[007] Ushuaia
I'm travelling in South America. Here's what I'm up to, some photos and other bits
Ushuaia bummed me out at first. It's a funny town with steep streets leading the mountains to the water. Sleek cruise ships drift in and out of the dock headed for Antarctica. Wealthy 70-something Americans promenade the main drag which is ugly ski-town buildings and outdoorsy shops. The Peugeot 206 is car of choice for the local rude boys and they cruise the drag with modified exhausts. My dorm buddy was a slacker student from Aachen who slept in the afternoon and ran trails in the evenings, and Oo-swai-ah felt far away from the vibrancy of Buenos Aires.
But I was here for the sea and the mountains which clung on to pockets of snow at the very top. And for this, Ushuaia was amazing.
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I took a boat trip down Beagle Channel, named after the voyage of HMS Beagle which gave Charles Darwin his first opportunity as a naturalist.
Now I'm not comparing myself to Darwin, but I had a lot of fun riding the bow of the catamaran and sighting wildlife through my binoculars. I spotted penguins, cormorants, sea lions and petrels. The wind was cold, we took a tea break inside and I bought a kinder huevo. My toy was a green dinosaur which sat on my little finger and we called him Roger.
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I only know the birds were petrels (not albatrosses) because a girl on my bus to Chile purchased a 'Birds of Chile' almanac from a local store. Biiig power move buying a 1kg+ book when you're meant to be travelling light, and I rate it.
Speaking of weight, my binoculars are probably my item with highest weight to usage frequency ratio, but they were worth their weight in gold on the boat, simply for the pleasure of studying the face of a baby penguin as he cotched on the beach.
As I reminded my hands to go for my binoculars instead of my camera I thought about the experiencing self vs. the remembering self (à la Kahneman). And I noticed that I was 1 of 100 people on the boat with binoculars (and therefore the coolest), but 100 of 100 had cameras. Why do we all have a hard time prioritising the experiencing self, and are we often getting it wrong?
Another beautiful bird I saw was on the Cerro Guanaco trail - a local speciality, the Magellanic Woodpecker (black with red head).
The walk was challenging but rewarding. First it skirted along calm rocky coves. The air was cool and pleasant on the skin. At 8km the steep climbing began. We rose above the tree line, navigated a bog, then started the steep dusty ascent to 1,000m which we shared with a roaming Guanaco (cool little llama dude).
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By the end I was a Ushuaia convert, helped by the mountains and a few cute interactions with locals.
I get tempted to cram days full with activities, but I am trying to carve out days where I relax, read, study Spanish and tackle travel admin. On one of these days me and my friend worked in a local cafe run by a husband and wife. Around 3pm their four year old came back from school. He put on his apron and started working the cafe like a maître d'. He instructed us to replace our backgammon stones with candy, and only when we took them off the board could we eat them. Once we finished he came to our table and asked: "¿Quieres una cerveza para bajar los caramelos?" - do you want a beer to wash down your candy? Unbelievably cute!
Another afternoon I was writing my journal on a bench by the waterfront. A white-haired guy stopped and asked to sit down. His name was Fernando, and we proceeded to have what you could loosely call a conversation which warmed my heart. It went something like:
Soy de Londres. Ah, you've lived in Ushuaia five years...? but you're from Buenos Aires. OK, but you go back in Febrero? Yes, muy frio. Yes, like London. Your writing is pequeño... yes.
~sit in silence and enjoy the stillness of the water~
Reina... que es Reina? Ah yes, Elizabeth. Yes dead now. And now... Rey... Charles. Carlos, si. Hija - Diana. And Hijo - William y Harry. Esposa - Meghan Markle de California, si. Esposa - Kate. Si, mal. Pero creo que ella esta bien...
And that was that, I asked for a selfie and we hugged it out.
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I walked past the memorial to Las Malvinas and thought about Argentina's young men and Britain's young men. About politics and victims of war. And also about love and kindness which transcends language, age and concepts of nationality.
Tomorrow I go off grid for seven days. I'm walking the O Trek in Torres del Paine carrying my tent and a shit load of trail mix.
Bisous,
George