The tiny train chugs past an ice-encrusted stream, frozen peat bogs and jagged mountaintops rendered postcard perfect by a recent snowfall. This was once a forest where the convicts cut down trees. As you can see, the prisoners cut down many, many trees. Soon the train enters the Tierra del Fuego National Park, pocked with peat bogs and hardscrabble hills. Across the Beagle Channel, the Chilean mountains of the Darwin Cordillera glow a pale blue-hite.
Beech forests rise up the mountains and whisper in the wind.
Snowy footprints, perhaps a fox, lead up a streambank. Here in Tierra del Fuego, water is as much a formidable presence as land. Andean flute music is piped into the Ezequiel's enclosed double-deck salon. Another island looms up, topped with grunting sea lions, among them a 300-pound male defending his harem. Then the catamaran pulls away, a golden winter sunset glinting off the backs of the sea lions.