Hi guys... We left Puerto Madryn last Saturday (6 January) and got the bus overnight to Río Gallegos, where there's not a right lot to do, and where we spent most of the time on the internet, at the supermarket and then watching telly and eating what we'd bought! The town is probably best known for having been a lauching site for vessels during the Falklands War over the islands known here only as 'Las Malvinas' and still very much considered to be Argentinian, so not something you're advised to engage in conversation about while down at this end of Patagonia...

From Río Gallegos we had a 12 hour bus journey on Tuesday (9 January) - this time during the day - to here, Ushuaia. The journey was long as we had to travel through two border crossings - one from Argentina into Chile and then later from Chile back into Argentina (small wonder that the two countries frequently fall out over border disputes...) - as well as make a short ferry crossing over the Magellan Straight (accompanied by Commerson's dolphins!) between mainland Argentina and Tierra del Fuego ('Land of Fire'), the big island at the bottom of the continent...

Ushuaia prides itself as being 'El Fin del Mundo' - the most southerly town in the world (despite the fact that there's a Chilean town, Puerto Williams, just south of here on the other side of the Beagle Channel, which got overlooked somewhat in Ushuaia's push for the title!) - and there are a lot of tourists here (including us!) to say that they've been here!

The landscape has been flat, yellow and green grassland pretty much since we left Buenos Aires and continued even as we started our journey over Tierra del Fuego, but as we got further south and nearer to Ushuaia, it became hilly and the town itself is surrounded by snow covered peaks, even now in summer. It lies on the Beagle Channel and further south are just more and more smaller and smaller islands, the final one being 'Horn', with its famous cape... and only 600 miles south of here is Antarctica. We'd love to go to both, but it's expensive, not for us backpackers and therefore something we'll just have to save for next time (when we're millionaires and can charter our own yacht!) I think that it really must be the trip of a lifetime...

The summer is sunny... and rainy... and we're walking around back in fleeces and boots, the shorts and flip flops packed away again for a while. The sun is well up by 5am and not down again until about 11pm. When the clouds come in, there's a chill and the dark hills and channel look quite bleak. There's a definite sense of being somewhere near the end of the world! We love it...

We'd booked a boat trip around the islands just off Ushuaia this afternoon, but the port was closed today - something I suspect happens fairly frequently. The wind (as we lay in our little tent!) last night was certainly ferocious! So we'll try and do that tomorrow, and then on Saturday we're booked to cross the Beagle Channel into Chile and to Puerto Williams on Isla Navarino. From there we'll do the five day 'Dientes de Navarino' - the most southerly trek in the world! - and then catch a two day ferry up northwestwards on the Beagle Channel and further into Chile to Punta Arenas, beginning to make out way north again and up to the Andes and Torres del Paine...

Lorna's all set up with her webcam now and so we've been enjoying seeing each other 'live'(!) over Skype! It's great. I've put a couple of photos up of Simon and his mum chatting and one of Lorna's map of South America that she's been diligently sticking red dots on since the day we left! It's quite satisfying to see how many of them there are!

Okay, we'll check in again once we've ventured intrepidly even further south! Lots of love... us x