Al Fin del Mundo

Al fin del mundo / to the ends of the earth …

Aerial view of Valle Carbajal, Tierra del Fuego (which I, unfortunately, will not see)

The phrase itself conjures up romance and mystery, a lonesome, exotic, and breathtaking destination. Such a place resonates with people from all walks of life.

For example, the Argentinean winemaker, Bodega del Fin del Mundo, sends bottles of its Postales del Fin del Mundo to supermarkets thousands of miles away. The author William Golding gave his trilogy of nautical novels the title, To the Ends of the Earth, later made into a BBC miniseries of the same name. A BBC Travel column promises journeys ‘to the ends of the earth,’ inviting travelers to “venture to some of the most remote corners on the planet and find out what it’s like to live there” — an appealing enticement. The Hostal al Fin del Mundo beckons to backpackers from its location in Punta Arenas, Chile’s southernmost city. A 2014 documentary film, Al fin del mundo, is set in the lakeside community of Tolhuin, just north of Argentina’s southernmost city, Ushuaia, about a hundred miles farther south than Punta Arenas.

Barrio Esmeralda

In my novel-in-progress, tour operator Pete Snyder gets together with his ex-pat friends in a bar in Valdivia’s Esmeralda neighborhood. Known as the Bar al Fin del Mundo, its entranceway is nondescript and somewhat camouflaged. Not everyone can find it.

To go a little off-topic, Barrio Esmeralda does exist, as a downtown district where the streets come together at odd angles (not all streets in the old section of Valdivia follow the traditional Spanish design of an east-west,  north-south grid emanating from the central plaza). The district forms a mini-plaza at its core. Pubs, karaoke bars, restaurants, pastry cafes, and other shops line the plaza, and it’s a popular place for students from the city’s universities. On certain evenings in the summer, the streets leading through the plaza are closed to traffic, tables are set up, and crowds arrive to congregate in the warm weather.

Barrio Esmeralda

Two remote corners of the world:

One of my first contacts with the allure of the exotic was a 1918 memoir by the naturalist W. H. Hudson. Just the title — Far Away and Long Ago (not to be confused with the Cover Girl song, “Long Ago and Far Away”) — gives me goosebumps. Hudson wrote of his childhood as the son of an English family working on the Argentinian pampas. Perhaps not surprisingly, he wrote the memoir in England several years before he died: the pampas were, indeed, far away and long ago.

Move forward a century to a contemporary novel, Night Film by Marisha Pessl. This is a wonderful book, a haunting and inventively told thriller about the mysterious Stanislas Cordova, notorious director of dark, cult-like films. At the end of the novel, the narrator reaches the ends of the earth — a bleak, magically remote place.

As a personal postscript, when I was researching my Chile trip, I realized the final Night Film scene takes place off the island of Chiloé, not too far from Valdivia. South of Chiloé lie some 800 miles of isolated archipelagos and stark landscapes — places even closer to the ends of the earth.

One timeworn monastery:

Several characters in my novel-in-progress travel to one such place — an old, forgotten monastery half-hidden in forest near a remote Patagonian fjord. They go there to find safety in its isolation, but the monastery also holds secrets about a troubling past.