Ushuaia

Today we got up and got ready for our Beagle Channel cruise. It was a half day boat tour of the Argentinian side of the Beagle Channel (where Charles Darwin passed through with his ship the Beagle), 17km west to Ushuaia’s lighthouse and back. We were on a small boat that seated 28 (with us being 14 of those seats). We pulled away from the Ushuaia tourist port and out into the bay. It was clear, calm, and sunny. The tour’s guide told us Ushuaia gets a day per month with weather like this. We are all starting to wonder if our weather luck is really this good or if they are all telling us things to make us feel better. Just after we had left port, the first bird we saw was an albatross, which is a good luck sign for mariners (unless the albatross is shot with a crossbow).

We worked our way down the channel islands where we saw sea lions, fur seals, and cormorants. The smell around the island is atrocious as the cormorants make their nests with their own guano.

There was a male sea lion that had a good itch he was scratching.

And there was a little fur seal pup that was only 10 days old.

It seems like a pretty good life… lounging on rocks, eating, breeding, and yawning.

We went past the lighthouse, with the island covered with cormorants, and learned about the colouring and what it means (red, white, and red means danger to the west).

Cormorants are quite entertaining to watch as they run on the water to gain enough speed to fully fly.

We spooked a group of albatrosses then saw some Magellenic penguins in the water so turned the boat to them and had a quick look before they dove.

We came across another flock of albatross and spooked them into flying away. They are such giant birds with wingspans up to 3m across.

We stopped on an island and learned a little about the Yaghan people that lived in the area prior to the European settlements. Wherever their huts were had rings of refuse around them denoting where they were. The refuse was mussel shells and bones of seals, sea lions, and penguins. There was a ton of wind making it hard to face into the breeze. This allowed lots of birds to sail on by very quickly, making for a fun time trying to track them with a camera.

Here we are only 1,000 km from Antarctica, and over 2,000km from Buenos Aires.

We got back from our cruise and stopped for some great milanesa sandwiches. They are a breaded beef cutlet with vegetables, mayo and ketchup.

During the afternoon I went on a hike to the Martial Glacier while Mike wandered around the main streets and people watched. The Martial Glacier has a chair lift and a single ski run in the winter. They use the chair in the summer for hikers to bypass the steepest part of the hike. The chair lift takes you from about 420m to 550m elevation then the hike is 1.5km each way to get to 825m at the top. The view looking down on Ushuaia and the Beagle Channel is quite nice from up there.

 

Mike came across a couple streets not to take after dark, then settled down in a bar to sample the local Beagle microbrew while watching the many Antarctic bound tourists passing along. We had a bit of down time before dinner where it was  back to the steak and Malbec. Tomorrow we are further south down the coast to the Tierra del Fuego National Park for a shoreline hike.