By Nick Casey

Nick Casey/Special to the Town Crier Cormorants linger along Last Hope Sound (Seno Ultima Esperanza) at South America’s southernmost tip.

It was far past bedtime when, dripping wet with rain, I rang the doorbell of the hospedaje looking for a room. Teresa - the 50something hotelier wearing a flowery dress and a stern expression - stood in the doorway, seemingly barring my entrance.

“It’s raining,” I explained in my most apologetic Spanish.

“Yes,” she replied, as if this were the dumbest of comments. “That’s because we are in Patagonia.”

Ever since I first read Bruce Chatwin’s travelogue “In Patagonia” I was consumed with this southernmost place. The tip of South America was Ferdinand Magellan’s shortcut, Charles Darwin’s laboratory, a place laid out on antique maps with fjords and straits running all over the place, frenzied.

And of course there were the place-names: Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire), Torres del Paine (Towers of Paine), Seno Ultima Esperanza (Last Hope Sound). Toponyms thrill travelers only like a good ghost story does.

But it was no use explaining this to Teresa. I had disturbed her slumber, and it was a wonder she was letting me in at all: She was taking my raincoat, accepting my excuses that I had no Chilean pesos at the moment but would make an exchange first thing in the morning.

Not that one would dare consider skipping the bill. In that barren land where trees grow sideways on the windswept steppe, travelers who make it so far south are more than grateful to locals who have opened hospedajes, private homes with a spare room for guests - a bedraggled visitor’s only refuge after sundown.

My plane reservation back to the States was less than a week away. The previous month had been a whirlwind of southward pit-stops: slow-moving glaciers, addled penguins, national parks and corner stores selling SPF 45 sunscreen. (Patagonia is cold and rainy, but with little ozone left, people joke that you can get a sunburn on a starry night.) The strain of backpacking had left the names of flightless birds and granite formations mixing themselves up in my head, making journal entries constantly confused, my mind like a child’s overloaded by a vast museum of natural history.

One thing was certain: I had to cross the Strait of Magellan and reach the southernmost city of the world, the small town of Ushuaia, Argentina.

I was almost there. Under the light of a kerosene lamp, Teresa was taking down my passport number in a tally of guests who had come to the town of Punta Arenas just before making the crossing. The guestbook was a grab-bag of penmanship; those places legible in the origen column indicated travelers from Israel, Australia, Colombia and Brazil. One audacious soul had made the journey from the “Most Serene Republic of Texas.”

And yet in the column labeled destino, all destinations were the same: Tierra del Fuego.

“Where is the strait?” I asked Teresa.

She simply gestured over her shoulder as though pointing to the outhouse.

From the flick of her wrist, it seemed the strait might have been only yards behind her back door. Yet the pitch-black of the rainy night offered no view through the window.

One could only imagine that it was on a night like this that Magellan and his three Spanish ships were anchored in the wind, taking an evening’s rest from their cautious passage through the strait.

After nearly a year spent slowly probing the South American coast for an inland waterway, the crew must have thought the land would extend straight to the pole without interruption. And yet the discovery of the strait was no cause for a party: Storms were whipping through the passageway, which narrowed constantly, leaving the crew in constant fear that their ships would run aground, marooning the sailors at the end of the world

Mysterious fires burned all around the shores and seemed to float across the water. Magellan would discover in the morning that these were the kindling of the native Yahgan Indians, for whom the entire region would be called the Land of Fire. But the romance of the name was not enough, at least for one of the fearful crew members: During the night, the captain of Magellan’s San Antonio deserted and fled for Spain.

But none of this was visible through Teresa’s window. It was too long ago, a little too dark outside. That night there was just a warm bed upstairs, and the faint hope that I’d be crossing the strait the very next morning.

The conclusion of this article will appear in next week’s Travel section.