. Unhurried and unbothered. Daylight was lingering rather than fleeing. It was stretching itself out, yawning across the hours. I thought again about the phrase “the end of the world” and its many meanings. Ushuaia uses it in a geographic sense to emphasize its southerly location, how it rests at the end of the map pinned to your wall, at the bottom of the globe perched on your desk. There’s also a dramatic interpretation of the phrase, like what a teenager (or an emotionally ill-equipped 29 year-old) might say after a bad breakup or a failed test or a scolding. And then there’s the apocalyptic interpretation of the phrase. The signaling of an Armageddon-type event, a biological end to life as we know it, total annihilation.

The thing is: none of these interpretations seem to apply to Ushuaia. The city might call itself the end of the world but it didn’t really feel like the end of anything. It’s too beautiful, for one. A Hard Rock Cafe has made its way there, too, complete with a giant electric guitar bolted to the side of the restaurant. Globalism and our love of fast food, music, and celebrity memorabilia? Thriving. On distant rocks, penguins waddle and sea lions laze. I got a haircut at a trendy barbershop. An unmanned lighthouse burns in the distance powered by solar energy. The smell of freshly made donuts filled with dulce de leche permeates the bakery air. Though not in season while I was there, ski and snowboard trails wait patiently for the winter rush. I cooked my own series of pasta dinners for the first time in a long time and shared food with the group of Israelis I roomed with. We played cards and got drunk. I worked at an internet cafe and applied for a job and I called home. My time there was the end of nothing.

When I leave South America, I go to New Zealand, another end-of-the-world type place. About it I’ve read blogs and gathered recommendations and seen The Lord of the Rings. I won’t make the same mistake twice, though, and assume anything because of its nickname or location. As I’ve learned many times on my travels so far, life and fulfillment can be found in the remotest, emptiest, hottest, coldest, busiest, extremest, randomest, most unexpected of places. And I mean none of us knows how it all really ends, right? The end of the world. Not even as the asteroid hurtled toward the earth could the dinosaurs have used the phrase and been right about it. The world is ending, surely, but like the summer daylight in Ushuaia, hopefully the ending is slow and stretched out, giving us enough time to do our own lingering and living, and maybe even enough time for us to try and do something about it.