The bus ride to Ushuaia was long. The bus traveled down a dirt road for the most part, and the main scenery out the bus window was flat sheep pasture. Sheep are only interesting for about 5 minutes... so the 12 hours on the bus felt like a lifetime! But as we approached Ushuaia, the mountains came back into view and soon we were on a narrow highway winding its way up the side of a mountain, the Garibaldi pass. We were finally getting excited!
Ushuaia was a really big city, with a large waterfront with tons of huge ships, as well as a large hopping downtown with tons of restaurants and shops. It seemed promising for lots to do after our kinda dissappointing stop in Puerto San Julian.
I was really excited to see some wildlife so we immediately booked a boat tour on the Beagle Channel. The weather looked a bit sketchy, but we thought we would make the best of the day anyway. And we were so lucky we did! Our tour first went to a Sea Lion colony, and since it was a bit cold out, me and Ryan were the only ones who were brave (or keen... or dorky?!) enough to go outside right at the front of the boat and get super close to the huge animals. We could see lots of them sleeping and lounging, upside down and on top of each other. Some big ones were even fighting and making loud noises to scare each other off their respective territories. Others were climbing clumsily back on to the rocks after a swim in the ocean. It was incredible to see these giants of the sea so close! All the while, massive Black-browed Albatrosses surrounded the boat, and we were amazed to watch them walk across the water with wagging tails as they almost struggled to pick themselves up off the water´s surface and fly off. Same story with the Giant Petrels. It was a seabird lovers dream!
We soon reached the penguin island and the boat stopped there for about 40 minutes. We saw Magellanic Penguins and Gentoo Penguins hanging out, chasing each other around and even swimming in the shallow clear water, some even doing jumps! The Magellanic penguins were mostly just enjoying the sunshine and relaxing, so the Gentoo penguins were the stars of the show here. There was a young one that kept pestering its parents to feed it constantly, so they were running around one after another, dodging all the Magellanic penguins that were just chilling out. And to make them even cuter, when they ran they waddled quickly from foot to foot with their little wings outstretched in that typical penguin way. It was such a perfect day with beautiful sunny weather and almost eerily calm waters. Incredibly though, about 5 minutes after we left the island and started heading for home, the weather turned. All of a sudden the wind, rain and waves picked up. It got so bad that the waves were crashing right over the front windows of the boat. We couldn´t believe it! The luck we have had with the weather has just been indescribable.
The next day we decided to go on a 4x4 offroading excursion. We were picked up from our hostel in Land Rovers, and headed out to the backroads of Ushuaia. The 4x4 tour was so fun, we went down backroads for a few hours through huge mud puddles, and over logs. We thought we were going to tip over for sure, but we were fine. Part of the tour also included ´beaver watching´which we thought was hilarious for so many reasons. Apparently the beaver was introduced to Tierra del Fuego years ago from Canada to start a fur industry and they have taken over! So we stopped at a beaver dam and everyone was furiously taking pics of a beaver! We were on the truck with two Aussies who had just been on an Antarctic cruise so we got to hear their exciting stories about sighting humpback whales up close, seals, and so many penguins they got bored of them. I definitely want to come back to do an Antarctic cruise someday!
As part of the tour we also got to do some canoeing. Since the guide knew we were the Canadians, he just basically handed us a canoe and said "GO!" while everyone else got a safety briefing and instructions on how to caone, haha! We canoed around a really nice lake with mountains surrounding us, and it was great. We made it back before everyone else who did the safety talk, and literally one minute after we got off the canoe it started raining, and we were able to just hop back in the truck. Again, we couldn´t believe our luck with the weather!
