BeachPatels Travel: Fin del Mundo.......Not

Monday (December 27) was another travel day for the group. We caught a flight from El Calafate to Ushuaia where we will board out ship. In the evening, my cousin Vip (Nick's brother) arrived from the US after traveling for over 24 hours. The antarctic group was complete upon his arrival. It's pretty amazing to me that we all got here having traveled slightly different routes until arriving in Argentina. No one was delayed for very long and all our luggage made it as well. We ran into several travelers that didn't fare so well.

Vip was hungry after his travels so we tried a restaurant in town that turned out to have great seafood. It was perched on a hill with a nice view of the harbor and city. Another fine meal. By the way, Vimal brought this great pepper from Arizona and we have been using it to "Indian-ize" some of the local dishes.

Ushuaia is a tourist, port city. About the only thing to do in town is shop and eat. Fortunately, the Tierra del Fuego National Park is close to town. Another fortunate turn was that the tour bus was sold out. We hired a transport company to get us there and back, but we were on our own the remainder of the time. This circumstance forced us to walk all through the park and we were rewarded with some amazing sights.

There were signs everywhere that implied that a certain spot in the park was the Southern-most point on the continent (the end of the Earth or Fin del Mundo). A quick glance at any map would show that there is plenty of land South of Ushuaia. In fact, Chile is actually farther South than Argentina, except the local maps claim the Antarctic peninsula for Argentina.

We'll be on the boat tomorrow afternoon following a day of killing time in town. There won't be another opportunity to make posts until we get back to the South American continent. For those zealots that want a glimpse of what we have been doing, I have included some links to pictures that I posted on our main website (however, the links below is the only way to directly access them). Feel free to send the web address to anyone interested in seeing the pictures. Happy New Year everyone!