A sign painted on a wall in Ushuaia reads "Ushuaia, the end of the world and the beginning of everything". Hmmmm... maybe we were supposed to do our trip in the other direction?...
Hamburgers on Christmas Eve (actually, they really hit the spot), but yesterday offered more excitement and fun. After a long ride in a van to Tierra del Fuego´s first settlement, a ranch near the mouth of the Beagle Channel, a passageway which connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans without having to go around the more-exposed Cape Horn, we hopped on a small boat and were taken to an island that is covered with penguins. As we landed on the beach, you could see the little black and white guys all along the beach, in the water, and a few coming up to our boat to check it out. The more you looked, the more you saw that there were penguins everywhere! Two kinds, and lots of newborn. The penguins were a bit hard to photograph as they always seem to be moving, whether it is waddling back and forth with mouthfuls of grass for building nests, flapping their wings and lifting their heads skyward to make mating calls, or clicking beaks with each other as part of mating rituals.
Today we toured the vacant prison that was the original reason for establishing the town of Ushuaia. Prisoners that committed crimes repeatedly were sent away to this undeveloped "nowhere" at the end of the world. The prison had cells but no walls around its yard. If prisoners escaped, there was nowhere for them to go.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment