The End of the World

We've been almost criminally negligent of the blog lately. We're really sorry, we can change! We can be good bloggers! For real this time!

Since the last time we posted, we left Buenos Aires (reluctantly, it is an awesome city) and took a 20 hour bus ride to Bariloche. It's kind of the Banff of Argentina. Mountains, lakes, great views, tons of tourists, and (for some reason) like eighty chocolate shops. There were some great hiking trails around town, and we spent one day hiking up an insanely gruelling trail to get a view of the surrounding lakes and hills.


On our way down, we realized we had missed the actual, perfectly reasonable trail, and just scrambled up a cliff instead. Oops.

While in Bariloche, we met up with Alexis and Garett, who we'd met in Buenos Aires a few days earlier. They both had vague travel plans, so we were able, through the use of cunning, sophisticated arguments, to convince them to come to Puerto Madryn with us to see a million penguins. Our argument was something along the lines of "One million penguins!!!". Here are Alexis and Garett on the bus to Puerto Madryn, eating salami and cheese sandwiches.



Salami and cheese sandwiches have made up a worryingly large percentage of our diet lately. Most of the sandwich meat here in Argentina is that hyper-processed ham loaf stuff that comes in a big shrink-wrapped cube, but the salami is pretty tasty, and bread is really cheap. That, combined with the fact that we've spent like 80 hours in various buses over the last week, and the fact that sandwiches are very portable, has resulted in our all salami-cheese-bread diet. It's been working out well so far, except for yesterday when our salami got confiscated at the Chilean border.

We got to Puerto Madryn, rented a car, and drove to Punto Tombo, the biggest penguin colony in the world (outside of Antarctica). It was awesome. Penguins are hilarious animals. The waddle, the black and white colour scheme, the flippers, it all adds up to comedy gold. We walked around the colony for like 2 hours. You'd think penguins would get kind of old after that long, but I'll tell you when penguins get boring: never. They are always awesome. Evidence:



After Puerto Madryn, we parted ways with Garett and Alexis and headed south to El Calafate, which was like a smaller, even touristier version of Bariloche, which meant restaurants were kind of expensive (by Argentine standards), but also that most of the buildings were really cool log-cabin-style places. There was also some inexplicable graffiti.


El Calafate exists mostly because of the Perito Moreno Glacier, a huge, blue hunk of ice an hour away that is one of the last advancing glaciers in the world. We only had one day in El Calafate, so we made a beeline for the glacier, and it did not disappoint. It's a 60 metre tall jagged, savage wall of ice that juts into a lake and fractures explosively when the sun hits it in the afternoon. While we were watching it, we saw at least a dozen huge chunks of ice break off and crash into the water. It was by far the most impressive natural phenomenon we've seen on the trip.



Our next destination was Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world. To get there, however, we had to take a bus into Chile (losing our salami in the process), across the Straits of Magellan, and then back into Argentina. It was supposed to take 12 hours, but we wound up being delayed by an additional 10 hours when the ferry across the straits had to shut down due to insane wind. I don't know exactly how hard it was blowing, but we had to lean into it not to fall down, our bus was rocking back and forth, and I think I saw a couple of cows go sailing by in the fields. Here is Mal braving the gales for a picture.


We did finally get to Ushuaia, and it has been pretty great so far. It's surrounded by mountains, faces the Beagle Channel, and really does feel like the end of the world.


The only downside is dealing with the constant jealousy of meeting people who are headed off for Antarctic cruises. We really, really wanted to include one in our trip, but we couldn't justify the $8000-or-so price tag. It turns out you can get great last minute deals here for as little as $4000 for a ten day trip. I keep trying to convince Mal that we wouldn't be spending $4000, we'd be saving $4000, but I think we're going to have to leave Antarctica for next time. On the other hand, there is a casino right down the street...

In the meantime while we wait to stumble upon $8000 in the street, we've been keeping ourselves entertained by trying to do as many southernmost things in the world as we can. One we were looking forward to was Beagle Beer, the world's southernmost microbrew. Unfortunately, once we got here, we found several other Ushuaia microbrews claiming to be the beer from the end of the world too. We tried them all, you know, just to be sure. Here we are with a pint of Beagle Dark, the last on our list (which is somewhat apparent from the picture).


We're off now to go book a plane ticket to Puerto Williams, a small village on the south shore of the Beagle Channel. There's not much there other than some nice scenery, but seeing as how we are competitive people and also trivia nerds, we couldn't leave the area without making it to the village that challenges Ushuaia's claim to be the southernmost city in the world (whether or not it's legitimate depends on who you're talking to). Pictures to follow later this week!