I did go to the smallest museum in town - the Yamana Museum which looked like it might be old-fashioned and dusty, the only kind of museum I really like.
It was excellent - two or three badly carpeted rooms with wonky maps and drawings stuck to the walls with blue tack, little figurines in glass cases and lots of old photographs. I learnt all kinds of stuff - 20,000 years ago the Beagle Channel was a huge glaciar and 14,000 (or was it 7000?) years ago indigenous Indians arrived in Tierra del Fuego which was the last land mass in the world to be inhabited. You can see why - it's a bloody long way to come (even Antartica is two days away on a cruise-ship) - and when you get there the weather's terrible and the beer's a rip-off. But the Yamana and the Shelk'nam and the Manekenk and the Kaweslar all made it eventually. They were hunter-gatherers who wore furry seal skins and lived on mussels and deer which they caught with bows and arrows. What a wild bunch! With fierce beautiful faces and great hanks of thick black hair - now I understand the hairiness of Fueguinos. And even better, during their strange coming-of-age rituals they covered their heads with odd bucket-shaped masks and painted themselves in black, white and red stripes and dots - I've never seen madder looking folk.
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