Ushuaia :: Argentina
Feliz Navidad desde el Fin del mundo
Places: Ushuaia.
Coolest thing I did: Watched a very determined South African turn his dreams of cooking half a lamb into reality..
Coolest thing I didn´t know: The best cooking show in the world: http://www.youtube.com/user/EpicMealTime (Gen Y have been teaching me that there is far more to watch on YouTube than TV).
Once the bus turns it’s back on Andes you find yourself very quickly looking out at flat grassland as far as the eye can see, and you pretty soon see where all that Patagonian lamb and steak you’ve been consuming for the last month comes from. As one fellow Aussie on the bus said aloud, at times you could almost think you were back in Australia, until you look back over your shoulder and remember the ranges of snow capped mountains you just left. Once again in this part of the world the border crossings seem almost pointless, with the same sheep wandering over international borders and no one seeming that fussed if you actually filled out the entry card or not. The trouble with all this is, when the bus you’re on takes 12 hours and the first 10 look like endless flat paddocks then the rural idyll gets dull really fast. Despite a bit of excitement on the heavily rolling car ferry over the Magellan Straight there’s a lot of staring out the window trying to learn Spanish subconsciously through your iPod.
The thing that makes it all worth it is rounding the corner at about hour 11 and seeing the mountains rising up over the end of Argentina part to reveal the gorgeous Lago Fagnano and then you realise you’re back in fairly remote, untamed country. So untamed that the island, Tierra del Fuego (The land of fire) gets it’s name from the fact the natives here used to get around in the nude and required heaps of fires to not freeze to death in the almost Antarctic conditions. They must have seen Europeans show up wearing clothes and must have had a technological leap into not getting frostbite on your rude bits akin to an iPad being dropped into the heart of Medieval England.
So my one and only goal of coming to Ushuaia, which is the last town in Argentina and technically the last on the continent (there’s one further south, Puerto Williams in Chile but apparently that’s one street of grizzled locals) was to have a fixed place to spend Christmas Day with the other orphans I’ve met along the way. The thinking, of course, is what better place to do Christmas than the end of the world, Ushuaia being the place where all those high priced Antarctic cruises old rich people take depart from. I admit to having seen basically none of the town and very little of the surrounds, you know because you should have Christmas off.
I assume the plan had been to try and cook some more European style hot food for lunch on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, until we saw the BBQ outside. With all the styling of Tower of London torture paraphernalia (you know, all black chains and clinking ratchets to lower the massive black grills up and down) you could tell these people take their BBQ seriously. So we spent an hour or so standing in blinding smoke burning down large chunks of timber into hot coals and then threw a whole load of steaks on. That went so well that we decided to forgo the oven on Christmas Day and BBQ our chooks instead. By that time I’d been demoted to charcoal boy by Doc, or resident South African who did a stellar job on the birds. So good in fact that he stated he would acquire half a lamb on Boxing Day and do it all again. This was a man not to make idle promises, and after 3 days of pretty much nothing but meat I’m starting to wonder if I might need to become a vegetarian for the next 48 hours or so.
One thing we’d been missing since Bariloche was Chimichurri, and oil based herb concoction that makes all meat instantly taste 56% better (that number was determined by years of study at BA’s research universities) and it seems like you can just buy the herbs that make it up in the supermarket and mix the oil in yourself. So we didn’t have it at Christmas, but we dramatically improved the already awesome 4.5kg of lamb that we attempted (and failed) to polish off between six of us. We’ve also been buying wine pretty much by pulling it randomly off the shelf in the supermarket and while Chile was a bit hit and miss I’ve yet to have a bad one in Argentina. A truly enlightened people.
So despite being hung over by two days of drinking I did attempt to get out and climb up to the glacier behind the town on Boxing Day for the view. That turned out to be 7km uphill through the sketchier parts of town, where the wild dogs look a fair bit wilder and defy naming and then up to a chairlift that promptly stopped working at 3:45 in the afternoon, which is fine when you don’t show up at 2:45. So I managed to get most of the way up to see the glacier, through at times heavy rain and howling winds, to see what must have been an awesome view over the town and out over the Beagle Channel to Chile if it had been a clear day. A large part of me thinks I should have stayed in the hostel, which has a nice view over the Beagle Channel as well, only you sit on white leather couches, not walk through the rain.
So due to taking my time to get here via the wilds of Patagonia I’m sitting in the Ushuaia airport waiting for my plane up to Buenos Aires (to an airport with the code EZE, which reminds me of a dead, high-pitched former member of seminal LA rappers NWA) which hasn’t yet even arrived from BA and is about an hour late. Some young American stoners I met in Bariloche refer to this as “being Argentina-ed” which happens a lot. When your bus doesn’t come, or you get searched at random at bus checkpoints, you’ve been Argentinaed, which puts you in the A-Zone. I’ve been promised as I travel the north of the country later on I will spend a whole lot more time there.
So I’ve loved all of Patagonia and the sleeping in tents and whatnot but a big part of me is happy to be heading back to a city again for a few days over New Years. My mate Gerry flies in from Sydney for at least 3 weeks starting tomorrow so it will be good to have a familiar face along the way.
Feliz Navidad a todo el mundo.