Puerto Natales to Punta Arenas, Chile, to Ushuaia, Argentina 23 - 26 Feb 2006

The Southernmost City in the World

We had been warned that it could be impossible to find accommodation in Ushuaia in the high season so had booked a b&b before leaving Geneva. As it turned out, more hotels must have been built since our friends visited and the Lonely Planet was published, and arriving a day earlier than planned proved to be no problem. The b&b was run by the friendly Familia Piatti, outside town in a quiet wooded neighbourhood. Transport into town was no problem. Either Javier Piatti drove us in or we called for a taxi.
Ushuaia may be the southernmost city in the world, but it has less of an ‘end of the world’ feeling than Puerto Natales. This is no doubt because of the need to cater for the ever increasing number of tourists who pass by there on their way to Antarctica. The Kaupé restaurant has the reputation of being Argentina’s best restaurant so we decided to celebrate our arrival in the country in style. And we weren’t disappointed. During our four days there, we tried out several other restaurants, such as Chez Manu, Tía Elvira and Tanta Nina and the quality of the food and wine (Argentinean of course!) was consistently good. Also, the devalued peso was good news for us.
By the next morning Angela’s knees had swollen up and the wound on her hand was getting infected (after the fall in Torres del Paine), so she spent a couple of hours waiting to see a doctor at the hospital outpatients. She was told to put her legs up and put ice packs on them. Luckily, there was a fridge with a freezing compartment just outside our room at the b&b and Señora Piatti kindly provided some ice packs. So we spent a quiet day for a change, just going out for meals and to fix up a boat trip for the next day.
We had good weather for the 5-hour boat trip on the Beagle channel and it was much warmer than it had been on the boat trip from Puerto Natales, due probably to the surprisingly light winds. We saw sea lions, cormorants and pretty rainbows, as well as our first penguins since the tiny ones we’d seen in the Galapagos: a colony of the burrowing Magellanic penguins with just one Gentoo (with orange beak and feet) in their midst.
Angela’s legs slowly improved, but she was in no shape for any major trekking. On our last day there, we went on a short walk up through the woods from the b&b for a view of Ushuaia. We also visited the memorial in Ushuaia for the Argentinean soldiers killed in action in the 1982 Islas Malvinas/Falkland Islands War. We felt sorry for those young men who were sent off there with hardly any training and not much motivation. They didn’t stand much of a chance.