The Waddling Tuxedos That Live at the End of the World
Em and I have made it to the End of the World; well, Ushuaia at least. Ushuaia is called the southern most city in the World (although there is a town, Puerto Williams, of about 4000 people in Chile that is 5km further south that the Argentinians like to pretend doesn't exist so that they can keep their city motto). Ushuaia is equally as far from Antarctica as it is from our next stop, El Calafate, at approximately 1000 km away.
While the Ona (aka Selk'nam) Indians lived in Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire) (the area of which Ushuaia is the capital) starting about 10,000 years ago, it wasn't until 1833 that British ship Captain Robert Fitzroy of the HMS Beagle spotted the peninsula and was subsequently considered its finder.
For the next 40 years the area was largely settled by British Missionaries attempting to help the indigenous tribes of the area (in this area it was mainly the Yamana tribe) but only succeeding in driving them to extinction within 80 years of contact (there s currently only one driving , full-blooded ember of the tribe still alive today). In 1973, the fist Argentinians (a set of teachers) arrived in the area and that same year, future Argentinean president, Julio Argentino Roca, decided to start a penal colony as a way to establish permanent residents and claim Argentinean sovereignty over all of Tierra del Fuego.
The penal colony, and a series of subsequent prisons, were opened and operated in the city from around 1898 to 1947, when they were shut down for suspected abuse of inmates and abesmal living conditions. Even with the penal system in Ushuaia disintegrating, it did its job; the inmates essentially built the town, got married, and created the industry in the area. Today, the city is know for its manufacturing of electronics, fishing, oil, and ecotourism.
Em and I came for three days of lush green and brilliant blues and of course, the waddling tuxedos and their brown furry young.
The hostel that we booked, Alba's, was like a B&B from Fairyland; a cute little house with mini doors and stairwells, that twisted and turned up and away. All the doors were different colors. And lead to rooms that were fit into the house like odd shaped puzzel pieces. We had the attic room, with slanted ceilings and creeky stairs. Alba greet us personally and was very nice as she helped make the place warmer than Hades (apparently heat is super cheap here so everyone tends to have it cranked as high as possible).
The first day that we were in town, we went on a tour of Tierra del Fuego National Park. The tour included a three hour hike along the water at the base of the mountains, the best lunch I've eaten so far on this trip (cheese, bread, chicken and vegetable soup, fruit salad, wine, and mate), an hour and a half kayak ride, and a toast with local liquor (something like rum, honey, and battery acid mixed).
Everywhere in this area is gorgeous. There's something to be said for living in such a remote part of the world. There is little pollution, tons of rains, and the entire place is vibrant and green.
For the kayak portion of the trip, they supplied us with waterproof pants and boots to go with our fashionable life vests. Since I had the smallest feet of everyone (including the teenager that was at least a half foot shorter than me), I got the lovely leapord print boots. As were paddling into the three foot swell, our guide is encouraging the group with calls of "vamos, vamos!". Paddling into wind is a lot different than claim lakes. Our workout was rewarded with an inquisitive seal coming to say hi, and liquor and Afadoras (type of super popular Argentinan cookie) upon reaching land again.
I was a little sad that we only had a few hours in the park and that we didn't get to ride the Train at the End of the World (left over from the penal colony days when the prisoners would go into the forest everyday to cut wood for the furnaces at the prison), but I was glad that we didn't get to see it and that it only sprinkled and didn't rain on us.
Since it's summer here and at 55' latitude, it's light out until about 11 pm, and everyone's schedules are set to meet these hours. Families are playing in the parks at 10 pm, dinner is 9 to midnight, and stores open later and close well into the night. These extended times helped us to visit the Prisoner's museum after our adventure in the park.
The old prison contained a central rotunda, with five cell blocks jutting off of it. Now-in-days, each cell block contains different exhibits that comprise five separate museums: the Prison Museum, the Maritime Museum, the Antarctica Museum, the Naval History Museum, and an art gallery. Essentially, each of the cells house mini exhibits on everything to do with the region from the native peoples that once lived here to the different boats that shipwrecked on the different shores to the most notorious criminals that used to be housed here. The highlight for Em and I was the entire wing that was left in the state it was found when they converted the place to a museum. Since is was dark, eerie, and most likely haunted, we mostly had the wing to ourselves to take awesome photographs.
We finished the day off with Centallo, King Crab; a specialty of the area. The crab is caught daily and cooked fresh. If you want, you can actually pick which one you want to eat from the tanks in each restaurant. The crabs are huge and delicious, but no one warned us that that had super sharp, spiky legs and that you end up with multiple small puncture wounds in the process of trying to get at the meat.
Our second day wasn't as jam-packed as the first; a morning the wander the town (which apparently is not open on Sundays) and a tour to see Harberton Ranch and Penguinos in the afternoon. The time to visit the waddlers has finally arrived. We meet in the center of town and were driven via mini bus to the Harberton Ranch, where we eventually took a speed boat across a small section of the Beagle Channel to Martillo Island to see the Magellanic rookeries and some King Penguins.
Harberton Ranch was established in 1886 by pioneer missionary Thomas Bridges and named after his wife's home back in England.
Because our group was so big, they had to take us to the island in two shifts, meaning we had time to visit the museum of natural history for the region's birds and mammals. For me this was great since it was an entire building dedicated to the study of the area's animals and contained the skeletons of all the marine birds and mammals they'd recovered in the area. Got to love dead things.
Eventually we made it to Martillo Island and were allowed an hour to quietly walk around and get up close and personal with the Island's black and white inhabitants. Our guide was telling us about how the Penguins are primarily monogamous and each year the males arrive first, prepare their burrows (kick out interlopers) and then wait for their females to come to the island (they usually arrive 2 weeks after the males). The males make a crying/donkey sound that is unique to each mated pair and that's how they find each other each year. The catch though, is that if the male cannot refind their burrow or is kicked out by another, their mate may reject them upon arriving on the island.
We got to see the king penguins of the two species on the island, as well as a few baby penguins (they're brown and furry and apparently not waterproof yet (they really didn't like the rain that accompanied our arrival)), as well as some bird species with their young (one of these birds is the natural predator of the penguins and eat their babies).
We closed out our time in Ushuaia with a Beagle Channel Cruise on our last morning in the city. Our four hour boat trip took us out away from land to visit some of the islands inhabited by cormorants, sea lions, and various other sea birds. The boat drives out as far as the Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse, the Lighthouse at the End of the World (as named by the locals, but not the same as the as the End of the World Lighthouse in Jules Verne's book) and then returns.
Upon arriving at the airport, Em and I found out we were to be stranded at the Ushuaia airport because the airlines decided to strike the other day. Apparently, our tour company was aware of the strike and informed our hotel in the next city and the glacier tour company of this (since we won't be getting out today or maybe even tomorrow), but they forgot to tell us. We arrived at the airport to huge lines and screens containing redlined flights. We were told that we just needed to wait in line to get booked on a new flight, but the line doesn't move and no one knows when the strike will end. On a more entertaining note, it seems that whenever someone does make it to the counter and either gets on a flight or talks to someone, the other stranded passengers start banging things, chanting and cheering; it's like the aftermath of a soccer goal, without the preceding action (someone later informed us that that was just the stranded rugby team). Hopefully, the next entry will be about El Calafate and not how we lived in the airport for a week.
While the Ona (aka Selk'nam) Indians lived in Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire) (the area of which Ushuaia is the capital) starting about 10,000 years ago, it wasn't until 1833 that British ship Captain Robert Fitzroy of the HMS Beagle spotted the peninsula and was subsequently considered its finder.
For the next 40 years the area was largely settled by British Missionaries attempting to help the indigenous tribes of the area (in this area it was mainly the Yamana tribe) but only succeeding in driving them to extinction within 80 years of contact (there s currently only one driving , full-blooded ember of the tribe still alive today). In 1973, the fist Argentinians (a set of teachers) arrived in the area and that same year, future Argentinean president, Julio Argentino Roca, decided to start a penal colony as a way to establish permanent residents and claim Argentinean sovereignty over all of Tierra del Fuego.
The penal colony, and a series of subsequent prisons, were opened and operated in the city from around 1898 to 1947, when they were shut down for suspected abuse of inmates and abesmal living conditions. Even with the penal system in Ushuaia disintegrating, it did its job; the inmates essentially built the town, got married, and created the industry in the area. Today, the city is know for its manufacturing of electronics, fishing, oil, and ecotourism.
Em and I came for three days of lush green and brilliant blues and of course, the waddling tuxedos and their brown furry young.
The hostel that we booked, Alba's, was like a B&B from Fairyland; a cute little house with mini doors and stairwells, that twisted and turned up and away. All the doors were different colors. And lead to rooms that were fit into the house like odd shaped puzzel pieces. We had the attic room, with slanted ceilings and creeky stairs. Alba greet us personally and was very nice as she helped make the place warmer than Hades (apparently heat is super cheap here so everyone tends to have it cranked as high as possible).
The first day that we were in town, we went on a tour of Tierra del Fuego National Park. The tour included a three hour hike along the water at the base of the mountains, the best lunch I've eaten so far on this trip (cheese, bread, chicken and vegetable soup, fruit salad, wine, and mate), an hour and a half kayak ride, and a toast with local liquor (something like rum, honey, and battery acid mixed).
Everywhere in this area is gorgeous. There's something to be said for living in such a remote part of the world. There is little pollution, tons of rains, and the entire place is vibrant and green.
For the kayak portion of the trip, they supplied us with waterproof pants and boots to go with our fashionable life vests. Since I had the smallest feet of everyone (including the teenager that was at least a half foot shorter than me), I got the lovely leapord print boots. As were paddling into the three foot swell, our guide is encouraging the group with calls of "vamos, vamos!". Paddling into wind is a lot different than claim lakes. Our workout was rewarded with an inquisitive seal coming to say hi, and liquor and Afadoras (type of super popular Argentinan cookie) upon reaching land again.
I was a little sad that we only had a few hours in the park and that we didn't get to ride the Train at the End of the World (left over from the penal colony days when the prisoners would go into the forest everyday to cut wood for the furnaces at the prison), but I was glad that we didn't get to see it and that it only sprinkled and didn't rain on us.
Since it's summer here and at 55' latitude, it's light out until about 11 pm, and everyone's schedules are set to meet these hours. Families are playing in the parks at 10 pm, dinner is 9 to midnight, and stores open later and close well into the night. These extended times helped us to visit the Prisoner's museum after our adventure in the park.
The old prison contained a central rotunda, with five cell blocks jutting off of it. Now-in-days, each cell block contains different exhibits that comprise five separate museums: the Prison Museum, the Maritime Museum, the Antarctica Museum, the Naval History Museum, and an art gallery. Essentially, each of the cells house mini exhibits on everything to do with the region from the native peoples that once lived here to the different boats that shipwrecked on the different shores to the most notorious criminals that used to be housed here. The highlight for Em and I was the entire wing that was left in the state it was found when they converted the place to a museum. Since is was dark, eerie, and most likely haunted, we mostly had the wing to ourselves to take awesome photographs.
We finished the day off with Centallo, King Crab; a specialty of the area. The crab is caught daily and cooked fresh. If you want, you can actually pick which one you want to eat from the tanks in each restaurant. The crabs are huge and delicious, but no one warned us that that had super sharp, spiky legs and that you end up with multiple small puncture wounds in the process of trying to get at the meat.
Our second day wasn't as jam-packed as the first; a morning the wander the town (which apparently is not open on Sundays) and a tour to see Harberton Ranch and Penguinos in the afternoon. The time to visit the waddlers has finally arrived. We meet in the center of town and were driven via mini bus to the Harberton Ranch, where we eventually took a speed boat across a small section of the Beagle Channel to Martillo Island to see the Magellanic rookeries and some King Penguins.
Harberton Ranch was established in 1886 by pioneer missionary Thomas Bridges and named after his wife's home back in England.
Because our group was so big, they had to take us to the island in two shifts, meaning we had time to visit the museum of natural history for the region's birds and mammals. For me this was great since it was an entire building dedicated to the study of the area's animals and contained the skeletons of all the marine birds and mammals they'd recovered in the area. Got to love dead things.
Eventually we made it to Martillo Island and were allowed an hour to quietly walk around and get up close and personal with the Island's black and white inhabitants. Our guide was telling us about how the Penguins are primarily monogamous and each year the males arrive first, prepare their burrows (kick out interlopers) and then wait for their females to come to the island (they usually arrive 2 weeks after the males). The males make a crying/donkey sound that is unique to each mated pair and that's how they find each other each year. The catch though, is that if the male cannot refind their burrow or is kicked out by another, their mate may reject them upon arriving on the island.
We got to see the king penguins of the two species on the island, as well as a few baby penguins (they're brown and furry and apparently not waterproof yet (they really didn't like the rain that accompanied our arrival)), as well as some bird species with their young (one of these birds is the natural predator of the penguins and eat their babies).
We closed out our time in Ushuaia with a Beagle Channel Cruise on our last morning in the city. Our four hour boat trip took us out away from land to visit some of the islands inhabited by cormorants, sea lions, and various other sea birds. The boat drives out as far as the Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse, the Lighthouse at the End of the World (as named by the locals, but not the same as the as the End of the World Lighthouse in Jules Verne's book) and then returns.
Upon arriving at the airport, Em and I found out we were to be stranded at the Ushuaia airport because the airlines decided to strike the other day. Apparently, our tour company was aware of the strike and informed our hotel in the next city and the glacier tour company of this (since we won't be getting out today or maybe even tomorrow), but they forgot to tell us. We arrived at the airport to huge lines and screens containing redlined flights. We were told that we just needed to wait in line to get booked on a new flight, but the line doesn't move and no one knows when the strike will end. On a more entertaining note, it seems that whenever someone does make it to the counter and either gets on a flight or talks to someone, the other stranded passengers start banging things, chanting and cheering; it's like the aftermath of a soccer goal, without the preceding action (someone later informed us that that was just the stranded rugby team). Hopefully, the next entry will be about El Calafate and not how we lived in the airport for a week.
posted by Robby @ 12:51 PM
0 comments
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home