Day 12 - Fox on the run

Ushuaia

Desperate to enjoy the great weather we headed off to the Tierra del Fuego National Park. We dropped by the El FIn Del Mundo steam train and watched other tourists board the train, we had heard though that it wasn't worth the asking price of over US$50 for the trip, so didn't join them. We had our hire car anyway, which was costing us around $110 per day for a beaten up small car, it's a captive market down here

Not far into the park we picked up a female hitchhiker, its amazing how generous you feel when you are on holidays in a strange country. Our first stop was Ensenada Bay where we had our passports stamped with the End of the World/Ushuaia stamp, before picking up our hitchhiker again and driving to Puerto Arias. Here we took two beautiful walks and then drove on to  the Alakush cafe, where we checked out the interesting  exhibition regarding the indigenous people of the area. It is a very sad history and probably expressed quite well in the wording in one of the displays where the translation of the Spanish word to upset/annoy was that the natives were "pissed off"!

Get your passport stamps here

On the way out we saw a "rare"  Patagonian Culpeo Fox, that's what they say but it was waltzing around the middle of the road very tamely so not so sure about the rare bit.

Just another beautiful view

We headed back to town and checked in with the tour agency to see if our payment had made it through, the good news was that we had been upgraded on our cruise from a twin bed porthole to a twin bed window - not bad for a last minute booking!

As the weather for the past two days had been so incredible, with sun and beautiful blue skies, and the forecast for the next few days was cold and showery, we decided to push on and visit the Glacier Martial, it was about 5pm, but still a few hours of daylight left. Even though we have more days here in Ushuaia, we are cramming the park visits into two days because we are worried about the weather changing.

Nothing here is well signposted so we parked the car and set off up the steep hill, not knowing how far we had to go. After over an hour of steep uphill climbing we reached the "glacier" - really just a large patch of ice, Any secret ambitions that K has (had) to hike to Everest base camp have now been quashed!

Driving around Ushuaia is not too hard apart from the lack of signs indicating that you have turned into a one way street, on a few occasions we saw the oncoming traffic heading our way so we to frantically do a u-turn to avoid a head on.