Wednesday 9th February 2011
Despite its beautiful and remote location, after 4 days I was ready to leave Ushuaia, probably something to do with being sick for a day in a pokey little bedroom, with "The Big Bang Theory" and "How I Met Your Mother" being the only English language proramming on the telly.
Our bus left the town at 5am and started its long journey off the Tierra Del Fuego island. We passed into Chile, and as day properly broke, through landscape that would define the next 36 hours or so of travelling: flat scrubland, as far as the eye could see, either side of the bus. Above, a million miles of sky. For hours and hours, apart from the road, there was no sign of man, just his domesticated animals. Horses and llamas roamed and Patagonian ostriches strutted around grazing cows and sheep. At one point the plain was broken into by the Magellan Straits, upon which we enjoyed a choppy crossing courtesy of a little car ferry.
In the late afternoon we crossed back into Argentina, and eventually rolled into Rio Gallegos, a small town, capital of Santa Cruz province. We stayed at the cheap Hotel Paris, on the main street. It was functional enough, although the proprietor was a true Basilito Fawlteron, far too busy counting his $5 notes to give us much attention (at one point we actually had to nip behind the counter ourselves to collect our bags). We spent the next day mooching around Rio Gallegos. George didn´t like it much, and decided it was quite like Swindon. After having wandered up the riverfront and cooed appreciatively at the tiny corrugated iron cathedral, we holed up in a cafe until our next bus, which left the bus station at 6pm and was scheduled to arrive at our next destination at 12.15pm the following day.
The bus journey was our first seriously long distance, overnight one, and it was generally pleasant. We got food, our seats were really comfortable and we both got some sleep. Unfortunately, it wasn´t all plain sailing. At one point, about 4 hours into the journey, I got up to find the loo. I pulled open the door, and was faced by a rather overweight lady, of advanced years, pants round her ankles, frock hitched up, bundles of loo paper gripped in her hand. She grunted. I don´t know whether it was at me or not. I closed the door and returned to my seat. I was still debating whether to poke my eyes out with the arms of my sunglasses when the bus steward announced that the toilet was suddenly out of order - and so it seemed to remain for the remaining 14 hours of the journey. Luckily frequent stops were built into the schedule to account for my heavy friend´s handiwork. Despite this, we reached Puerto Madryn dead on time. In Ushuaia and Rio Gallegos it was all jackets and woolly hats, but here the weather is gorgeous.
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Unfortunately, in the 12 hours after scaling the glacier I developed a mean-spirited little fever, that left me weak and sweaty for a day or so. I felt somehow like an early missionary, or 19th Century poet, travelling to the uttermost end of the Earth, only to be struck down with an illness, leaving George to stand vigil at my bedside and mop my sweaty brow. But I didn´t fulfil the Romantic ideal by dying, and the following day my temperature had righted itslf and I was left with a streaming cold. Although perhaps not the ideal treatment, George and I went for a 3 hour trek in the local National Park, where all the fauna was so tame, it felt like being in an Argentine version of Mary Poppins (not quite bluebirds resting on my shoulder, but hares and falcons nonchalantly wandering around).
We worked up enough of an appetite to go to a cheap but good parilla restaurant which bears remark only because, although it was all you could eat, a sign warned diners that if they wasted food an additional $12 would be added to the bill. In this climate of fear I just about forced down a salad, a sausage and a hunk of steak, marvelling at the locals´ ability to consume slab after slab of meat.
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Friday 4th February 2011
We´re in Tierra del Fuego, el Fin de Mundo: Ushuaia is the most southerly town in the world, and looks out on the Beagle channel, a stretch of water within which the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific merge, surrounded by Argentine and Chilean mountains. The town itself still has a bit of a frontier feel, but to be honest, it´s better described as a cross between a mid-range Alpine ski resort and a Cornish tourist village. The main street is packed with sportswear and gift shops, the latter´s windows filled with quartz (?) penguin figurines.
A lot of the activity is bloody exhausting. Today, we scrambled up a mountain to a glacier, which I trudged over in order to get as high as possible, while George admired the views, before a long woodland trek back to town. But yesterday was more leisurely. We took an old pleasure boat (the Barracuda) onto the channel, and were rewarded with a three hour cruise that took us past, amongst other things, rocks covered with cormorants and stinking guano. Other rocks were occupied by lounging sealions, flapping and belching as they crawled over each other. I was very proud of George resisting the impule to say, "Actually, I´m a zooologist" in the face of the woman who was trying to explain the difference between male and female sealions to her.
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