Back from the End of the World

On Thursday afternoon, after my class at UCA, my friends and I headed out to the Airport so that we could take a flight to Ushuaia which is the capital of Tierra del Fuego. During the flight, we stopped once to drop some of the passengers off, but we were in the middle of nowhere. On the last half of the flight, there was an amazing sunset. It must have lasted for two hours in total. 

Once we got off the plane, the first very clear difference was the drop in temperature. In Buenos Aires, it's usually in the 80s with humidity. In Tierra del Fuego, the temperatures were in the forties to low fifties with tons of wind. We took a quick cab to the hostel, which was incredibly clean. The next morning, we headed up to the National Park. Normal entry fee is 50 pesos, but with a student id, it was only four pesos. There were four possible trails that we could hike, and we choose the one that was by the Beagle Channel. The views were amazing. Along the way, we passed by horses and rabbits. The trail was supposed to take about 3 hours, but because we took tons of pictures and stopped to eat lunch, it took us about five hours. When we had reached the end of the trail, we saw two rainbows. The weather at Tierra del Fuego was a bit strange. It was always sunny, event though it was a bit cold until late afternoon, when clouds would roll in and it would rain for a few hours. 

That night, we headed to bed pretty early because the next day we planned to take a boat out to an island of penguins. We had not realized, however, that first there would be an hour and a half bus ride to the boat. It was well worth it though. When we finally arrived to the island, we saw hundreds of penguins in their natural habitat. Our tour guide, Anna, told us about the migration path of the penguins. Apparently, we had arrived just in time to see them because in a few weeks they will be returning to the South pole for the winter. I took lots of pictures of the penguins and had a great experience there. 

The next day, we headed out on a 10am boat across the Channel. First, we visited islands with seals. Then we passed the lighthouse. We visited a few other islands, but we finally disembarked on one of them and climbed up a hill. From the summit, we had a great view of the city of Ushuaia and the other islands. It was an incredible sight. 

Finally, that night we headed back to Buenos Aires. It had been an incredible experience. I had never seen such fantastic landscapes and been so close to so much wildlife. I'm glad that I had this chance to get to travel to the End of the World.

Today, Tuesday, is actually a holiday in Buenos Aires. It is called el Dia Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y Justicia. So, I don't have classes, but I'll probably head down to Plaza de Mayo to see how the citizens commemorate this day. 

Finally, although I've been posting some pictures here, this is a link to my picasa site. Just copy the line below this paragraph into the address bar of your web browser and you'll be able to see my pictures! Because it's so hard to post a lot of pictures to the blog, I've been uploading pictures to this site. I only have about fifty up from the End of the World Trip so far because it takes a lot of time to load, but I should be posting more soon.

http://picasaweb.google.com/ej.jones06/