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Situated on the hillside rising north - up and away from the bustling harbor and downtown of Ushuaia - the small second-floor apartment with orange walls is brimming with warm afternoon sunlight. I sit and work at a kitchen table in front of a massive south-facing window that reveals a vista of the city, the docks with huge cruise ships heading to Antarctica, and a vast stretch of the Beagle Channel, the waterway arching around Cape Horn named after Darwin's intrepid vessel. I have been in this the southern most city of the world for a week, seeking passage to the South Pole and exploring El Fin Del Mundo, as the Argintinians describe the region. By a series of seemingly unrelated events and coincidences - impossible to imagine before they became a tangible actuality - I met a couple in South Africa whose son lives in Ushuaia and is married to a woman connected to the tourist industry. If such paths leading me from country to country and person to person hadn't become a common, defining aspect of my project, I wouldn't have believed it possible that the world really could be as small as it is. The lovely South African-Argentinian couple and their friends who help manage, organize, and run trips to Antarctica went to great lengths to find a place for me on a boat, but all in vain. All the ships that have been passing through the area have had their staff secured for almost a year in advance, and have had no room for an additional naturalist, potato peeler, or poop-deck swabber. Leaving the city on an early-morning bus tomorrow, I will head north to Rio Grande and eventually, in a week or more, to Buenos Aires. Though the Arctic Terns circling around Antarctica now, molting and preparing for their return journey to the Arctic, will undoubtedly be dissapointed not to see me frolicking on the pack ice and drifting through their fishing grounds, they would surely be happy to know that I will be joining up with them in a short while on the beaches and rocky fingers farther north along the South American coast.
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