Ushuaia – end of the world
Getting to Ushuaia, the world’s southernmost city, from El Calafate was interesting.
The only bus leaves at 3 am, and the journey lasts for twenty hours, as you need to cross Chilean border and stop 4 times to get in and out stamps. So we now have altogether 8 Argentinean and 6 Chilean stamps in our passports. It’s surprising they don’t have any agreement to make the journey simpler, but it seems that their relationship hasn’t been very good in the past. They almost got into a war in the seventies over a few tiny islands in the south.
Finding an accommodation took a while as we hadn’t booked one and the city was pretty full, it’s high season there. Finally found a nice, affordable attic room.
We took a boat to see the famous light house “Les Eclaireurs”, birds, sea lions and most importantly penguins. The boat got really close, just in front of those cute little things, and we didn’t regret not taking a walking tour to their island. Didn’t want to get any closer anyway to disturb them too much. It was real fun watching them wandering around, “kissing” and diving.
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We wanted to also reach Cape Horn, but had to skip it as it would have taken 5 days and costed over 500 euros each.
The city itself was bigger than we expected, but the main streets got quickly familiar to us. Especially because getting out of the end of the world is not that easy in a peak season, and we spent most of Valentine’s day walking around bus companies and travel agencies finding a way to reach our next flight on time. The flight was on Tuesday from Punta Arenas, on the Chilean side. All the companies said that the earliest bus tickets available were on Wednesday. A flight was available but would have costed few hundred euros each. Finally we got a bus ticket via Rio Gallegos (Argentina), on the East coast. It involves extra kilometers and unnecessary border crossing, but got to Punta Arenas on time.
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