Ushuaia - Argentina
Trip Start
Oct 30, 2007
1
122
165
Trip End
Nov 20, 2009
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Ushuaia,
Patagonia,
Argentina
Friday, March 13, 2009
We saw vast prairies with heaps of guanecos (smaller versions of llamas), rheas (like small emus) and gauchos (not another local animal, but Argentinan cowboys) herding cattle. The long thin town of Ushuaia, pop. 50,000 has a beautiful backdrop of snowy mountains on one side, opening out into the vast Beagle Channel on the other, dotted with islands inhabited by seals, cormorants, petrels and other sea bird life. Just its remoteness and its windswept setting make it worth a visit in itself. The Yaghan people were the first inhabitants here hundreds of years ago, and were a nomadic race living out of their canoes, and lived naked, despite the freezing temperatures, covering themselves in seal fat to keep warm (brrr!).
All rugged up, end of the earth
The climate here as you would expect is cold, going from sun, to snow, to rain and back to sun in the space of an hour or two (sounds a bit like Melbourne!). We spent a day walking through the National Park here with beautiful bays and great wildlife - really had that feel of being a long way from anywhere. We spent the next on a little boat cruising the Beagle Channel and its islands (named after Darwin´s exploration boat from when he studied the Yaghan) - incredibly photogenic. All washed down with a couple of Beagle Beers from the world´s most southern brewery - heaven. In fact, big call, but this beer was the best beer we´d had on the whole trip, even surpassing the fantastic beer we´d had in Latvia and Czech.
Another reason some people come to Ushuaia is to board a ship to Antarctica, mostly small number icebreaker or ice strengthened boats. It´s a once in a lifetime experience which we originally really wanted to do, but at around USD6-7,000 (or A$10-11,000) each it was unfortunately out of our reach. Plus the season finished in mid March, so it was one of those "well, we hope to do it at some stage in öur lives" things. Anyway, we got chatting to this Kiwi guy on the Beagle Channel boat trip who´d got chatting to a travel agency in town, and they had last minute vacancies on the last ship of the season in two days time, at USD4,000. Oooooh, wonder if we could afford it??
Next day we said goodbye to our friends Lynette and Sichy after living it up with them for the past month. They were heading back to Buenos Aires by plane for a few days and then back home, and we headed to the Antarctic Office on the harbour to find out more about it. The staff said they had a video of a typical trip if we wanted to see it, which featured the same boat that was going in two days time. 3 minutes into watching it, we turned to each other and said ¨We are SO going!!!¨ We then went and chatted to the lovely travel agent, handed over our hard borrowed cash and she kindly threw in the rental of all the down jackets, pants etc we needed and a night in her hotel next door (anyone reading this who may be going, go and see Daniella at Ushuaia Turismo - she´s lovely). We spent the next day....well, just getting SO SO excited, buying some more warm gear and enough camera memory cards and wine to sink the ship we were going to board. Well, can´t run out, can we?????
