I always wanted to visit Tierra del Fuego, but never thought I'd make it.

Though I worked as a reporter for years in South America, I never found the journalistic justification to go. Maybe that's why I read so many books about it.

Things change. Recently my wife, Susana, and I found ourselves speeding toward that remote archipelago at the bottom of the South American continent, our trip actually enabled by the financial mess in Argentina, a consequence of the country's default on its foreign debt. It's true what they say: Every crisis is salted with opportunity.

Because government measures imposed to prevent a run on the banks included a freeze on every savings and checking account in Argentina, Susana couldn't gain access to the modest sum she inherited from the sale of her late mother's house in Santa Fe, the capital of the interior province of that name.

But when the rules were relaxed, and depositors were permitted transfers from their accounts for necessary expenditures, like utility bills, taxes, even vacations, Susana saw our chance: We would spend the sequestered pesos rather than let them lose value in the account from inflation.

Tickets and accommodations were purchased. We flew to Buenos Aires from Santa Fe, then south to that remote city whose name has the sibilant sound of a whispered secret: Ushuaia -- uush-why-ah.

I had learned some history of the place, of the explorers, adventurers, idealistic missionaries, and of the sad destinies of the indigenous races, the extinct Yamana, the Ona, the Alacaluf, once the unclothed lords of those lands.

To the maritime English, Tierra del Fuego presented opportunities both strategic and evangelical. The Argentine author Sylvia Iparraguirre suggests in her 1998 novel, Tierra del Fuego, that England wanted a naval base near Cape Horn, which was the real reason for all those visits by British explorers such as James Cook and Robert Fitzroy.

Fitzroy brought Charles Darwin there on his ship Beagle in 1832, where he reacted to the naked Yamana quite negatively: "Their very attitudes were abject, and the expression of their countenances distrustful. ... The language of these people, according to our notions, scarcely deserves to be called articulate [with its] hoarse, guttural, and clicking sounds."

It was ungenerous and uncharacteristic of the author of The Voyage of the Beagle.

Several years earlier, Fitzroy had carried away four Yamana children to England to wean them from their primitive state, and to Christianize them. He returned three of them in 1832 (one died of smallpox in London), where they threw off their European clothes and returned to the wild life they found more natural, and which so shocked Darwin.

Sealers and whalers -- Americans, Dutch, Russians -- came in the mid-1800s and annihilated entire seal populations, the Yamanas' principal food. English missionaries followed in the 1870s.

One of those missionaries, Wasti H. Stirling, was the first European to settle on Ushuaia Bay. He lived in a corrugated steel house, shipped out from Europe. Another missionary, Thomas Bridges, built an estancia, a huge farm, or ranch to raise cattle or sheep. It is still there on the Beagle Channel, run by his grandchildren. It's open for visits, and tea.

Bridges compiled an English-Yamana dictionary of 32,000 words, the language Darwin ridiculed but which proved quite sophisticated. The dictionary is in the British Museum.

Tierra del Fuego has been infrequently visited by Argentines. They didn't even raise the flag there until 1884, nearly 70 years after independence, when a magistrate took up residence. Twelve years later, in 1896, they built a prison. They hoped to emulate the British in Australia by populating the territory with convicts. Thus, for the longest while Argentines regarded Tierra del Fuego as their own Siberia. The prison was closed in 1947.

Tierra del Fuego is a tourist destination today, and in recent years it has attracted more foreigners than Argentines -- Jap-anese, Europeans and Ameri-cans, especially the latter now that the dollar is so strong in Argentina owing to the collapse of the peso.

And a fascinating destination Tierra del Fuego is, for reasons both conventional and otherwise. Cool in summer and cold in winter, the region offers skiing, camping, hiking, kayaking, mountain-climbing, trout and salmon fishing in its many lakes, and possibly the richest bird-watching anywhere. And, of course, there is heart-stopping scenery, of which Darwin wrote: "wildly different, it was, from anything I had ever beheld."

Rugged terrain

The flight from Buenos Aires follows Argentina's scalloped coastline down past the flat, grassy pampas into the windy furnace of Patagonia. From high above you watch huge clouds of sand form below, which are then rushed by the perpetual wind into the green sea. In Night Flight, the French author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery celebrated the land that "gives off this golden glow," and the mail pilots who fought through those Patagonian winds in the frail aircraft of the 1920s.

The plane peels landward over Ferdinand Magellan's eponymous strait, which he discovered and transited in 1520 from Atlantic to Pacific. The strait separates the big, triangular main island (Tierra del Fuego -- 28,473 square miles, two thirds of which belongs to Chile) from the continent.

The area's topography reveals itself in the north as low, wet and glacial, spotted with lakes and moraines, and here and there covered with tussocky grasses. The charcoal mountains with glaciers on their shoulders appear next, not immense but steep and formidable, prominent among them Mount Sarmiento and Mount Darwin, each well over 7,000 feet in elevation.

These mountains form the final links in the chain that extends all the way down from Alaska, through North and South America. It turns eastward here to sink into the Atlantic. Its final thrust above the surface of the sea is the forbidding Isla de los Estados, (Staten Island, in English), in history the location of the first prison in this bleak region; in fiction, the site of Jules Verne's adventure novel, The Lighthouse at the End of the World.

South of the mountains lies a deep beech forest that marches up to the northern shore of the Beagle Channel. After that the topography breaks up into countless islands, large at first, then growing smaller as they descend into Drake's Passage hovering over Antarctica.

With its population of about 40,000, Ushuaia is the most densely populated place on the island of Tierra del Fuego, and is the largest southernmost city in the world, a designation it celebrates vigorously.

Punta Arenas, Chile's southernmost city, has more than 110,000 people but it is northwest of Ushuaia, and sited on the other side of the Strait of Magellan. Ushuaia has an airport, is a port of call for cruise ships and anchorage for vessels from the world's fishing nations who ply the waters off the Falkland Islands. After tourism, fishing is the mainstay of the local economy.

Those visiting Ushuaia who might like a side trip to Antarctica can inquire for a berth on those cruise ships heading for the southern continent.

Our plane glides over Chile's Navarin Island, descends almost languidly through the Beagle Channel, that more southerly corridor between the two seas, which enabled the vessels of the 19th century to skirt the graveyard of ships off treacherous Cape Horn.

The aerial approach to Ushuaia is thrillingly beautiful. The fiords, the plunging mountains, greenish black and dusted by snow, here and there wrapped in clouds, awoke something in me I thought long gone.

Prisoners' land

Ushuaia spills down toward the water off the skirt of Cerro Martial. The town is unpolished; it seems unfinished, trying to become something better. It is a jumble of miniature houses, mostly made of wood, some of corrugated iron, these latter painted bright yellow, blue, green. The metal houses continue the style of dwelling preferred by the English missionaries. Some are now restaurants, shops and small museums.

The best among the museums is the old prison, the presidio. It is full of lore and artifacts of the hard earlier days in this geographical extremity. The convicts are long gone, but their stories have been woven into the tapestry of Ushuaia's mythology. One tale, or myth, is that Carlos Gardel, the tango singer who in the 1930s single-handedly made the world aware of that idiosyncratic musical form, did a stretch here as a juvenile offender.

After checking into the spacious Hotel Ushuaia, with its grand view of the harbor, we were eager to get out and about. We took a taxi (inexpensive, quick and the best way to get around) to a ski lift and rode it to the top. From there we trekked upward along a crooked stream of snowmelt toward the Martial Glacier, which slumped between two mountains, thick and creamy white above us. It was a warm day, but it grew chilly as we drew nearer the ice field.

The glacier had seemed enticingly close when we got off the lift. But it proved too distant for us, so we halted by a huge boulder next to a stream, and switched to Plan B: We walked back to the lift, then descended to the taxi, which took us down to the port. There we enjoyed some hot centolla, or spider crab, Ushuaia's signature dish. We drank wine, saw the bright red trawlers at their berths and celebrated our first evening there in the vicinity of a group of effervescent young Japanese girls off a cruise ship, who confused and delighted the waiter.

The next day we visited the 240-square-mile Tierra del Fuego National Park, which abuts Chile. We boarded a green train and traversed part of the route the convicts were carried over from their prison to their labors in the forest each day. We rode inside these undersized railroad cars, and our comfort behind the glass reminded us that the prisoners' commute was never so snug: They rode on flat cars, exposed in all weather.

Everywhere there are monuments, intended and otherwise, to recall these men long gone. The train, chugging through the dark forest, broke into a clearing under a lead-colored sky and curved slowly around a peat bog strewn with small white flowers, and nearly encircled by the black Pipo River.

The gray stumps of the trees prisoners felled more than 80 years ago are still there, obtruding from the spongy earth like crooked teeth, slowed in their natural disintegration by the cold winters. The prisoners harvested the hard beech wood of this southernmost forest and used it to warm the prison.

But they also built the pier, the post office and the first stretch of road into the area. And they operated the first printing press to reach this part of the world.

They were a motley if nefarious lot, all repeat offenders. They included anarchists and intellectual journalists who roused the rabble against the governments of the time, wife slayers, highwaymen and bank robbers, and the most grotesque of serial murderers.

"Ushuaia is almost inconceivable without the Prison. You can even wonder if the town would have existed without it," wrote Carlos Pedro Vairo, in his history of the place titled Ushuaia, which is sold in the prison museum shop.

That may be argued, but clearly the convicts did serve the community that became Ushuaia; and they still do, for their presence here is forever being recalled.

Glaring from the yellow outside wall of the post office is a huge portrait of a dwarfish man dressed in the old prison garb. He has the eyes of an evil hypnotist; his head is shaved to emphasize ears as big as semaphore flags. It is the image of the petiso orejudo, the "little big-eared man," a notorious child killer, murdered in the Ushuaia prison by a fellow convict.

A pride in the place

In the afternoon of our second day, we went out on the Beagle Channel in a catamaran and visited with blubbery sea lions sprawling on a rock island.

The animals share these stones with uncountable numbers of Imperial cormorants, which wear the same black and white outfits that penguins do, but have the ability to fly. The penguins have an island of their own, farther down the channel.

We crossed the mountains in a bus to see Lake Fagnano, and thus passed from what had been the land of the Yamana to the land of the Ona. At a farm where they raise Alaskan and Siberian huskies, the owner says the popularity of sled racing has given the huskies legitimate work again, to compensate for what they lost in Alaska and Canada to the snowmobile.

We later had barbecued lamb at the first sawmill built in Tierra del Fuego. Sheep are to Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia what cattle are to the rest of Argentina -- the dietary staple.

Today's Fuegians come from all over Argentina, elsewhere in South America, and beyond. They manifest a sense of exception, a robust pride in this scattering of sleet-lashed islands hanging over the South Pole. They exploit its imaginative and poetical qualities, as well as its commercial potential -- as with the World's End Book Store and the Train at the End of the World, all to remind you where you are.

You can have a fin del mundo -- end of the world -- stamp put into your passport at Museum at the End of the World. We met three Russians off a fishing ship at the tourist kiosk on the main pier getting their free certificates attesting to the fact that they had reached this extremity of the earth.

Today, for reasons everybody understands, distances matter much less than they did a century ago. You can phone, fax or e-mail anywhere instantly, and transport yourself physically in a day. As dutiful citizens of this globalized world, we are urged to remain "connected."

Well and good, though I always believed that being out of touch for a while, truly unreachable, is healthy for the imagination; it has a regenerative quality. I determinedly thought this even as doubts were sown by the intense popularity of all the devices that link us from where we are to everywhere else. In fact, of late I had begun to feel like an intellectual hermit clinging to an idea whose time had gone.

Thus, my surprise by what I experienced as our plane descended through the Beagle Channel, a mysterious feeling that seemed to reanimate this fading notion of mine about the value of remove.

There is no place in the world like this, I said to myself. But what does that mean to me? The very next morning I was awakened by a faint light slipping in between the drawn curtains of our room. Looking out, somewhat groggy, I saw the first hint of the sun's return from the other side of the planet. Dawn was breaking, spilling its light over Antarctica, putting fire in the Beagle Channel below.

Across the water the mountains of Chile rose like a black wall; the gray clouds of night were in flight above them. I stood there feeling half my age, unexpectedly self-confident, utterly free and unconnected, happy that we had come, and eager to watch this display of the staggering aesthetic power of nature unfold before me.

There I was, present at the end of the world. I had made it.

An ideal day

8:30 a.m.: After breakfast in Ushuaia, walk to the tourist kiosk or into one of the various tour agencies and sign up for a visit to Tierra del Fuego National Park, west of town.

11 a.m.: Walk around Ushuaia, visit the Fin del Mundo Museum, or the metal house lived in by Wasti Stirling, the missionary and first European to settle at Ushuaia Bay. The building is now a gallery, showing mainly ethnic art from the region.

1 p.m.: Lunch in one of the many restaurants along Calle San Martin, or on Calle Maipu at Volver, for the fish and atmosphere and view of the port.

3 p.m.: Board the Ana B. catamaran for a two-hour ride down the Beagle Channel to Isla de los Lobos, where the sea lions dwell. The excursion provides great opportunities for bird-watching.

5:30 p.m.: Walk to the Presidio for a tour of the old prison. This is one of the most interesting experiences in Ushuaia. The inmates there -- a rogue's gallery if there ever was one -- did really hard time. No one ever escaped who was not captured and brought back.

8 p.m.: Dinner at Tia Elvira, on Maipu, is a good choice.

When you go

Getting there: Major American airlines fly daily from New York (with connections from Baltimore) to Buenos Aires. Foreign lines, such as LAN Chile (800-735-5526; www.lanchile.com) and the Brazilian carrier) Varig (800-468 2744; www.varig.com) also make the connection. From there, the regional airline LAPA is a regular carrier to Tierra del Fuego.

Lodging: Ushuaia is rich in hotels, and many are con- venient to the busy port area and museums and restaurants.

* Hotel Ushuaia is half a mile up the mountain from the Beagle Channel, a short walk to Ushuaia's main street, San Martin. The Albatros and Canal Beagle hotels are large and comfortable, and sit on Calle Maipu, directly across from the municipal pier, where the huge fishing boats and cruise liners berth and the excursions depart each day.

* A substantial breakfast is always provided by the hotels, and the dollar goes far here. Hotel Ushuaia is $38 per person, double occupancy. Canal Beagle is $45 per person and the Albatros is $41.

Dining: The Argentine diet is limited in variety. Beef is the staple; everywhere, that is, but Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. There, the sheep rules, and the traditional asado, or barbecue, is made with lamb. There are various restaurants along Calle San Martin, where the lamb, cooked over a coal or wood fire, is succulent.

* Some of the restaurants are all-you-can-eat establishments; Tolkeyen, located a short cab ride from the center of town, is one of the best of these. But there are other options in Ushuaia. Fish and the town's signature dish, centolla, or spider crab, are best eaten at Tia Elvira, on Maipu near the pier, and the octopus is good at Volver, an interesting restaurant wallpapered with pages from Spanish newspapers published during the Civil War.

For more information about traveling in Tierra del Fuego, here are some online resources:

* Tourism Board of Tierra del Fuego: www.tierradelfuego. org.ar / indexeng.htm

* Tourism at Ushuaia: www.cyberush.com.ar / ushuaia 54 / tour / tourism.htm

* Argentina Turistica.com: www.argentinaturistica.com / 2ushiresenia.htm