Laguna Esmeralda

Laguna Esmeralda is a small glacier lake, appropriately named after it's intense green/blue color. It's a short, 30 min, mountain-lined cab/bus/car ride from Ushuaia's city center. It's hard to find much information online in English and Spanish, but as usual, the hostel was extremely helpful. I did find this great site by a young Russian woman, who blogs about her travels. Her whole deal is "SEXY FUN TRAVELER" with the byline "Crazy travel, fun adventures, sexy photos" She was actually pretty helpful detailing what we should expect.

The hike up to the glacier is muddy and flat, and about four hours round trip. You can take a bus to a drop off point, and it will pick you up four hours later. We chose to take a cab, so we could take more time. Our first ride didn't show up, so we ended up taking a more expensive cab, $300 pesos each way, with the good faith that the driver would come back an pick us up at a set time. The driver spoke no English, but was really animated with exaggerated hand gestures, so we all sort of understood each other. He even stopped at an overlook for us to take pictures. (We did have that shared panicked moment of "oh no why is he pulling over, oh no oh no. OOOOOO, ok")

He dropped us off at a trail head privately owned by a woman with the greatest job ever- a husky farm. The farm runs dog sled tours in the winter, and also serves as a trail head for hikers going to the glacier. As soon as we arrived, the woman let us know there was another entrance, free of charge, down the road. We paid the 30 pesos each, and entered through her property. She gave us a copy of a hand-drawn map, and offered snacks. A good way to start a hike.

We made our way though the muddy fields, passing beaver dams and peet bogs. After about three miles, and a few false summits, we reached the lake. Alex had the GoPro strapped to his head, trying to film the first views of the glacier, which made all the false summits hilarious. I'm sure there are a few videos of a ridge, a huffing walk up it, then just a field of mud. Then alex turns around to me, camera on head, and shakes.

I knew we reached the glacier when I heard Alex ahead of me swearing enthusiastically. Video to come later.

The walk back went by quickly, including some views of the impressive massive beaver dams.

The huskys greeted us with howls as we approached the end of the trail, a great end to a great little hike.

-N

Tierra del Fuego National Park

The weather is pretty finicky here, to the point where I'm pretty sure all of the weather prediction technologies have just decided to play it safe and say that there's a 50% chance of rain 24/7. So when we caught absolute perfect weather on the day that we were planning on resting after our aggressive start, we decided to make a mad dash for Tierra del Fuego national park.

There are all kinds of tour companies that will try to get you to take guided tours of the park, which is completely unnecessary, so we just rolled up to the main bus station to see what our options were. People generally try to convince you to go with their bus company, and one guy we talked to flagged down a bus that was leaving, and sold us two round-trip tickets for 400 pesos (pretty much the going rate). We had to pay another 140 pesos each to get into the park, so it's starting to add up (works out to about $54 per person total).

The second we arrived we forgot all about it though, as we got an absolutely incredible view of the southernmost post office on the planet.

There's a chance that we mailed stuff from here, keep your eyes peeled, moms!

It was actually a bit of a coincidence that we found this place, there are only a few main trails in the park, and we wanted to check out the one that goes along the water. It just so happens that this post office is at the beginning of that trail.

I took a stupid amount of pictures and videos along the way, it was just so perfect out, we really took our time getting to the end. They said the trail takes about 3 hours, and the buses back picked up either 3 or 5 hours after we first started, so we aimed for the last one of the day because why would we rush through this?

One of the many instances of me being impressed by the view.

View of the mountains through the trees.

There are probably another hundred pictures where this came from, so whenever we find ourselves with decent internet we'll be sure to post those.

After the main hike, we found our way up to a main visitor center just as it was closing. As people left, horses started taking over the grass, which we contemplated stealing since the last bus of the day was about 20 minutes late, but it all worked out.

Not a bad day!

Isla Martillo Penguin Colony

The first thing we did on our first full day here was hit up a tourism agency like a couple of complete tools. We thought it was just an information center, but definitely not. We did figure out that there's only one way onto the big penguin colony around here, and it's through a private tour company. The reason is because it's actually on privately owned land, and they have a deal with this one particular company. The whole story behind the land is actually pretty interesting, check it out here.

The trip wasn't that cheap (about $140 per person with the crappy exchange rate since I had to use my credit card), but since it was the only way on the island, we figured "fuck it, why not" and pulled the trigger. A lot of these tours might raise the question "is it worth it" and the thing is, unless you're from here, they generally are.

The bus ride over there was about 90 minutes, and we had two guides giving us a quick history lesson on Ushuaia and Estancia Harberton along the way. Once we got there, we split into two groups, since they don't want too huge of a group of people on the island at once. We were in the second group. There's a pretty huge marine animal research facility on the property, and we did a tour of some of the skeleton specimens they had there. All of which were found in Tierra del Fuego. There's a current that goes clockwise around Antarctica, and Tierra del Fuego is the only land that exists in this particular current, so all kinds of good stuff washes up.

After the tour, we all hop onto a small boat, ride through the Beagle channel, and land on the island.

This is our transportation to penguin island (not the real name).

This is what I look like most of the time.

And this is the first thing we saw as we were landing.

And the second thing we saw was this:

I think the only reason he wasn't attacking penguins is because he was too full from eating penguins all day.

It's not every day you get to see a predator with its prey hanging out casually in the background. Leopard seals can't do much damage on land, and clearly the penguins know this.

The island is primarily populated with Magellanic (hundreds) and Gentoo (thirty-ish) penguins, but for some not completely known reason, there was one King penguin just hanging out among the colony of Gentoo penguins.

The gentoo penguins have a great running stance.

The weather really worked out for us, it was overcast at first, but the clouds burned off beautifully. That's probably the biggest risk you run in staying in a place like Ushuaia for a short period of time, the weather really is unpredictable.

Always time for a gratuitous selfie:

This time of year is around when their eggs start hatching. We were fortunate enough to get pretty close to a couple that was in the process of feeding their babies.

After this, we retreated back to the boat and made the journey back to Ushuaia. We were on the island for about an hour, which completely flew by. We took probably 10x the number of pictures you see here, so whenever we get back to fast internet, expect to see a more complete version of the trip.

Definitely worth it, in my opinion.

We made it to Ushuaia!

We're in Ushuaia from December 1st until the 14th, with no real itinerary while we're here. So far we've already been to a penguin colony, a glacier (which taught us a lot of lessons about how fast rain can happen), and a national park. We're exponentially exceeding the ratio between pictures taken and internet upload speed, so it might be a while before we can get a whole bunch of pictures all uploaded, just a few one-offs for now.

Ushuaia is a pretty interesting city. It's clearly a huge tourist destination, so it's pretty apparent that a lot of the city is built around that. There's just one main street, and it's loaded with places to buy hiking gear and stuffed penguins. There's also an area of "little houses" that have all of the buses/boats/helicopters/airplanes that you can take around the area, featuring people trying to convince you that their tour is the best. There's pretty much only two bars in the city, but basically only one that people go to. Of course it's an Irish pub, called The Dublin.

A bit more unexpected, is how big industry is here. Apparently there are crazy taxes on goods that aren't assembled in Argentina, so from what I gather, parts are shipped to Ushuaia (from China I'm guessing?) and then assembled in plants down here, then shipped up throughout Argentina. I'm willing to bet this is just one of many places that does this, but it sounded like starting a plant in Tierra del Fuego has some kind of tax incentive, so Ushuaia in particular has seen a lot of growth. This is all according to our penguin island tour guide, who grew up here, so I'm gonna take him at his word. We have noticed a lot of duty free shops in town, so the tax incentive bit seems to go all the way down to retail.

All of this is nestled in the spot where the Andes meet the ocean, it's hard to imagine not being constantly impressed by the setting. I guess the same can be said for New York City, and we managed that one, so who knows!

Tigre

We took a couple trains up the coast from Buenos Aires to check out Tigre. Here are the pictures.

The train ride itself was actually pretty interesting. It took us a few minutes to figure out how to buy tickets, since most people have Sube cards, which is like the Clipper card of Buenos Aires. Down here there are multiple types of independently run transit companies (buses, subways, commuter trains), so I think next time I'm going to actually figure out that whole system. Although, once we found the ticket counter, and found out that the Mitre only cost 3 pesos (about 25 cents), I became less motivated to get a Sube card.

We took the Tren Mitre on the B. Mitre line (there are three lines, and one of them has the same name as the train itself, that one was fun to figure out) to the end, to transfer onto the Tren de la Costa. There are other ways to get to Tigre, but this one is definitely the coolest.

Once you get your ticket for the Tren de la Costa, you can actually get off and back on at any stop along the way. It goes through some beautiful suburbs, some bourgie (I have never tried to spell that word before) tourist shopping malls, and a couple very poor neighborhoods, the whole mix. We got off in Acassusa since we had read it was a pretty cool little town. It felt a lot like a mini Santa Cruz to me, which I'm a huge fan of, obviously. We grabbed lunch at an awesome little restaurant right on the coast. You could see Uruguay way in the distance (at least, I think that's what it was), there was a skate park and a climbing wall next door, and on the other side was a kite boarding rental shop. Not to mention, the place had an awesome dog, Rita. We got some pretty solid food, bur more importantly, I was introduced to a Branca Menta with Sprite. This sounds disgusting, but believe me, it is fantastic.

After lunch, we hop back on the Tren and make our way to Tigre. We must have gotten on at the same time that some fancy private school got out, because the train was loaded with kids in school uniforms, and they all had iPhones (which are very hard to get down here).

Once we finally get to Tigre, it's probably about 4pm, and little did we realize that on weekdays everything pretty much shuts down around then. Luckily we were able to sneak onto the last boat that tours through the delta just as it was leaving. We did a long lap of a couple islands within the delta, while the tour guide was giving us a quick history in Spanish. I think I got about 30% of what she was saying, the biggest takeaway is that dealing with garbage is complicated. The whole trip was very beautiful though, I definitely get why the area is turning into a bit more of a luxury home experience.

On the trip back, the lady at the boleteria gave me the RESIDENTE price for the Tren de la Costa, so that was a pretty solid ego boost right there.

Overall, definitely a good day-trip to get out of the city.