Brett's Southern Crossing

Ushuaia is the most touristy place I’ve been so far.  It attracts travelers by land and air from Chile and Argentina, and has a port for cruise ships to dock.  People come to see the wildlife in the area, to say they’ve visited the world’s southernmost city, and to board ships headed for Antarctica.

I enjoyed it here, but I don’t think I could rate it as a must-visit place for a trip to Patagonia.  The most popular activity seems to be a half day boat trip in the Beagle Channel.  The channel is named after the famous boat that Charles Darwin was on when exploring this area.  The islands in the channel have a variety of birds and sea lions to view, and they stop on one island to show shell mounds built by an indigenous people called the Yaghan.  These days, there’s just one aging Yaghan woman left.  The view of the wildlife was decent, though Puerto Madryn will be hard for any place to beat.

Also nearby is the Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego, which has some very nice scenery and a bunch of short trails to hike through.  I bought a shuttle ticket and spent a day in the park.  First I hiked along a nice lake with mountain views to the border with Chile, known as Hito XXIV (the name of the marker on the border).  Then I walked down the road to several short trails through a forest, a peat bog (with interpretative signs), and an area that has beaver colonies.  One solid day was enough for this park, although there were enough trails that I could have gone back for one more day.

Ushuaia is fairly expensive, with lots of parrillas (argentine barbeque restaurants) for tourists, although many of them offer tenedor libre (all you can eat, literally translated as “free fork”) for $60-70 pesos (about $15-18 USD) not including drinks.  The museums here are the most expensive I’ve seen anywhere.  The archaeology museum cost $50 pesos, leading a French guy staying in my hostel to rant “this is more expensive than the Louvre!!”  It’s apparently a nicely designed museum, but I thought the French guy had a pretty good point.

After the minor fiasco of Viedma, my next stop was Puerto Madryn.  This town is located a convenient distance from two major tourist attractions: Península Valdéz and Punta Tombo.  Both of these are day trips, and seemed fairly priced at $150 pesos (about $30 USD) for a 12 hour tour with a bilingual guide.  Although located in a fairly desolate looking part of Patagonia, these reserves are overflowing with wildlife.  In the week I spent here I saw lots of sea birds, dusky dolphins, southern sea lions, southern elephant seals, magellenic penguins, armadillos, llamas, and foxes.

A lucky visitor to Punta Tombo might see an Orca feeding on sea lions.  There were no attacks when I visited, but the videos show the Orcas beaching themselves onto the shored to get at the sea lions before somehow flopping back into the gulf…unfortunately the entire Orca population is only a few dozen individuals, so seeing them at meal time is uncommon.

The other major attraction here is the Southern Right Whale.  These whales come to the area to breed later in the year and there are so many that you can watch them right from shore if you don’t want to take a tour.

The most unique tour was a morning visit to snorkel with a colony of sea lions just a 10 minute boat ride from the beach near my hostel.  The sea lions will come out from the beach to swim with you, and it was a great experience.  They come close enough that I was able to reach out and touch them several times.  One sea lion came right in front of my mask and started blowing bubbles – I don’t know if it was just exhaling a bit, but some people say they’re imitating SCUBA divers that come to the area.  The tour operators claim this is the only place in the world where the sea lions will swim with snorkelers, and it’s definitely something I would recommend to anyone that visits.  The cost was a bit pricey, at $500 pesos ($125 USD)

While I was here I decided to also do some SCUBA diving.  It has been several years since my last dive and I wanted to refresh my skills a bit, so I signed up for a PADI Advanced Open Water certification class.  This is basically just 5 dives from different categories.  I did wreck diving, deep diving, underwater navigation, and underwater naturalism.  Puerto Madryn has dozens of dive shops lining the beach, which seems a bit strange since the diving is really not very good.  The water is cold (which means a 10mm wetsuit and lots of weights), the visibility is poor, and there isn’t much to see.  Cold water means no coral and few fish.  I was interested mainly in the refresher, but I don’t see why so many shops can stay in business.

Finally, I have to recommend the hostel I stayed in, Hi Patagonia (not associated with Hostelling International, by the way).  It’s a residencial house in a convenient area, with great staff, nice rooms, and cozy down comforters.  One of the best hostel’s I’ve stayed in.  It is midsize, probably housing about 30 people when full.  But this area doesn’t have the mega hostels some cities can support.