Ushuaia

We have arrived, the job is done.  

I trust everyone had a fine Festivus and aired all their grievances properly. We spent the holiday in an air b and b trying to escape the wet and wind for a few days. 

We finished the trip to Ushuaia by coincidence on the longest day of the year (in the southern hemisphere), December 21st around lunchtime. We came around a corner and there were the twin pillars with room to pull off the highway. I took the photo and that left us wondering what next? 

Lunch obviously. 

Steak and wine overlooking the Beagle Channel with no more road left to drive. 

I had lemon mousse for dessert and it tasted appropriately like a Key Lime Pie which put me in mind of home. 

I couldn’t stop staring at the Beagle Channel. Tour boats and fishing boats came and went. A couple of boats with masts motored by in the distance. Wild Tierra Del Fuego was very flat for a day. 

The two hour drive to the city from our campground in Tolhuin was quite scenic.  We could have been driving the Rockies in late fall, not the Fuegian Andes in summer.

There is this band of mountains that encircles the northern approaches to Ushuaia that they call the Andes of Tierra Del Fuego. 

It wasn’t windy for a change but it was drizzling enough to spoil my photos through the windshield on an already drab colorless day. 

I hope they render some idea of the last thirty miles of our journey from Key West. 

It was a pretty spot and happily it was only 1400 feet above sea level.  

And then the arrival. 

It seems the netting above is to catch any skiers who might accidentally fall off a passing ski lift. We saw no such amusements as we drove through. 

47 degrees and icy damp sounds about right for Tierra Del Fuego at almost 55 degrees south latitude. 

I have put a 110 kilometer an hour (70mph) sticker on the back of GANNET2 since arriving in Argentina. Technically it’s not legally required for foreign vehicles but it’s one less thing to have to discuss with any over enthusiastic member of the Gendarmeria  Nacional. Some vans have 80 or 90kph stickers. I went for the fastest I could find but I have no idea what is the correct self limiting top speed, but we won’t be doing 70 in any event. 

Ushuaia is not a beautiful waterfront tourist attraction.  For us it’s an achievement but the locals, disappointingly, treat our goal as just another grubby underfunded city to mooch around in. The police checkpoint at the entrance was not staffed when we drove in: 

Drizzle of course:

Ushuaia should be gorgeous with the Martial Mountains behind and the Beagle Channel in front but it’s really rather drab. It was founded in 1884 and has a population of 80,000 people more or less. 

Its name comes from the Yagan word for cove and I should point out locals don’t pronounce the “h.” They say “oos-why-ya” when speaking of their city. 

Argentina has had a crap economy for 25 years with inflation you wouldn’t believe and debt defaults served up with the usual self serving corruption. There has been a two tier economy with a thriving black market which meant foreigners with dollars could exchange money for half the value so Argentina was available with a 50 percent nationwide discount. 

Not anymore as they have elected a president promising economic reforms which will involve he says short term pain in exchange for long term stability.

From Wikipedia:

Javier Gerardo Milei^[b](born 22 October 1970) is an Argentine economist and politician who has served as President of Argentinasince 2023. He has taught university courses and written on various aspects of economics and politics and also hosted radio programs on the subject. Milei's views distinguish him within mainstream Argentine politics.

In November 2021, Milei was elected to the Argentine Chamber of Deputies, representing the City of Buenos Airesfor La Libertad Avanza. As a national deputy, he limited his legislative activities to voting, focusing instead on critiquing what he sees as Argentina's political elite and its propensity for high government spending. Milei pledged not to raise taxes and donated his national deputy salary through a monthly raffle. He defeated the incumbent economy minister, Sergio Massa, in the second round of the 2023 general election, for the post of president, on a platform that held the ideological dominance of Peronismresponsible for the ongoing Argentine monetary crisis.

He was known for campaigning with a chain saw to illustrate how he would prune government spending but his public antics only made him more visible. His opponent was a member of the old government and had no hope of overcoming the widespread disgust and exhaustion of business as usual. 

Here’s the thing: Argentina is stabilizing its economy which is bad for us as we no longer get the inflationary discount but it’s terrible for people who lived in the old inflationary system and have lost their jobs and hundreds of thousands have been pruned. Eventually things should improve but for now the country is impoverished and it shows. 

We went food shopping at La Anonima, one of two big chains in Patagonia. The other is Carrefour, the French supermarket conglomerate. 

It’s slightly bizarre finding yourself here at the bottom of the world just shopping as usual on a Saturday afternoon. There was no ticker tape parade to celebrate our heroic drive. No one cares, nor should they. 

Layne went inside to discover decent fruits but limp vegetables while I walked Rusty among the mere mortals who have never driven the PanAmerican. They got on with their lives. 

Just another work day along the Beagle Channel where 200 years ago the youthful Fitzroy and Darwin explored together exploding the myth of a human centric universe. 

Not everyone uses internal combustion but behind the one horsepower local are trash trucks which say “We get it done” which is a motto I’m now inclined to adopt.  

Eeyore trailing along behind: 

Delicious hamburgers in La Antonia. My friend Greg calls the health warnings “Stop Signs.”  These have no less than four. They must be barfy. 

The sign says cool drinks. 

We tried to take campground with a hot shower in a heated bathroom but their dogs attacked Rusty so we retreated to the wild camp in a former city campground that overlanders use. We have friends meeting us in town on the second of January so we will do some exploring along the beagle channel I hope and get to see some of this impressive coastline before we leave.   

The afternoon of January fourth we start our drive north to get home by way of Brazil and then back to Peru to drive the way we came more or less. One step at a time. And we’ve still got to drive to Alaska and the Arctic.  

Merry Christmas From Tolhuin

Merry Christmas first of all. By the time you see this we will have been hanging around around Ushuaia for a while so there will be photos and stories about the end of the world as they like to call it down here. But that will be tomorrow after this holiday which as I write we plan to spend in the wilderness wild camping. Owing to our direct journey south through Chile people we have traveled with are still zig zagging through Argentina and Chile up north while others have finished their sabbaticals and are returning to Europe. Courtney and Andrew whom we last met in Punta Arenas are shipping their Jeep to the Netherlands soon. We Americans are alone at the end of the world. 

We awoke from our wild camp outside Rio Bravo to find an actual Argentine gaucho (cowboy) training his horses outside our home. Walking the unbroken horses in circles while teaching them to obey his commands. 

Then he rode off, as did we. 

Part of Ruta Nacional 3 runs along the Atlantic here. 

Most overlanders ignore Argentina’s Atlantic Coast but we plan to drive much of it on our way north along Route 3 before crossing the famous plains crammed pampas back to Andes and the Chilean border. That will be later. 

Tierra Del Fuego is mostly flat or rolling prairie. It’s about summer now so there is sunshine but also lots of ice cold wind. Out of the wind it’s quite pleasant even with temperatures in the mid fifties but in the wind your digits freeze and hats gloves and wind proof jackets are mandatory. 

The highway isn’t quite as good as the perfect roads of Chile but the potholes aren’t so many and can be avoided and we can travel at 50 miles per hour without stress. 

The winds mostly from the west have been quite intense and I can feel GANNET2 yielding to the gusts, which have been up to 40mph.

The cell signal cones and goes but it’s never very strong except right inside towns so we are glad to have Starlink packed ready to deploy if we need it. Gas stations have showed up in each community and there are more villages here than in Chile but every time the fudge goes below three quarters we fill up.  

Headwinds can increase fuel consumption and if a gas station were to run out this isn’t where you want to be driving on fumes. It is desolate out here and there aren’t even any electrical lines or power poles. 

We got stopped by the Gendarmeria Nacional at the checkpoint before the town of Tolhuin, and in keeping with all the other trove countries we have visited they were cheerful and friendly and did a quick check of GANNET2’s Temporary Import Permit and my Florida driver’s license which is a novelty of course and we were quickly on our way. We have yet to meet a cop on the take but there is still time I suppose. 

There seem to be more towns and villages in Argentina’s narrow strip of Tierra Del Fuego than across Chile’s huge chunk of the island and Tolhuin is a small town about an hour and a half north of Ushuaia. 

We decided to stop here because it has a laundry with good reputation and a campground with hot showers. What more do you need after several nights of wild camping? 

A bakery perhaps? Hmm…

There is a library dedicated to the Falkland Islands, still a point of contention around here. 

I’ll express my thoughts on that subject later. We have considered flying to the Falklands for a visit but you can only fly from Punta Arenas in Chile, Britains ally in the war fought forty years ago. And we’d have to leave Rusty in doggie daycare for a week and you can imagine how I feel about that. 

Argentina is said to make the best empanadas in Latin America and they weren’t bad at all for lunch. Because yes indeed, Tolhuin has a few excellent bakeries. 

It’s an okay town with the services we need but nothing to write home about. 

He explored it enough to put him in a coma my gradually aging dog. It was time to go camping. 

A dirt road… sigh… but only a few miles. Check out the rolling wooded hills in the distance. 

You can rent a space for your tent with a fire ring and you might get a teepee with an electric light inside. 

An innovation the indigenous people didn’t enjoy. Rusty used them to escape any sudden showers. 

They call them kawi (kah-wee) around here. 

The communal kitchen was a bit too informal for us. 

The views are special  while the decor is eccentric. 

This lake called Fagnano curls around the mountains like a fjord into Chile but is cut off from salt water by a spit of land. 

We took a spot by a kawi for shelter from the wind.  

The reason we were here wasn’t the decor or the views but the abundant hot water in the shower. It looks funky but it worked really well. 

This is as wintery a Christmas as we have spent in a very long time. But here at 54 degrees south latitude it’s easy to mistake summer for winter. 

Best wishes for a peaceful holiday season.