We spent Christmas in an apartment we rented in the heart of downtown Ushuaia.
The good thing about having a van is we carry armchairs with us and a 110 volt converter and Layne has her pots and pans and so forth. We neither of us are fond of Christmas decorations so our rooms have a rather unseasonal lack of color but you are welcome to come and decorate it. The lawn on our terrace was astroturf which I love because I am lazy. It all fits, doesn’t it, plastic grass no fire trees equal a happy camper because we are team boring.
It was on the ground floor with one bedroom, a huge walk in closet and a bathroom with abundant hot water and on top of all that luxury we had central heat and a washing machine, all for $50 a night.
Street parking for GANNET2 had us a bit nervous as we were staying for four nights but we were repeatedly reassured that Ushuaia is a low crime town. Plus the police headquarters and city jail were just around the corner. We also worried about not having a drier but the dry heat of the apartment and the fresh breeze on the patio dried our laundry pretty fast. These are the perks that warm the cockles of an overlander’s heart. Hot showers and laundry, who could ask for more?
Prices are exorbitant we found out and Argentina is no longer the cheap dining scene it once was. Also we had contemplated going on an Antarctic tour as you can sometimes get last minute deals. $14,000 for a shared cabin and toilet for ten days to walk around on the ice seemed not worth it to me. Plus I want to leave sailing the Drake Passage, the toughest seas in the world on bad days, to Webb Chiles. Also the idea of depositing Rusty with a dog sitter, even an excellently rated one was giving me palpitations. I think we can do long excursions like that after we get home. It’s easy enough to fly down to see snow and ice after Rusty has gone to his reward.
Ushuaia has a frontier town feel to it, but it is a massive tourist magnet. Store fronts are labeled in Spanish and English and it feels like half the population on the sidewalks are foreigners with backpacks and ambitious adventure sports on their minds. Locals weave between us visitors doing their chores, lining up at the post office and working to make ends meet. It’s a bit like Key West I suppose where visitors play and locals don’t.
The town is built on the lower slopes of the Martial Mountains, the end of the Andean chain which we first saw on the coast of Colombia at Santa Marta on the Caribbean. The longest mountain range in the world indeed.
The result is a lot of steep streets rising up from the waterfront.
And slopes are steeper than they appear in photographs. Our all terrain tires help on these slippery hills in the rain.
On a sunny day the waterfront is quite lovely. There is a marina tucked away behind the cruise ship dock but the harbor is closed to the public.
The waterfront is a walking and cycling path with views across the Beagle Channel. Some campers live here while visiting the city, while we spendthrifts lived large in our apartment two blocks away. We waited until evening to find a spot on the street right in front of our door. It was pretty comfortable inside but these campers have a hell of a view.
The hills on the right are Chile, and the two countries have come close to war over the boundary between them down here.
This is the guarded entrance to the world of boats in the southernmost city.
You have to cross six lanes of traffic to get the pedestrian area.
Rusty loves Ushuaia and he’s dragged me on long walks through town. He walks off leash, waits for me at intersections and only crosses when I say it’s safe. It’s been great fun watching him picking his path around town. There are a few street dogs but he crosses the street to avoid them. I want to adopt them of course but neither he nor Layne would put up with me.
You can see why wind chill is something to take into account here.
From the mountains to the tidal waters:
Paul and Andrea came by for lunch on Boxing Day before they took off for their Antarctic tour. Andrea was looking forward to a luxury cabin and hot shower on demand.
Ushuaia has a population around 80,000 people which is a fair bit of growth since 1869 when British missionaries led by Waite Stirling showed up in Tierra Del Fuego in that year and from among them Thomas Bridges became superintendent of the mission. Bridges was found on a bridge and was adopted by a school teacher in England called Despard who took him to the south Atlantic but found life intolerable and went back to England. His adopted son found his home there and became a major figure in the founding of Ushuaia. Thomas Bridges:
And here he is with his wife and children, the owner of Harberton Ranch (estancia) named for his wife’s hometown of Harberton in Devon.
He had lived in the Falklands with his father and learned to speak the language of the Yamana then committed himself to life in Tierra Del Fuego. On a training trip to England he met and married Mary Ann Varder who gave birth in 1872 to Thomas Despard Bridges the first recorded European birth in Tierra Del Fuego.
That’s the best I could unravel from reading about the founding of this town. Consider this: the Yamaná also known as Yahgan had lived in this country for about ten thousand years. They are a tribe derived from the Selk’nam who lived further north, but the Yamaná/Yaghan are the people who lit fires to stay warm on these hillsides seen by Ferdinand Magellan who gave it the name “Land of Fire” (Tierra Del Fuego).
And now this amazing and rich history is become a city you might find anywhere in Latin America far from the Spanish colonial influence that gives cities further north their extraordinary architecture and their expansive plazas and their breathtaking historical beauty.
It’s not clean and tidy like Chilean cities but it is pretty architecturally uninteresting.
Rusty owned the city on Christmas morning. I was barely awake and the rest of Ushuaia certainly wasn’t.
We enjoyed walking together. Here’s what we saw. Me taking terrible selfies for a start. I tried.
Homage to heroic early mail carriers in this frontier town.
Bilingual shopping.
Finisterre: Latin for the end of the earth.
Now if anyone asks, you can tell them what Ushuaia looks like. Nothing special in this most special of locations. Oh well.
