Ushuaia
Trip Start
Aug 19, 2008
1
14
15
Trip End
Oct 04, 2008
Ushuaia,
Patagonia,
Argentina
Monday, September 29, 2008
We arrived here on Wednesday night, after about 13 hours on various buses, and walked straight to our guesthouse. It is a small family place, run by an old couple, very central and very quiet, so it suits us very well.
We had quite a relaxed day on Thursday as we were still pretty tired from all the bus travel. We walked around the town and got reacquainted with the place. In the evening we had dinner at a tenedor libre, an all-you-can-eat buffet. The salads were okay, and the barbecued lamb was good. There is a barbecue room with a man cooking lamb on spits, and you take your plate up and ask for what you want. He usually gives you an enormous amount of meat so that you canīt really fit anything else on your plate with it.
On Friday we went sailing on the Beagle Channel in the afternoon. There were some tours that included trekking on some of the islands in the Channel, but it was pretty cold and windy, so we decided to do a straightforward boat tour. In fact we chose the Barracuda, the boat we went on last time. It is quite old, but very comfortable, with a nice warm bar area to drink coffee when it gets too cold on deck.
We visited several of the islands and saw lots of cormorants and sealions. There were quite a few very large male sealions, roaring and posturing, so we were hoping to see a big fight, but nothing much materialised, just lots of noise. There were also lots of females and pups, but last seasonīs pups, so they were quite big. They were making quite a bit of noise as well.
In the middle of all of them there were a group of caracaras (scavenging raptors) eating a dead cormorant, but none of the live cormorants seemed bothered by it. They were busy starting to build their nests.
We had hoped to see some albatrosses, but apparently it is too early in the season for them. They appear in a month or so, with the penguins, because they eat the penguin chicks.
On Saturday we took a minibus into Tierra del Fuego National Park. We did the same walk we did three years ago. Itīs a nice walk of about five miles that follows the coast line of the park, through woods and sometimes on small shingley beaches. It took us about two and a half hours this time, compared to the three and a half it took us last time, and at the end we had enough energy to walk a bit further around some of the small islands in the park. It is full of peat boggy bits, and some of the ground was very spongy and odd to walk on.
When we came back to the town we were very hungry, having eaten nothing but bananas since breakfast time, and we enjoyed our tenedor libre very much. We went to a different, slightly more expensive one, and it was really good. The lamb was even better, and they also had beef and chicken on the asador. The buffet food was much, much better as well.
Yesterday we had quite a lazy day, just walking around the town. Most of the shops were shut for most of the day, as it was Sunday, and not many people were around.
Today we are heading back to Buenos Aires, so we are now waiting to fly out this evening. I will update this when we get back there.
