Patagonian Grand Adventure

Day Eleven– 23 February 2014

Weather: It was Ushuaia. Cold and cloudy.

But it wasn’t drizzly, raining, foggy or miserable.

It was a quick morning. Up at 6:30, luggage out and breakfast all done by 7:20. It was only twenty kilometres to the airport. It was a new airport built to move the flights away from the city. This airport also had a seventy-six peso airport tax. About $8.

We checked in and I had a window seat. Woohoo!

I paid my airport tax, found a Coke and wifi. Canada beat Sweden for the gold medal in Olympic hockey!

Woohooooo!

Payback for 1994.

Oh, the airport also had its very own security cat.

This little guy was just sitting in the middle of the floor right after the security check.

The flight took off on time at 9:20 and almost immediately I could see the Chilean Andes sticking up out of the broken cloud.

The Andes go south and make a turn to the east as they descend into the ocean. We could see the peaks, glaciers and the Magellan Strait.

Then it got cloudy. The forecast for Ushuaia was now four degrees and cloud, but no rain and clearing possible.

But as they say, wait five minutes and the weather will change.

The approach into Ushuaia was pretty cool. The plane flew over the Beagle Channel with the mountains to the right and landed on a strip of land extending out into the bay.

The airport looked as new as El Calafate. We went in, got our luggage and found our guide, Laura. Our driver was Neno. Since our flight was changed to an earlier one, we had more time today so Marcelo offered us the chance to do the Beagle Channel optional today instead of tomorrow. He explained that the good weather for tomorrow would be hit or miss, but more importantly, the shops were not open today because it was Sunday.

That sealed it. We would do the optional today and have tomorrow afternoon to shop and check out the downtown area.

We even had a chance to check into the hotel and get our heavier clothes for the cruise. The hotel was outside the city centre but if one wanted to go into town, the cost was less than $10.

My room had a great view of the channel and the mountains. The hotel was called Los Yanamas after the original native people of the area who were known for being completely naked despite the weather. There was a display in front of the hotel with a replica of their small huts as well as one statue of a man, which just happened to be just to the left of my window.

So, every time I got close to my window, I got a bit of a fright cause I thought someone was standing there. 🙂

We got back on the bus just after noon for our included city tour. Laura told us that Ushuaia has two seasons. Cold winter and not so cold winter.

I could believe it.

The name Ushuaia was a native word that meant ‘facing westward’ or facing the sunset. The city has 60,000 people and is trapped between the mountains and the sea.

With an exploding population, they are having to move farther from the city and into the valleys.

The city was founded as a way to assert Argentine claim to this area of Tierra del Fuego (Fire Land). The border, which follows the Andes until they begin to turn east was drawn down the centre of the island along the 68^th parallel. Chile owns everything on the other side of the Beagle Channel down to Cape Horn where a single military family lives (for one year stints).

At first, they couldn’t attract too many settlers to Ushuaia. The Norse figured this out with Iceland. Not a very inviting name, so when they discovered the next big island, they called it Greenland to attract settlers.

Argentina took another route. They opened a prison in Ushuaia and populated the town with criminals. In 1972, the government enacted a number of incentives to have people move there including a much higher salary, same tax rate as the mainland as well as no VAT. Some people came here to work and save money, expecting to move home after a few years, but many stayed as the standard of living there was higher than in many small cities/towns in other parts of the country.

Despite the weather.

We made a photo stop at the old airport (ha! Knew the airport looked new).

This one was abandoned because the runway was too short for modern aircraft and the runway faced the wrong direction.

We took a few pics and I turned around to see everyone taking shelter against a building. In Turkey, you’d see the same in any spot of shade. In Ushuaia, it was any spot out of the wind.

We passed through the downtown and Laura pointed to a parking lot that was near the water’s edge and said it was reclaimed land to help build up the downtown. Nearby was an Information Centre where we could get our passports stamped with the End of the World stamp.

We stopped at the town prison and museum.

Laura told us about some of the prisoners who were kept in that prison, including “small man, big ears” who was a serial killer that targeted children.

After he was incarcerated, they thought performing surgery to reduce the size of his ears would cure him but no luck. I didn’t get a chance to read the write up in his cell, but he was apparently a very cruel individual.

Afterwards, we had some free time in the prison (pun intended) and then we were given an hour to have lunch before the optional cruise. We walked up a street and found the Banana Café. We looked inside and it seemed like it was a place for a quick meal. We had lunch and got out with ten minutes to spare.

Another group went into a sit-down restaurant, and after fifty minutes, their food had still not arrived. Someone figured out how to tell the waiter they needed the food packed up so that they could go. They showed up on the boat just in time with a box full of food and even steel cutlery (that they had to return after).

The irony was that the boat had decent sandwiches.

The boat was a catamaran and the water was fairly calm so anyone who gets a touch of motion sickness didn’t find it too bad.

The boat headed west and then pulled into an island where we could go for a twenty minute walk to take pics of the surrounding mountains.

The clouds were above the peaks and the sun started peeking through the clouds, dropping sunrays on Ushuaia.

Gorgeous!

And it wasn’t even that cold. Not warm, but more than tolerable especially when the boat turned east and went with the wind. I had my new penguin hat which was the warmest hat I’ve ever worn.

The boat pulled up to two or three rocky islands that were covered with cormorants.

There were also sea lions. They were sleeping together in groups and some looked like teenagers who’d been out too late.

The boat then headed to a lighthouse that is now powered by solar energy. It was sitting on a rock island with cormorants for company.

The boat made a leisurely circle around the island and then we headed back to Ushuaia at full speed just as the clouds started to clear.

We got back into port at six, and after the cutlery was returned to the restaurant, we headed back to the hotel for a very relaxing evening watching the skies clear and the mountains light up.