Ushuaia and the End of the World

Getting to Ushuaia was a bit of a mission. We had to take a eighteen hour bus and then another twelve hour bus as well has having to cross Chile to get to it. On the back of the bus, we had a group of past it Argentinian-rocker-hippies who decided too sing and shout loudly for most of the journey. A, brave, Swedish girl decided to shout "Silencio, por favour!" and their response was to shout about her not being Argentinian and then became even louder than before. The landscape for most of the journey, is barren and quite boring while the winds are a force to be reckoned with. Only within an hour of getting to Ushuaia do you start to see mountains appearing. We got there as the sun was setting and it was very beautiful among the valleys.

One of the main reasons for simply being in Ushuaia is to be at the bottom of the world as it´s the southernmost city in the world. The city itself is industrial and not that pretty but the surrounding countryside is simply, beautiful. The climate is very changeable and a bit like England in the spring or summer. Our days were spent simply driving around, enjoying the countryside, especially when the sun was out. We took a chair lift up to a glacier, Colin doesn´t like chair lifts and was screaming like a girl the whole way up as well as keeping his eyes shut, "Adrian, it´s too high, I don`t like it", "Adrian, it`s swinging too much". Yeah right! The glacier was retreating rapidly so, there wasn´t much of it but the scenery and view of Ushuaia and the Beagle Channel was beautiful.















Afterwards, we visited a national park, Tierra del Fuego, named after the island we were situated on which is the largest in South America. The national park is full of lakes and mountains and had lots of good, short little walks around the coastline and the lakes themselves. Driving around, a lot or most of the mountains are still covered in snow and wildflowers had started to grow. Annoyingly, on the occasions when we bothered to get for sunrise, the weather was terrible. We stayed in a nice hotel and had a kitchen almost to ourselves so we cooked spicy food which is difficult to find in Argentina. Eating out and drinking out here is pretty expensive, so we used the kitchen in the hotel as much as possible and in the evenings, relaxed with a nice bottle of wine.