Ushuaia, 24th-31st August

Hello from ´el fin del mundo´, well Ushuaia to me more precise, the worlds most southerly city. In fact that seems to be the general theme here, you can drive the worlds most southerly highway, take the worlds most southerly train, etc etc. I´ve been here a week now, attending Spanish classes in the morning and doing a bit of exploring in the afternoon.

In the first couple of days i didn´t do much apart from visit the maritime/prison museum, which is actually inside the old prison (Ushuaia used to have a penal colony, the kind of place you would rather die then go to). Quite interesting for me as i like the old stories of adventure, back in the day before mobile phones and gps etc, they also had pieces on antarctic exploration, including our numerous ´glorius British failures´like Scott and Schacklton. On Wednesday, i headed out on the obligatory (and therefore expensive), boat tour out on the Beagle channel (on which Ushuaia lies). Darwin, passed through here on the way to the Gallapagos (actually on the second voyage of the Beagle), and kindly described the native Yamanas as ´primitive beings, closer to apes than to us´, not very nice of him really. The main feature of the trip was that it was really damn cold, but visited some nice places like the of course ´lighthouse at the end of the world´, islands with loads of sea lions and birds etc.

Looking back to Ushuaia



Bridges Islands (could be Scotland though......)

As I am the only person in my class at the school, i´ve also been helping with some of the English classes, although all they want to talk about is football really. In fact it was quite funny, cos i set them a writing task and pretty much all the guys wrote about football and all the guys wrote about cheating boyfriends!

Ushuaia....again

Yesterday, i went for a long walk in the parque national tierra del Fuego (about 7 hours in fact). I went all the way to the border with Chile, and even trespassed a little bit, well to be honest there was nothing there but a sign. The park is full of birds, and just before i left, i managed to spot 3 woodpeckers in the trees only a few yards from me, which was pretty special (although apparently they are quite common here).



Me playing the game of standing with
each foot in different countries

Woodpeckers

Today I walked up to the san Martial Glacier, although to be honest you couldn´t actually see it as its quite small and everything was covered in snow anyway. There is 1 chairlift up there so I think I may try and go up again and get a little bit of snowboarding done. well, yep that's about it really. hope to hear from you soon.O