Ushuaia and a lot of French...

It´s already Monday afternoon and after 6 days in Ushuaia it´s nearly time to move on to Buenos Aires, the very last destination on our trip. We are flying tomorrow at 2.30 pm - a 3 hours´ flight vs. a 60 hours´ bus journey, the choice wasn´t hard to make. Especially since we´ve come all the way down from Santiago de Chile by road - once was enough!

Our time in Ushuaia has been nice and relaxed. It´s very cold down here and rather wet at the moment, but we managed to make the most of it. On Friday, we didn´t do much else than sit in a coffee shop and read; in the evening we took advantage of the fact that there was a special French film festival here in Ushuaia, organised by the Tierra del Fuego Alliance Française. So we went to the 7.30 pm showing and for 3 pesos (about 50 p) each, we saw... a really, really bad French film called `ça brûle´. It was an absolute pile of rubbish! But it was a different way to pass the time and by watching the film Gary had the chance to practice both his French (soundtrack) and his Spanish (subtitles).

Talking of which, for the past six months Gary has been moaning that people here only ever speak Spanish to him, because they can see straightaway that he is a gringo. Okay, it´s true, and sometimes it´s really very annoying (particularly when you´re speaking perfectly good Spanish to a guy and he replies in English every time, and his English is not even as good as your Spanish) but I´ve personnaly made my peace with it. Well, Gary hasn´t. So as he was complaining once again last Wednesday that people only ever speak to him in English, I turned around and told him `D´accord. Je ne vais te parler que français pendant une semaine, et tu ne vas me répondre qu´en français´. So we´ve been speaking only French to one another for 6 full days now (only one day to go, phew!). When we first got to our dormitory here in Ushuaia last Thursday, Gary asked the girl in the bed facing us where she was from (hoping it would be somewhere English speaking, so he could survive his week of French-infused hell by chatting to other people than myself) and she said she was French. And she didn´t speak any English, hee hee. So Gary has been hearing French, speaking French, seeing French films and going out for drinks with French people all week. That´ll teach him!

On Saturday, we took an afternoon boat trip through the Beagle Channel (named after the boat Charles Darwin was on when he sailed through this channel.) It was amazing to feel the difference in sea `choppiness´ when you go from the Bay of Ushuaia (nice and smooth) into the Beagle Channel (very choppy indeed). It gave us a more concrete idea of how hard it must have been for the first pioneers who came from Europe centuries ago and discovered the area. There have been hundreds of shipwrecks in the area in the past 500 years and given how the sea behaves it´s really no wonder.

The landscape was a mix between Ireland (sea, green vegetation and rocks) and Switzerland (huge snow covered mountains). Neither of us expected Ushuaia and the Tierra del Fuego in general to be quite so mountainous.

During the boat trip we also sailed past a couple of islands inhabited by different animals. 2009 has been `Sea Lions Year´ for us!

On Sunday we didn´t do very much, apart from visiting the Museo Marítimo, where we found out everything about how the Argentinian government sent prisonners out to the Tierra del Fuego over 100 years ago in order to start a colony (as the climate is really tough in this part of the world, it wasn´t exactly a natural choice of dwelling for most people.)

Yesterday we woke up bright and early and went to the Tierra del Fuego National Park, 12 kilometres out of Ushuaia, where we trekked all day. We were really lucky with the weather (it had been raining all week, but we harldy had any rain and the sun came out a little bit in the afternoon.) We trekked along the coast first and enjoyed pretty views.

Then we went up the Cerro Guanaco, or at least as much as we could as after a couple of hours the path was closed due to snow still being there. We walked on the snow a little bit but after falling flat on my face a few times I thought it might be best to turn around...

So after walking around for almost 7 hours, we stopped in a coffee shop in the park and enjoyed hot chocolate as well as alfajores, a delicious Argentinian cake/biscuit type thing filled with dulce de leche and covered in chocolate. So so so good!

(We´ll bring some back when we´re home in a couple of weeks, if you want to try them. Although I can´t promise they´ll last very long.)

C.