Buenos Aires to the bottom of the world!

Hiiiii

ok, lots and lots of stuff to tell and so little time as i´m in ushuaia and cybercafes are quite expensive.. So be prepared for some bad built sentences instead of the James Joyce descriptions you are used to!

I left BA by bus. Golden tip for those who travel Argentina. Take Andesmar bus company. Great couches and they organize a bingo game on the bus! In Puerto Madryn, I met Renata, an Italian girl who I teamed up with.

We went on a queste for the holy tent and went camping in Peninsula Valdes. Here we made friends with 2 Argentinan guys from Buenos Aires who were traveling by car and they took us across the peninsula the day after to do some wildlife spotting. On the peninsula you can see pinguins, sea lions and elefantes marinos. (elephant seals in english i guess)

From there Renata and I made our way to Gaiman, an originally Welsh village famous for its tea and traditional Welsh sweets. Never say no to sweets! The other attraction in the town was a park made from garbage... Que? Yes exactly, ma thoughts as well, but it was actually amazing to see.

A cute little town but we didn´t spend the night.
Instead we went for a cray plan. We wanted to visit Punta Tombo because it has the largest pinguin colony on the continent but we knew it would be a busy spot. The smallest town to Punta tombo is an ugly one at 120 km so we decided we d just try to camp right outside the park entrance. We got stuck at 60 km from it and decided to camp there instead since absolutely nothing was passing by anymore so late to pick us up. Of course the minute we took out the tent, a guy passed by and took us to 20 km! He lived out there on a sheep farm. His biggest concern was that his kid had to go to school so he had to drive her every day and the fact that his cell didn´t have reception :) Really interesting to have met him.

The strangest thing abouth whole this area is just the great amount of nothingness... You can drive hunderds of kilometers and not see anything except maybe a gas station.
Meet Gauchito Gill, thair version of San Christpher (i think, me and the saints dont get along very well). Anyway, he s supposed to protect travelers and every few 100 meters you can find one of these little shrines.

This part of Patagonia it is sooo flat and really windy! So our night camping in the wild was mostly filled with fear of our supermarket-tent blowing away but it did hold! And in the morning the first car passing by took us so we got some private time with one million pinguins. They are so extremely funny!
Me blending in with the locals....

From Punta Tombo we continued to Sarmiento. A small village but it has a petrified forest with 65 billion old trees. Apparantly, there was a gaucho festival in the town so it was actually very busy. I didn´t result easy to get to the petrified forest but one of the gauchos kindly offered to take us. He called it a gauchada. Very sweet guy. Had a farm with 7000 sheeps so i guess that s why he didnt bother to treat us the taxi trip. Once again, very interesting to meet him.

From there we took the night bus (bingo again!!!) to Rio Gallegos and from there we made our way to Punta Arenas-Chile. This is the very bottom of the continent. Not a very exciting town but I needed a few days of rest and I met a lot of travelers there. Here Renata and I split up as she had an antartica trip booked from Ushuaia...

I relaxed a few days, the main event being a visit to the most southern beer brewery which I did with some guys from the hostel.

Most people take a 13 hour bus from Punta Arenas(chile) to Ushuaia (Argentina) on Tierra del Fuego (the name of the island as a whole). I wanted to go to Ushuaia but I also wanted to see a bit of Tierra del Fuego so instead I took the ferry from Punta Arenas to Porvenir, crossing the strait of Magellanes which is an event on its own! I saw pinguins and dolphins! Very little people go to Porvenir, it s not a Lonely Planet destination, but it is such a cute town! And it s actually a faster and cheaper way to get to Ushuaia anyway. I met a girl from Alaska on the ferry and we decided to spend a few days together.
We rented a bike and went exploring tierra del fuego. I was so excited to actually be there. It s a place that I have wanting to visit for so long and I just couldn´t believe I finally made it! The bikes were good but had very hard saddles. That combined with the bad roads and the fact we got a little lost and had to climb some fences, made friends with sheep and guanacos made us go the next day on foot.

After a few days which we spent with a incredibly nice family guesthouse, steph went back to Santiago while I continued the travel to Ushuaia. I was kinda afraid that I wouldnt get there. No buses but a nice Argentinan old couple took me to the Argentinan side of the island.

The landscape started to change dramatically. I was really happy to see some trees and mountains again after the huge amount of pampa I had been seeing for the last weeks.
I as now on the same road that I took leaving Buenos Aires but now I was exactly 3000 kms furher away.

I m now in Ushuaia which pretends to be the southern most city in the world. This is simply a lie as Puerto Williams is actually more to the south. Unfortunate for the Argentinans, Puerto Williams belongs to Chile, so they marketed Ushuaia to be ´the end of the world´. Anyway, it looks like a very beautiful town, locate next to the Beagle Channel.