On the flight to Ushuaia the clouds prevented much of a view after take off. We were really hoping to get to see the Southern Patagonian icefield. We did get some views of the mountains and the Beagle Channel before landing though, so that was nice. Ushuaia is Argentinas Southern most city and is located on an island called Tierra del Fuego. The island is shared with Chile and is reachable by car from Chile if you take a ferry across the Magellan Staight.
We didn't have a hostel booked and had thought we might camp but it's fairly cold here and rather drizzly! The daytime high was around 50, so the low would be considerably colder, and and we only have 35 degree sleeping bags. We decided against camping and instead went to the tourist information desk to see which hostels still had room. The lady was really nice and gave us a list with the number of beds available at each hostel and then numbered the list and then marked each number on a map of town! We chose one called Los Lupinos, the most central hostel, and it also happened to be the one with the most beds available. At 30 available beds, it had way more than any other hostel, so we were a bit worried that there might be something wrong with it, but it has turned out to be great! It has a nice big kitchen with many cooking utensils and the bathroom and dorms are clean. As an added bonus Jeff and I got cheetah comforters!
When we left our hostel in El Calafate this morning we acquired a small bag of brown rice and two nice heads of lettuce! So we went grocery shopping when we got here and have spent the evening drinking the cheapest bottle of wine we could find in the grocery store ($1.75, the $1.25 bottle was sold out!!) and making a nice green salad and a lentil, rice and veggie stew.
February 10th 2015, Tuesday
Today was cold and drizzly most of the day, and it was hard to get motivated to do anything. It's amazing how much colder it is here than anywhere we've been so far. It's just like being in Alaska in the summer while it's blazing hot everywhere else! There is even fresh snow on the mountain tops, just like there is in Alaska towards the end of summer! Right now we are in the USA equivalent of August.
<Looking up at Ushuaia from the water.>
<The waterfront in Ushuaia. The old boat is inhabited by many sea birds, including arctic teens, which we see all summer in Alaska!>
<This is supposed to be a representation of the native peoples.>
We decided we wanted to go on a boat tour and we wanted to see penguins, so we set out to investigate the options. The tour sales people here tend to be really aggressive and approach you while you are walking by on the street and try to lure you in and I HATE that and usually ignore them! There was a lady down by the port that managed to win me over, though! She presented us with all of the options, what she had to offer (sail boat ride), and what the competitors had to offer. So we decided we'd do a sail boat tour in the Beagle Channel tomorrow morning and a combination penguin and historic ranch (Estancia Harberton) tour tomorrow afternoon.
After booking the tours we went grocery shopping for lunch supplies. There are three eating options in town that are listed on Happy Cow, but we aren't dying to go to any of them, and hostels are on the expensive side here, so we decided we could offset our lodging costs by cooking our meals while we are here. For this grocery trip we decided to go to the bigger as farther away grocery store. It was a mad house inside and took forever to checkout, but we looked for the cheapest wine we could find again. We saw lots of bottles in the range of $1.25 to $2, then Jeff discovered the boxed wine! We picked the cheapest one. It cost about 93¢ for a 1000ml box (larger than a regular bottle)!
<Real cheap wine. According to the box it's the wine most commonly drunk in Argentine homes.>
<I also found high fructose corn syrup free apple soy milk! It seems the ones they say free on the box use a sweetener other than corn syrup, but definitely aren't sugar free! They are still very sweet, so I'm not sure what the free on the box means.>
In the afternoon it cleared up a little bit and we decided to go for a walk along the coast to one of the first ranches established in the area. We wanted to go by bus, but you have to have a card that you load with money, kind of like a gift card, to be able to ride. We figured out how to buy the card, which was for sale in a pharmacy of all places, but when we went to buy it they said the city was sold out of them! Oh well! We ended up having to take a taxi instead for about $10. We got dropped off at a trail head in an area known as Playa Larga and walked aways through lenga forest on bluffs above the coast to the old abandoned ranch called Estancia Túnel. A storm appeared to be brewing, so we took a quick look around the ranch buildings then hurried back to the road. Once at the road we had about a 30 minute walk on a dirt road back to the highway, but luckily the storm blew over and made for pleasant walking. We tried to hitchhike, cause we didn't really want to walk the entire way back to town, once we got to the highway it would probably be 5 additional miles in to town. All of the cars drove past us, but to our surprise one of the cars returned a few minutes later! It was a nice local lady who was out sight seeing with family that was visiting her. She had dropped them off somewhere and came back for us! She drove us to the end of the road to a taxi stand in a neighborhood near the highway, so we could take a taxi back to the hostel. We couldn't believe how nice she was! We were quite relieved because it was getting late and we had walked for about two hours already and we were getting hungry! We had stamppot for dinner and our box of wine, which we all found to be pretty good and a bar of chocolate! I discovered that the chocolate found in the baking aisle is milk free!
<A nice lenga tree with an interesting growth pattern.>
<Outhouse at Estancia Túnel with an actual toilet inside and a large holding tank for water used to flush it, but it dumps right onto the beach below!>
<Lots of abalone and conch shells on the beach. Also found a lot of seaglass too!>
<We found an open window in one of the newer looking buildings and climbed inside. This is where we suited up in our rain gear.>
February 11th 2015, Wednesday
Looking out the windows during breakfast it was definitely still cloudy but otherwise looked pretty decent out. It gave us hope. Our sailing tour began and 9 and was a 4 1/2 hour tour. I decided not to wear long underwear, and no one else did, because the tour company provides these really cool weather proof jackets and overalls. We thought that would be more than enough, but boy were we wrong! We all froze our butts off, to the point of it being painful on our hands and feet! I don't know what the temperature was, but certainly below 50, and with the rain and wind it felt even colder! Sadly, I can't say any of us actually had fun. We got to see a few neat things, "the lighthouse at the end of the world," sea lions, cormorant colonies and a short walk on one of the islands. All the while, what we really wanted was for the tour to be over! Also we were fed cookies that contained grasa bovina, or bovine fat! This was discovered after they were eaten! So they were not even vegetarian cookies! Guess you can never be too careful down here.
<Lighthouse at the end of the world.>
<Sealions and cormorants.>
<We went ashore on a tiny little raft, a few people at a time.>
<The island we stopped at for about 20 minutes. There were a total of 8 passengers on the boat and I don't think any one really wanted to get off on the island. To make things worse, the crew made us remove the overalls, for fear we might somehow damage then while we walked!>
Once back on land, we had about an hour to run back to the hostel and heat up leftovers for lunch, before our afternoon penguin tour. We were the last ones to board the bus and ended up all having to sit separately. Kirianne ended up sitting next to this horrible smoker lady and her annoying little girls across the aisle. She didn't recognize them until she was already seated, or else she definitely would not have sat with there! They were on the same bus as us several days ago when we left El Chaltén, and were very obnoxious to ride with. We had a pretty empty bus on that trip and Kirianne didn't have to share her row, and we had the front row of the double decker, it was great! After taking a rest stop in which we could get out of the bus, we came back to find smoker lady was seated in the window seat of Kirianne's row, while her very young children were seated on the other side a row back, so for the rest of the ride Kirianne had to sit on the aisle side and deal with the children leaning on her seat and into her while they repeatedly got up to talk/complain to their mom!
For the penguin tour we had to ride about 1 1/2 hours to the East side of the island to a ranch called Estancia Harberton. It was the first ranch on Tierra del Fuego, and was founded by a missionary. The land was actually given to him by the government! The land is still in his family, and is a truly huge piece of land, which includes lots of water front, and the island on which the Penguins chose to set up a colony in the 60s! So we got to drive through the ranch, which is now home to a bed and breakfast.
They split the bus into two groups of 20, because only 20 people are allowed on the island at a time. The first group went straight to the boat and we stopped to see a marine mammal museum that is on the property. It's was pretty neat to see the bones of whales, sea lions and sea birds. Most of the specimens were found in the area, or a little ways up North, where low tides can expose up to 14km of shoreline and strands many animals! The museum exists because the wife of the 3rd generation owner is a marine biologist. I guess that's what you do when you have more money than you know what to do with!
After the museum it was our turn for the boat. We took a quick zodiac ride over to the island and got to spend an hour there. We saw Magellanic Penguins, Papúa Penguins and there were even randomly 4 king penguins there, which you normally have to go to Antarctica to see! Jeff and I had seen a penguin colony on our last trip, and although this one was smaller colony, it was way more scenic! So we really enjoyed seeing the penguins again, they are just so unbelievably cute and fun to look at!
<If you look closely, I appear to have a uni brow! That is my new sunglasses tan line!>
<This penguin has nesting materials in his beak!>
<A few penguins made nests under the stairs!>
<The main house. Estancia Harberton.>
When our time on the island was through, we loaded back up on the bus and headed back to Ushuaia. We made one stop on the way to see what are known as flag trees. The wind blows here quite often, and almost always from the Southwest, so in exposed areas, the trees point Northeast, giving the trees a slanted growth, that is given the name flag tree.
February 12th, Thursday
Another cold and blustery day! We once again had little motivation to get out and do anything! Even though we set our alarms for
7:30 and actually got up, it was almost noon by the time we were leaving the hostel! We decided to take a bus out to the national park, Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego. There is no actual public bus that goes there, just minibuses. Minibuses us just a fancy name for a guy with a van! There were many different mini bus "companies," all of which charge 200 (US$15) pesos per person for a round trip. The park is only 7 miles away. When you get to the park, as a foreigner you get charged much more than locals, 140 pesos (almost US$11) to enter, so a visit to the park is not cheap! We decided to hike the coastal trail. I think it was a little over 6 miles and took about 4 1/2 hours. About an hour into the hike we stopped to have our lunch (rice cakes, carrot hummus, avocado and cucumber) which required some assembly. We all froze while the wind whipped at us and it looked like it would be another miserable day, but luckily the weather cleared about an hour later! We happily enjoyed the rest of the hike in and out of lenga forest and rocky coves and beaches between 2 bays.
<Bahia Ensenada, Tierra del Feugo park>
<Post office at end of the world.>
<The trees here have so many burls that they look arthritic!>
<This is one type of fungus growth that causes burls to form, there is at least one other kind that we have seen, and it is orange and smells like cantaloupes!>
<Lenga forest and Bahia Lapataia.>
<Nice mature lenga forest. Looks much different than the flag trees, even though the are the same species.>
<These strange mistletoe like plants grown on some of the lenga trees.>
<At the end of the Pan-American Highway.>
February 13th 2015, Friday
<This is was breakfast looks like at our hostel. A bag of sliced french bread and about 10 different flavors of jam is placed on each table. We have consumed many baskets of bread during our stay.>
<Zapallo (pumpkin) has been our favorite flavor of jam. It is nothing like pumpkin butter, and has none of the traditional spices of pumpkin pie, it is literally pumpkin jam or jelly!>
We decided to do a free hike in town today called Cerro del Medio. A description of the hike was posted on the wall of our hostel, which we photographed and went on our way. We were able to walk to the trailhead from the hostel and right into the forest above town. We continued up a river valley above tree line, and after awhile the trail kind of disappeared. We were expecting to arrive at the top of a mountain, but we weren't sure which one or how to proceed! We had also expected the hike to be 4 hours round trip, and we were already 3 hours in with no end in sight. We settled with stopping at a small lake on a saddle between two mountains with a partial view of town and the Beagle Channel. We would have explored some more but we were out of time because Kirianne would be flying home today and we needed to get back to town for her flight.
<View of the lake we hiked to in the mountains behind town.>
<View of Ushuaia and the Beagle Channel.>
<A view of Ushuaia from near the start of the trail.>
Once we were back at the hostel, we ate some leftovers and sent Kirianne on her way. Jeff and I then set out to get a bus ticket out of Ushuaia. We had delayed in doing so earlier, because we hadn't yet made up our minds about where we were going. We came to find out we would be stranded for another 3 nights and two full days, as the next departure with space available was on Monday. We bought the soonest tickets possible and then spent the rest of the day going over our options and plans, and depression and doubt set in!
We had originally wanted to continue South of Ushuaia to Chile's Southern most town, Puerto Williams on Isla (island) Navarino. It is a small town of around 2,000 people with lots of hiking nearby, with one trek specifically that we wanted to do, called Dientes de Navarino (Teeth of Navarino). It is a loop hike of several days around the teeth/mountains that it is rather exposed with some time spent at higher elevations, and bad weather could make it miserable. So after all of the weather we'd experienced in Ushuaia we started doubting whether or not we wanted to bother with going there. We for some reason only brought 35 degree sleeping bags. I at least have a liner that adds 8 degrees of warmth, but Jeff doesn't, and we learned on our trek in Bariloche that 35 degrees just doesn't quite cut it! I'm not really sure what we were thinking in regards to the sleeping bags, I actually bought a new one in favor of my regular 20 degree down sleeping bag! I guess we had summer on our minds! We also found out it's costs US$125 each way too eat over there by boat. That also influenced our decision. But that afternoon the clouds cleared and the sun and mountains came out in all their glory, and I started to feel disappointed that we didn't go through with it!
Another option we'd been considering was going to Antarctica. Most Antarctic cruises leave from Ushuaia, and although some cruises cost as much as $70,000, you can find last minute deals in the range of $5,000. We ultimately decided against going because we figured it's a trip that is entirely dependent on the weather, and bad weather could ruin the trip or at least make us real mad we spend 5 grand! I still really want to go, maybe next time!
The weather got clearer than it had been since we arrived, but since our departure was locked in for Monday, rather than mope around and think about what could have been, we had to come up with something to do for the final two days. We had been feeling like Ushuaia was a money suck, so we decided we needed to go free camping for a night. We had wanted to do a day hike to Laguna Esmeralda, a glacially fed lake, and a day hike is what most people do, but there is an option to continue past the lake and set up camp along the river, then continue way up the valley to the glacier. You could do the whole thing in a day, but an overnight would be nice and free! To get to the day hike a mini bus must be taken for the fee of 200 pesos (US$15), which is exactly the cost of a dorm bed, so it was a perfect offset. Once the plan was set we rearranged our bags, leaving all the unnecessary items in the luggage storage at our hotel.
For dinner we had a stir fry of corn, potatoes, purple cabbage, tomatoes and canned mushrooms. It was not what I had in mind, but it was pretty good, and it was the best I could do with what was available at the grocery store! You can't expect to consistently find what you are looking for in the produce section of the stores here. One day they have an abundance of something and you go back the next day for more and find it's all sold out. And even when everything is in stock, there selection is not great. It makes me wonder what the people here would think if they went into a US grocery store! These are the vegetables that are available most often, and never all at once: potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, corn, cabbage, beets, onion, garlic, bell peppers, cucumber, tomatoes, zucchini, avocado and butternut squash. Greens are pretty much non existent, you can get lettuce but it's usually quite wilted. We have yet to find celery, broccoli or cauliflower. I will be excited to see if Chile has more selection since they aren't having currency problems and inflation and shortages. On the bright side, we have been eating nectarines, peaches and plums almost every day!
<Extremely large sheets of sandwich bread in whole wheat! We didn't buy them, only admired them. They are only a few millimeters thick, quite strange.>
February 14th 2015, Saturday
We started our hike to the lake around noon, and we're pleased to find it was very easy walking, only about 500 feet of elevation gain spread out over 2.5 miles to the lake. We saw a number of beaver dams and lodges. The beavers have created one dam after another up and down the whole river valley. Some of the dams were probably over 6 feet tall, and held back an amazing amount of water. It's crazy to think about how beavers go about building a dam, they don't have the luxury of rerouting the water into a culvert like humans do when they build dams, so I'm curious how they do it. The water coming down the river is all glacially fed and has an emerald color to it, that's what esmeralda means, so all of the beaver ponds as a result look beautiful. At the same time they are depressing to look at, because beavers are invasive here. They were introduced in the 40s in hopes of starting a fur trade (that never did well) and they are thought to number over 100,000 on the island of Tierra del Fuego! They don't have natural predators here, so they keep multiplying and destroying forests.
<The mountains reflected in a beaver pond. The snow towards the middle is the area we are hiking to.>
<Series of never ending beaver ponds and dams.>
<A burl that looks like a elephant!>
After an extremely leisurely 2 hours we arrived at the lake. It was a little foggy and rainy, so we kept going. We followed the river about another hour through the forest, stopping just below the tree line to set up camp. As soon as our house was built, it started to rain more heavily, and we took refuge inside, hoping we wouldn't be stuck there the rest of the day! Luckily for us it cleared up after only half an hour and we were able to complete the final 3 hour round trip hike to glacier and back with mostly clear skies. The rest of the hike was above tree line, and over lots of rock. We climbed up a steep lateral moraine (moraine is the pulverized rock a glacier leaves behind as it retreats). Much of the rock was crumbly shale, but a lot of it reminded me of slate, like the tiles we used to have in my house when I was little. Eventually there wasn't much of a trail to follow, and we had to kind of guess where to go. I imagine not many people go all the way to the glacier. There is a description of it in our hiking book, otherwise we would not have known you could hike to it. We are not sure we followed the description of the book, but we did arrive at the glacier, high up on the valley walls. We discovered on the way that most of the rock we were walking over was insulating a massive snowfield underneath us, and in some areas we could see snow caves covered in rock! The view down the valley from the glacier was amazing, you could see the mountains across the valley, the river, all the braver dams and downed trees, the Laguna Esmeralda and the the steep cliff walls all around us. We could get close enough to the glacier to touch it and see the blue ice, and I even got to walk into a crevasse right at the edge of the glacier. It was neat! The way back was much easier, and we got to practice our scree skiing again. (: For dinner we had a pot of brown rice flake, sprouted mung beans, corn, tomatoes, zucchini and chives.
<Laguna Esneralda from above.>
<Really cool mountains above the glacier.>
<Snow cave covered in insulating rock.>
<Steep cliff walls and the steep scree below them that we traversed across.>
<Blue ice from inside the crevasse!>
<At the foot of the glacier, looking up.>
<Glaciar de Albino and the small crevasse I walked into. Jeff was down below as did not come all the way up.>
<View from the foot of the glacier, looking out over the valley.>
February 15th 2015, Sunday
<Some fancy cutting work by the Beavers.>
<An especially large tree that was chewed through by the Beavers.>
We slept through the night and stayed warm enough! It didn't rain anymore overnight, so we didn't have to put away a wet tent and that was real nice! We got rained on a little on the walk back, but it wasn't bad. The bad came when we had to sit at the trailhead in the rain for over an hour to wait for our return minibus back. They forgot about us! We had agreed with the driver that we would be ready to go back at noon, and we got there just after
11:30. At almost one, a different minibus showed up to pick up some other hikers. He initially told us he wouldn't take us, but after a call to our driver he changed his mind and took us with him. There was plenty of room.
Once back in town Jeff yelled at the people who we bought our tickets from and got half of our money returned, 100 pesos each for the return trip! I am not pushy and avoid confrontation at all costs and would have just let it slide, but I am glad Jeff stood up for us! It made our trip even cheaper. I had to help him out a little because they pretended to not know what we were asking for until I piped up in Spanish.
We realized too late that it was Sunday and everything closes early or never opens at all. We tried two restaurants, both of which were closed, but managed to make it into the grocery store 5 minutes before closing! We probably could have gone out to lunch if we'd been picked up in time, but we saved even more money by making food, so it all worked out in the end. We spent the rest of the day in the hostel cooking, eating, becoming clean via the shower, reorganizing and going to bed early. Tomorrow we will be getting up
at 4 AM for our 12 hour bus ride to Punta Arenas, Chile. So far we have spent more time in Ushuaia than any other location, and we are happy to be leaving!
<A meal throw together after our very quick trip to the grocery store. Brown rice cakes, onion, tomato, avocado, mustard and Mrs. Dash.>
<The strange no so sweet potatoes we have been eating. They are the yellow cubes. Definitely not potatoes, but they don't really taste quite like sweet potato either. They are called batata.>
I continue to find free food in the free box at hostels. I acquired more spices, fresh chives, an onion, a tomato, a full bottle of red wine vinegar, a 2 pound bag of brown rice, a pound of dry black beans and lots of bread during our stay in Ushuaia.
