Patagonia - Part II

Continuing where I last left off, I was in Chile and took a 3 hour bus ride from Puerto Natales down south to Punta Arenas... it was a nice uneventful ride with lots of wildlife to look at along the way, like ñandús, guanacos, maras, and patagonian geese.


Since they don't exist in North America and I am too lazy to find pictures of them, you'll have to do a search for them if you want to see them. Although I will say that Punta Arenas, for being the biggest city in Patagonia (about 120,000 people), didn't have a lot going on.

But they DID have some "quaint" little phone booths and a really weird cemetary... and you know your town doesn't have a lot going on when the cemetary is a big tourist attraction.

Later I stumbled upon a funeral procession whilst there among the tombs and the odd trees lining the walkways (I have no idea what they're called but they looked like giant, green, McDonalds' Grimaces). Naturally I had to take some photos much to the annoyance of the funeral attendees but the person in the casket is (presumably) already dead, so what did it matter?

After the visit to Punta Arenas it was time to venture across the Magellan Straights and Tierra del Fuego to return to Argentina and "the end of the world", Ushuaia. Last stop on the way to Antarctica -- about 620 miles further south across some really rough ocean, where the Atlantic and Pacific clash together. Or so I've been told.

The downside was that it was a 12 hour bus ride, of which 2/3 of it was over a bumpy, unpaved dirt road. But it was a good way to see most of Tierra del Fuego, when the windows weren't coated with mud and dirt. The final hour or so of the drive was pretty spectacular, morphing from desert into snow-covered mountains that dribbled down into the sea.

Ushuaia is a really nice place, very touristy though (I used to think it would be "exotic", "far-flung", etc) and it's really getting built up compared to the last time I was there 3 years ago. It's right on the Beagle Channel where Darwin & Co sailed through on the way to Galapagos Islands, etc, over a century ago .

It was here that I too navigated the Channel, as you can plainly see from my captains hat. There's quite a bit of wildlife to see, including sea lions, cormorants, whales (not in season), and penguins... also not in season. Although we saw two of them swimming around, so maybe they were lost or something. At least they were smart enough to stay out of my way.

So after all that, vacation time was over and it was time to head home to Buenos Aires. Also, it was then that I had yet to experience that delightful three and a half hour flight back, with all the screaming toddlers, absentee parenting, and surly Aerolineas Argentinas employee service. But at least they weren't on strike, which is somewhat rare in this country.