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apologies for the recent lack of updates, have just got back from 5 days wandering round in torres del paine national park, not very many internet cafes there, so will try and back date this one and remember what happened in ushuaia. ushuaia is the most southern city in the world and is on the argeninian bit of tierra del fuego, which is the island off the south coast of argentina, but to get there you have to go through chilean territory which means an extremely tedious bus ride where they make you get off and go through customs as you leave argentina, enter chile, leave chile then enter argentina again, so have now got two passport pages full of identical stamps. yay. also theres a ferry crossing and sometimes they just stop for a bit when they feel like it, and only feed you with really thin cheese and ham sandwiches. all round farce basically.
luckily ushuaia was really good when we finally got there, its right on the beagle channel (named after darwins boat when he passed through there in 1832 - interesting fact of the day) and surrounded by mountains, pretty spectacular. it is fairly touristy and they take every opportunity to remind you that you´re at ´el fin del mundo,´ and everyone speaks english so got a bit lazy with the spanish for a while. also we discovered that its really hard to get away from due to lack of buses and peak season, so ended up stranded there for 5 nights, quite a bit longer than planned. on the plus side, this gave us lots of time to go to the pub, and we had met lots of dutch/american/english/israeli/other people on the way down so had loads of mates and had an awesome time. eventually ended up in some ridiculous techno rave at 7am one morning, which was perhaps slightly unnecessary seeing as i had claimed i wasnt drinking that night, so spent the last couple of days being slightly more productive - got a boat trip round the beagle channel, hiked around the tierra del fuego national park, and walked up the mountain near town to the glaciar where we had loads of fun sliding down the snow on our backsides. ideal hangover cures and all really beautiful, got some good photos. found a really good seafood restaurant as well (although obviously i had steak) where they bring you complimentary champagne after the meal, and discussed the feasibility of stealing the lifesize che guevara statue that was in the corner of the restaurant and carrying it round south america as our mascot. eventually decided it probably wasnt very practical. we changed hostels half way through for a change of scenery, both were really good, the first one was full of israelis who for some reason found it necessary to cook a massive banquet every day for about 20 people, which was good because they usually gave us some leftovers to complement our slightly less ambitious meals. the second hostel had eggs for breakfast and a massive dog that kept trying to knock over our game of jenga with his waggy tail, so was also good. since it is the closest town to antarctica, there are loads of ships leaving from ushuaia to go on tours of the antarctic peninsula, really tempting but decided 4000 US dollars wasnt really in the budget, so eventually got on another bus and headed for puerto natales in chile....
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