Ushuaia, Argentina

What a beautiful spot for a city - well, in one way.  The beauty is the natural area - a backdrop of the Andes Mountains on one side and the Beagle Channel on the other.  On the other hand, I wouldn't want to be here in the winter.



We docked this morning along with 4 other cruise ships that were already here.  But those 4 were much smaller than us and at least one of them does Antarctica expeditions.  I wouldn't be surprised if a couple more of them did too.



We made our way to the tourist office mainly to check out when the city bus tour leaves.  We were just in time as one arrived shortly after we got there.  So off we went.



Ushuaia was established here as a prison town (and they exploit that for tourists), but it did not have that many residents until the 1970s.  Argentina decided to provide grants to industry to open up here.  Then the city boomed and is currently around 80,000 people.  We were surprised at the size of it.  There is a naval base here too.

As I said, it's on the Beagle Channel, so named from Darwin's ship on his way to the Galapagos Islands.

These are some of the surroundings.  Too bad it was as cloudy as it was.  But it could have been worse.

How about this small plane about to land - over our ship yet.

We were on a double-decker bus and sat up top.  It was probably imported from Britain - very telling as the driver sat on the right side.  We couldn't help but notice the "no smoking" signs. I enlarged the photo so you could read them.  I think it's cheaper to smoke on the right.  And in case you didn't get the idea in English, there's a Spanish sign too, which does look very similar.

When we were finished our tour, we had to go to the "oldest pub in town", of course.  This is it.

It was pretty cool inside.  One of the things I sometimes look for is how people translate another language into English.  It makes for some humorous reading at times.  Like this menu.  We had the Cond-Cuts and the boston-butt.

This is "Beyond Everything", er, I mean "Beyond Everithing".  It's our silly language.

But we should not raise these issues with the Spanish-speaking people and just let sleeping dogs lie.

After our stop, Gerard and I went on a bit of a trek through the city, while Dan & Joanne headed off to the museum.

Understand that the city is built on the side of a mountain, so it goes uphill as you go further from shore.  One living here must deal with the slope.  We saw this car park along the way (I had to take the photo through the gate boards.)

Here we are back at the port.  It wasn't quite this far via ship from Buenos Aires.

When we left Ushuaia, we went through the Beagle Channel.  On the way, on our side of the boat (Starboard), we went by 5 different glaciers that were visible.  Only one still touches the ocean - this one, called Italia (Italy).  You can see the bits of ice floating in the water after breaking off.

 

The glaciers were named for the countries from where the workers came from on the ship that named them.  This is the Alemania (Germany) Glacier.

Seeing these glaciers was a bit of a bonus today.  We didn't expect them.  And we are now in the country of Chile and will be for the rest of our journey.  "Don't cry for me, Argentina."