December 2006
From Puerto Natales in Chile we left the state of Ultima Esperanza (last hope) went back El Calafate, got up at 3 am and took a 20 hour bus ride past Bahia Inutil (useless bay) to Ushuaia and El Fin Del Mundo (the end of the world). Ouch. We could have flown but ever since I was a kid I have wanted to see the Straights of Magellan and so I did. Not much to look at though, just some water and a 20 min. ferry ride. We thought the guy with the horse and dogs was going to get on the ferry (on the right) with us to make things interesting but he didn't.
I don't know, this building just looked kind of goofy so I took a picture. The mountains here are so spectacular that I gave up trying to take pictures of them. We were saturated.
Ushuaia is a huge port and supposedly the southern most city in the world, the end of the world (Fin del Mundo). They don't bother to mention that across the bay, in Chile there is a tiny town of mostly soldiers which is actually further south. Boats head south from here for the 10 day trip to Antartica.
We didn't get to ride in the big sailboat above but we did take a little excursion in this sail boat below to a seal colony. This is in Beagle channel (yes Darwin was here in his boat the Beagle) with Argentina on the left and Chile on the right.
We got close to these guys. The birds are cormorants.
This island is also a cormorant nesting site. Yes, you know what all the white stuff is ...
We took another hike up to yet another glacier. Actually we never did see this one, apparently it has shrunk so much that only a tiny part way up high remains. The weather here was weird. It was literally true what they told us that if you didn't like the weather you could wait an hour. We saw subfreezing rain and snow and 60 degree F sun the same day. Ushuaia had some of the worst and best weather of the trip.
On another day we have a really marvelous hike along the Beagle channel in the Tierra del Fuego national park. Chile is across the water in this picture. Here we got to also see shell mounds where the indigenous people left huge mounds of clam and oyster shells. There is some interesting history here. For one, the indigenous people were as tall or taller than Europeans, wore no clothes but smeared themselves with seal fat and had fires in their canoes to keep warm. When the Spaniards came they brought the usual diseases which pretty much wiped the indigenous people out (nothing but a few pictures remain). There were Anglican missionaries who tried to help these people but everywhere the missions went the people would die off and they'd have to move the mission due to lack of indigenous folks. Go figure.
We saw a large red headed woodpecker on this hike.
We also took a day trip out to Estancia Harberton. On the one hand he was an Anglican missionary ... On the other he wrote an English - Yalgan (the local dialect) dictionary. His reward was a huge chunk of land which the family still owns. There are some trees here that are bent over by the wind. Who is that goofy guy leaning over?
Also on this trip we went to another penguin colony. This one is all protected and the number of tourists limited to only a few. Don't know why the one place up in Peninsula Valdes will let a million folks roam all over the place and mix it up with the penguins but this place had us tiptoe around. Maybe it was entertainment for the guides (make the tourists do silly tricks).
