Our Last Day in Ushuaia

Our last day in Ushuaia was a long one. We had to check out at 10am, but our flight wasn't until 9:45pm. So basically we had to entertain ourselves for almost 12 hours.

The first part of the day was easy enough to fill, and memorable to boot! We went on a boat tour of the Beagle Canal, where Darwin was when he wrote about HIS adventures in Ushuaia! We had a great tour guide lady who used the time between stops and islands to give the group little “classes” (for lack of a better word) about local information.

We saw sea lions! And then we saw cormorants nesting! And then we saw a huge cormorant colony! It was nice to see the cousins of the tropical cormorants that we have where I live in Brazil.

Kristin's not trying to push me... we're just trying not to fall over on the very rocky boat!

Imperial Cormorants! I was so happy to see them up close

Imperial cormorant colony.... it was cold

The lighthouse at the end of the world! There's only one that's more southernly than this one.

our first steps onto the little island

views from the island trail

hey-aaaay!

Goodbye, cold island

After our cold but beautiful tour, we went back to the mainland. When we got there, the city was smack in the middle of its “Birthday Parade”. Just a bunch of kids in Karate school uniforms, and police officers on horses. Typical small town parade. Cute!

Unfortunately, it was hard to find a restaurant open for lunch when the whole city was down at the pier watching the parade. But we eventually did. It was nothing memorable. Ushuaia is fantastic, but you certainly shouldn't go to the Antarctic steppe for fine dining.

Then we gave ourselves a city tour. Basically we just walked up into the neighborhoods and took funny pictures and enjoyed the views of the Bay and got an idea of how the locals live (and finally saw a couple of meat and vegetable markets-- as it turns out, they don't all eat at restaurants for every meal :P ).

After our self-guided tour, we went to the local Indian tribe museum. It's small but interesting. Fun fact: The most populous tribe from the region didn't wear clothes! The idea of clothes (animal skin) was actually cumbersome while trying to hunt in the ocean, the snow, and the rain. So they used seal lion fat as like, a protective oil in the cold!

It was such a good museum (thought of you, Rachel) because it focused on the tribe in a humanistic, relationship way, as opposed to an abstract, anthropological way. Let me explain. I always get annoyed when museums describe indian tribes in anthropological terms, as if other cultures don't do exactly the same things. So instead of saying useless things like “This tribe built shelters for protection from the elements!” and “This tribe had initiation rites for boys to become men!”, the museum said things like “men and women were equal in the relationship and shared all responsibilities” and “whoever hunted that day shared their food with whoever was around”. Does that make sense? Like it actually gave you an idea of the tribe's morals and values and stuff.

After all that, we still had a couple of hours to kill. So we went to a happy hour at a bar for a drink, and then we just went to the airport early to read.

In a future entry, I'm going to write out everything we did in Ushuaia and our recommendations, so that you can have a great of a trip there as we did!

Read more about my Buenos Aires trip here.