Day: 11-14
Trajectory: In and around Ushuaia

Distance covered:   unknown but unimportant

Our journey south is pretty much finished now bar the last hop of the RN40 from Rio Gallegos to Cabo Virgenes, which Martín will do alone. This blog post will describe some of the things we did in Ushuaia before Tiso took the plane back home to San Martín.

Hostería – comfy but not much character

Tiso and I stayed for four nights in Ushuaia and I stayed alone for one more. It is not on the RN40, but it was as far as Tiso was going and a great place to visit, with  a lot for the tourists of all ages to see and do.

Hostel (lit) – full of backpackers, very friendly.

Because of previous bookings we alternated between a hostel and a hosteria, practically next door to each other. Both comfortable, and the hostel (as one would probably expect) remarkably friendly.

Martin in total photographic bliss on an excursion to Isla Martillo

On our first day we went on a sea trip and saw lots of wild life: here are a few examples:

Magellanic penguins

One King penguin in the company of several Gentoo penguins

Fur seals

Sleeping sea lion

Imperial shags – note the piercing blue eyes

Our first priority was to get the the spare wheel fixed – here’s a reminder of what it looked like after the volcanic rock had attacked it:

The remains of a tyre that we had to replace.

That done, we continued with our tourism in Ushuaia. On our second day we visited the Tierra del Fuego National Park, where we had our obligatory photograph taken at the end of terrestial Argentina.

Obligatory photo for tourists who reach the end of the world

The national park is spectacular and the weather surprisingly mild – with quite a few people camping there.

National Park of Tierra del Fuego – View 1

National Park of Tierra del Fuego – View 2

We also visited a fascinating museum in the old Prison, very well worth a visit.

Prison museum – one of the main corridors

The museum told a lot of the history of Ushuaia itself, as well as the lives of the prisoners and their guards who had lived there.

Many of the cells had been used as exhibits of different kinds: this one to show how a typical prisoner lived

Tiso left by plane and I went back to the National Park to do some birding. There was evidence of beavers and the damage they have caused since their introduction almost everywhere.

Evidence of beaver damage was everywhere in Tierra del Fuego

Beavers would make good pencil sharpeners

And here is one of the culprits:

The culprit, swimming innocently in a channel

And I was left alone in Ushuaia, with the long journey up the Atlantic coast of Patagonia ahead of me. But that belongs to another blog.