“It doesn’t have to be New Year’s Day on Cape Horn. It can be any combination of place and time that takes you away from the incessant demands of daily living, places you in direct contact with nature in its stark magnificence, and throws wide open the window on your essential self so you can get a good hard look.”

-Norie Quintos, excerpted from ‘Beginning at the End’, an article in this month’s National Geographic Traveler about celebrating New Year’s Eve 2009 (ie. the start of a new decade) at the southernmost tip of the Americas, Chile’s Cape Horn. At one point in the article, as she stands alone on Hornos Island, she has the sudden realization that for “one brief shining moment” she is the “southernmost human in the Americas.” Awesome.