Ushuaia

We spent Saturday, February 21 in Ushuaia, on the southern coast of Tierra del Fuego. After disembarking we walked to Plaza Civica:

At the Monumento Antiguos Pobladores, the monument to the ancient settlers:

Sign on the side of a building, seen as we were walking along the waterfront:

Monument to the Peróns:

A Mondrian building against the mountains:

A glacier that you can see everywhere in town:

Flags of the Tierra del Fuego province, Argentina, and Peru in the Plaza República del Perú:

The Ushuaia city sign with the rare sight of no one standing next to it:

…and then we showed up:

The public library was closed on Saturdays:

We were looking for a grocery store and found La Anónima just a short walk from the library. I had seen the sign of the store earlier and thought it looked as though it could be a grocery store. I’d be interested in the psychology behind my way of associating the logo, below, with groceries. When we approached the store from the library we saw people walking out of there with bags, as well as the can’t-miss stylized shopping carts on the side of the building.

Mark bought a few fruits and when we left the store it had started to rain. I came prepared this time, as I had packed my raincoat and pants in my backpack. Instead of undertaking the awkward task of putting on rain pants outdoors–in the rain–we quickly returned to the store and got into our rain gear there. Rain was not going to dissuade us from walking around the city, especially since we had the proper clothes for it.

Since we had no Internet on the cruise for the past week Mark wanted to find a hotspot, as he was unable to turn on his Jetpac. He was able to use Jetpac in Argentina and Uruguay, but couldn’t get it to work at such a southerly latitude as the Falklands or even here. I suggested we stop into a hotel, as hotels always have free wifi for their guests. We walked into the Hotel los Naranjos where we could also use the washroom. I moseyed up to the check-in desk and saw a sign on the wall informing guests of the hotel password and Mark got connected. I hadn’t been on-line all last week either, so I used Mark’s phone just to check my E-mail to see if my neighbour, who was checking my snail mail, hadn’t been trying to notify me that my house had burned down or something. Fortunately no panicky E-mails like that awaited me at the southern end of the world.

After the hotel we climbed a lengthy staircase to the street named Gdor. Deloqui. We overlooked the waterfront from this elevated spot and ate our lunch:

Looking east along Gdor. Campos from Sarmiento:

Throughout Patagonia we saw recycling receptacles like the one on the left of the photo below:

They didn’t look appealing–not that enormous blue bins are attractive either–but at least with the latter one can’t see anything in them. The raised metal baskets we saw in Ushuaia had wide gaps between the bars so trash could easily slip out. How easy is it for collectors to empty these receptacles?

Walking south on Sarmiento behind the Mondrian building:

The rain by now had stopped and the sun was out. We were getting hot in our rain clothes so wanted to take them off. I spotted a bus shelter (below) with a bench inside which made it a lot easier to sit down and remove my rain pants. As we disrobed I told Mark that if anyone saw us, two men inside a bus shelter taking their pants off, we could get into a lot of trouble:

Photobombed by a horse:

The main post office in town. The mural depicts prisoners, since Ushuaia was used as a penal colony in the late 1800’s:

Av. San Martin:

Mark ahead walking back to the ship:

Peaky mountain as seen from our cabin balcony, before we departed:

Glacier in the mountains:

Departing Ushuaia:

Our next port of call was Punta Arenas, Chile, two days later. We would travel through the Strait of Magellan to get there. But we wondered how we would be making the trip because the ship was moving east through the Beagle Channel. We were watching the progression of our route via the ship’s navigation channel and it didn’t seem as if we were turning around. Surely we weren’t going back out to the Atlantic Ocean to approach Punta Arenas from the north of Tierra del Fuego?

We did in fact turn around to head west through the Beagle Channel, but it was a long while before we could detect that we were changing direction. I wish I knew how far we travelled east, but a rough estimate from the scale used on the navigation channel made it out to be 20 km. We then weaved our way north of Isla Gordon and around the western rump of Tierra del Fuego and headed to Punta Arenas via the southern Strait of Magellan.