Ushuaia 2

The Fridtjof Nansen waiting for our safe return to dock

Day 20 - 29th January 2023

We visited the bridge of the Roald Amundsen on the last day of our cruise around the Antarctic Peninsula and met with it’s uber cool Norwegian Captain who just so happened to be from the same town as the ship’s namesake. Pauline asked what they use for predicting the incoming weather and without batting an eyelid he said in a calm, confident drawl ‘the same as you, I use the Windy app’. He then went on to say that he had seen that there was a 60 knot storm sweeping in across the Pacific and suggested that it might not be a great thing to get caught in it on Drake Passage. We were whisked away, the zodiacs were packed away and the engines were revved up to full power to start the race with the storm back to Ushuaia.

It did mean that our last day of zodiac cruising was cut short but everyone knew that if this cool cookie said that it was going to get tough if we didn’t leave right now, it was probably time for action.

It had been snowing hard on our last morning at Ross Island and this, together with an absolutely massive number of penguin colonies had prevented us from making one more landing. The locals were all pretty happy though except for the ‘oh shit there’s a seal moment’. You’ll spot the black fur seal in the photo if you look for the only area where there are no penguins!

Brendan, the on board penguin expert whose enthusiasm was infectious, was also in raptures at the scene especially at the amount of young that seemed to be thriving. This had not been the case with many of the colonies that we had seen further south that had started late in the breeding season leading to the high likelihood of the chicks not surviving before the polar winter set in from March onwards. All this because of the Tonga underwater volcano erupting in 2022 causing billions of tonnes of water vapour to enter the atmosphere that lead to late snow covering rocks that would normally have been bare when the nesting season should have started. Natural global warming…

in other interstellar news, we had the chance of looking out for the bus sized meteor that was hurtling past the Earth closer than satellites on its 50,000 year orbit of the sun. We mused as to whether it might be long awaited No3 RouteMaster to Camden but it was cloudy so I guess we’ll never know.

Our journey back across the Passage was uneventful and, of course, the captain beat the storm to get us back to Ushuaia 12 hours ahead of schedule. Aware of the delights that the town at the end of the world lacked, we opted to stay on board to share a final super of luxury with some of the friends that we had made during our sensational visit to Antarctica.

Dolphins helped to steer the ship to port. I’m sure that they were also trying to say that Ushuaia wasn’t actually the most southerly town in the world because there is Port William in Chile that we have just gone past. I’m not sure though because my Dolphinese is worse than my Spanish. Just.

The next morning we awoke to a beautifully sunny day and were determined to like Ushuaia more than we had done three weeks earlier.

On the quay, bus loads of red jacketed tourists poured from the open side of the boat as the expedition team gave a weary wave goodbye clearly exhausted from keeping a fixed grin on their faces for the last sixteen days and not doubt heavy hearted at the prospect of doing it all again.

We slipped through the net of exuberant sycophants and into our unnecessarily large taxi for the very short trip to the hotel de los Andes where we would be staying for a night before heading to El Calafate and the start of our road trip.

En route to our hotel, we spotted a new variety of the flightless bird clearly off course, the lesser spotted Dickhead Penguin. We wondered if this was a side affect of what the Australians call ‘Dock Rock’. Who knows but the world was certainly swaying a lot.

Checking into the Hotel Los Andes proved a sobering experience and a salutary lesson in managing down our expectations of luxury. We took the barely functioning lift to the second floor, pleased that it had managed to complete the task only to find that our bedroom door was inaccessible with the worn piece of plastic that we had been given as a key. Believing us to be gringo idiots, the receptionist waved the bit of plastic at the decrepit card machine again and sent us back to the second floor. We took the stairs. Still no joy so the receptionist reluctantly came up and tried for herself. Surprise surprise, it didn’t work. The cleaner was called to try her master key; another piece of worn out plastic and that didn’t work either. Eventually and after it had been conceded that we might be right and the lock was broken, we were sent to another room.

Basic is probably the politest word that I can find to describe what we found. Vaguely clean could be a couple more. In deciding that I needed to make sure that we give feedback to our tour operator once we return home, I have invented a new method of scoring hotels called the Bog Paper Score as it seems to me how much comfort is delivered when wiping your arse probably sums up the overall experience. So 1 is no bog paper whatsoever and 10 is having someone wipe your arse for you with luxury puppy soft fabric. The hotel de Los Andes gets a 3 which is equivalent to the grease proof toilet paper that you used to get at school.

We headed out and took a taxi to the foot of the surrounding hills where we understood there to be a cable car running up to the Glacier Martial. A weaving journey through the one way traffic system of streets too narrow for modern transport lead us up to the allotted spot but, with some inevitability, the cable car was not working.

The walk up through the woods was very pleasant though and whilst the glacier itself was a little underwhelming compared to the frozen riches that we have been spoilt by, the views back across the Beagle Bay were beautiful! All the more so for not seeing Ushuaia in the foreground.

Beagle Bay

We took some time and careful internet research before opting for this quirky place for dinner that claimed to be part museum / part restaurant. The pork stew I had was excellent and, whilst interesting, the dusty bric a brac on the shelves was more in keeping with a themed chain restaurant from the 1990s than with a museum of historical artefacts. As soon as I had ordered, the stew was taken off the menu. My stomach was fine the next day though so I figured that it was popular rather than old and hanging about to be finished.

Leaving Ushuaia on a lunchtime flight I find myself humming R.E.M. ‘it’s the end of the world as we know it but I feel fine’