Patagonian Grand Adventure

Day Twelve – 24 February 2014

Weather: In Ushuaia, the odds of a day like this was one in forty-five.

I slept till 7:15 and opened the curtains to a brilliant clear blue sky.

Wow!

Just wow.

After I picked my jaw up off the floor (I’m getting good at that on this tour), I went to breakfast. Very basic setup which has been the ongoing theme. Scrambled eggs which always seemed like they’ve been cooked with a lot of butter. And lots of breads with delicious tea and cocoa with hot milk. This hotel was very nice.

We boarded the bus and headed towards the end of the Pan-American highway in Tierra del Fuego National Park. The border with Chile follows the 68^th parallel and we’d be coming right to the end of that. In fact, a tourmate who had a camera with the GPS activated said we had strayed beyond the 68^th parallel on one of our walks.

Laura pointed out a nine hole golf course where people do the course twice to make it eighteen. Some people go to Ushuaia to golf there as it’s touted as the most southerly golf course in the world (or at least the most southerly green one). They call it golfing at the end of the world.

The last hole must be a doozy.

We drove through an area where new roads and buildings were being constructed and Laura told us that the city was expanding in that direction.

The dominant mountain in the area is Mount Condor but a low hill called Mount Susanna acts as a weather guide for them. If they can see it, the weather is fine. If they can’t, snow is coming.

The national park is a protected forest and only 3% is considered recreational. A train in the area was built by the prisoners whose accommodations we visited yesterday. The wood they chopped down was still visible as the wood takes as long to decompose as it does to grow.

We entered the park and took a steep road down to the Ensenada Bay. Laura said the road is only open from October to April as it’s too icy for tour buses otherwise.

We hopped off and walked down to the beach under that gorgeous blue sky and four degrees. The male solo on the tour was from India and he was the only smoker on the bus. When we hopped off, we realized we could see our breath. I said that he must not see that too often in India, and he said yeah, when he stepped outside the hotel that morning, he thought he was still smoking. 🙂

Then we turned around to see a sight so rare, our TD and driver were already taking pictures.

Wow.

Blue sky and no wind.

To put this into perspective, Laura told us that Ushuaia gets completely blue skies like this about eight days a year.

Yes. You heard that right. Eight days out of three hundred and sixty-five.

We had one chance in forty-five of getting a blue sky.

The region gets about two hundred rain days and in winter the winds are lower. They get about fifty no-wind days in winter. The temperature doesn’t go to extremes like one would think. In winter, Ushuaia’s average temperature is zero degrees C. That’s warmer than home. And less windy. (St. John’s is considered a windier city than Ushuaia, but we get more sun and more snow).

So, being the middle of summer, the calm water really took Laura and our driver by surprise. That was very rare, she said, as she snapped as many pictures as we did.

I have no doubt some of them will end up in a brochure for Ushuaia.

How can one not look at that and go Wow?

We had about twenty minutes to take pictures, and at nineteen minutes, a slight breeze came up and erased the mirror.

I was standing next to the parking lot when the breeze came up and a bus pulled up behind me. Everyone got off and I could hear them exclaim as to how beautiful it was and how lucky they were to be there at that particular moment.

I could only smile and said “you should have been here three minutes ago.”

There was a post office at the site where the clerk, Carlos, would stamp our passports for $2. It took up a full page and included a sticker with his photo on it.

He was a cool dude and a funny guy.

I’ve never had an issue with souvenir stamps on my passport. In fact, a customs officer asked me why I had two stamps from Machu Picchu. I told him because I entered in the morning and again in the afternoon.

He had to turn away to hide the smile.

We got back on the bus and continued towards the end of the highway. En route, Laura showed us an area of dead trees in a swampy area and said it was the work of beavers.

Argentina has beavers? Who knew!

Guess where they got them from?

Yup. They thought they could create a fur industry by importing mink and beavers. Problem was that it doesn’t get cold enough for the animals to produce the thick, lush coats like they do in Canada.

But like in Canada, the beavers kept taking down trees and building dams. So now they have a pest of no value. Our driver, Neno, hunted beavers. He showed us a beaver tooth key chain and I think we were all expecting a flat straight tooth when in reality, it was almost a complete circle.

Two pairs of beavers were introduced in 1946. There are now over a hundred thousand. They have even crossed over to the mainland, but the puma lives there and has limited their expansion.

There’s also a rabbit problem and they introduced the silver fox hoping it would work as a predator but apparently the fox prefers the taste of lamb over rabbit.

The farmers are not happy about that.

The bus dropped us off at the start of a trail that we could walk. One could stay with the bus and meet us at the end of the highway, but I think everyone took the walk.

It was about a one kilometer easy walk along a trail. Laura showed us two of the local trees – the lenga and nire.

She showed us a mushroom like fungus that grows on the side of the lenga tree that causes it to grow a knot to protect itself. Apparently the fungus is edible. It’s called the Darwin fungus but in the local language, it’s called ‘sweet, sweet.’

The trail ended at Lake Lapatia where we got our pics taken in front of the sign indicating that it was the end of the highway. Yeah, that’s me wearing my penguin hat behind the sign.

We walked out to the end of the boardwalk for a look at the lake.

Then we headed to a campground for another walk along another lake from which we could see the Darwin range in Chile.

Before the walk started, one woman who had won a bottle of wine in a game we played on the bus shared the wine out with everyone (I had told her about the same thing that happened in Croatia and she thought it was a splendid idea – as she wasn’t sure she could get it home intact.)

As we walked along the shore, Laura told us the behavior of the upland geese has been changing. For the last three years, they haven’t been flying north and remaining in the area for the winter. They’ve noted the same behavior with the black neck swan this past year. There’s been so little snow, they’ve been able to feed locally.

At the end of the trail was a very nice visitor center where we got enough time to grab a bite to eat before heading downtown. I had a great potato quiche.

We drove back to Ushuaia and Laura offered to drop anyone at the hotel who didn’t want to go downtown. There were no takers. I joined a tourmate who had been to Ushuaia before and we took our time strolling up and down the main drag.

We shopped until our feet said stop. We got pics of the Ushuaia sign and the mountains overlooking Ushuaia.

And then went looking for a taxi. It cost us $6 including tip for the fifteen minute trip. (I’ve seen complaints in Trip Advisor about the fact that the hotels were not central and that one had to take a taxi to get downtown. But seriously? For the amazing and very quiet location of Los Yamanas, the $6 was well well worth it).