Getting there is half the fun

Getting there is half the fun. We are currently in Ushuaia, Argentina, which, at 54° S is the southern most city in the world - its situated on the southern shore of Tierra del Fuego, just a few hundred kilometres from Cape Horn itself. You can go further south from here, but it gets hard. And more importantly for us, it gets expensive. For us, this is the southern limit of our travels (this time around, at least). But getting here has been a story of its own.

After the previously noted beating administered by a distorted Chilean stereo system in an internet cafe, we headed south. A three hour bus ride from Puerto Natales took us to Punta Arenas, where we stayed the night. There were three very memorable highlights of that day: 1. Dorthe´s new "boyfriend" - the bus drivers assistent (most long distance buses here are manned by two people, one who drives, and the other who serves the driver and passangers tea, coffee, food etc). Well, he took quite a liking to Dorthe, and ended up "talking" (he was actually deaf and mute, and so we had to sort of sign with him as best we could) to us all the way. That was fine, but then he started making the coffee - we thought it was for everyone, but in the end he only served the two of us, and the driver, which was a touch embarressing! 2. Trying to rent a room in a Punta Arenas bed and breakfast (which didn´t serve breakfast) from a 93 year old who was stone deaf and partially blind and didn´t understand our spanish one iota! It took half an hour, but we got there in the end. 3. Cooking dinner that night - we brought some large pinkish steaks called Pollo Ganso from the supermarket that looked quite good. Pollo is spanish for chicken, and Ganso is spanish for goose, so we thought it would just be goose, or maybe emu, something birdlike anyway. We fried it for four minutes on each side, but it turned out that it was pretty damn tough. Like really, really tough. Afterwards, we found out from the son of the 93 year lady (who was the real proprietor of the B&B), that Pollo Ganso comes from young calves (no poultry there, despite name), and that he would normally cook it for about an hour in a steamer.....

From Punta Arenas, we then had a 12hr, 645km bus ride south over Tierra Del Fuego to Ushuaia. Why does it take 12hrs to do 645km, that´s not far? It didn´t take long to figure out - the road was rather, ahhh, dodgy - three quarters of it was corrugated, pot-holed gravel roads - that of course didn´t stop the bus driver from barrelling along as fast as he could though! She was a bit of a, ahhh, bumpy ride.

The scenery though, was fantastic - barren, vast, windswept country. First we paralleled the straits of magallen, passing old ships beached on the sore, and rusted warehouses. Then we crossed the straights - a 30 min ferry trip in big seas, spray, and STRONG winds that was absolutely spectacular, then 9 more hours of windswept tundra over Tierra del Fuego, punctuated only by the border crossing. And finally into the mountains for a spectacular alpine crossing down into Ushuaia - a relatively small tourist town on the Beagle channel. Appropriately enough for the "end of the world", it was snowing and minus 2°C when we arrived.

Ushuaia is a picturesque, if overly touristy, little town. It is surrounded by snow capped mountains, and fronts out on the Beagle channel. The hills are covered with ñirre, a beech species that at the moment is bright red, and just stunning. We have spent the last two days here exploring around, and dealing with the rather changable weather - if its not raining, its snowing. We spent the first day exploring the local national park, walking through beech forests, spagnum peat bogs, and past beaver dams. Then yesterday we climbed up to a glaciar behind the town, which involved walking most of the way through fresh snow that was up to waist deep in places!!!

Its a long way from anywhere, it was quite expensive to get here, and was certaintly quite a substantial detour from our general direction of travel. And although getting here was half the fun, being here is even better.