A couple of weeks after I went to Mar del Plata I met a couple of Germans in Shoeless Joe's. The guy was a pilot and the girl was a flight attendant for Lufthansa. We were talking and they told me they were going on a cruise around Cape Horn and then through the fjords of Patagonia. I told them I would love to make a trip like that but that it was too expensive for me. He told me he could get me a special rate and he picked up his phone and made a call to his travel agent. In about two minutes I had a reservation on the week long all inclusive cruise for $527 dollars. The normal price for the cruise was about three grand so I got a real deal and had to jump on it. Then he booked my flight from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia for me and gave me the card for his travel agent to go pick up the tickets the next day. He also got me pilot rates on the flight to Ushuaia.
The big problem is I only had a couple of days to get packed and down to Ushuaia and the airlines in Argentina were on their seemingly perpetual strike. It was only a go slow strike not a complete strike. Basically they just messed up the schedules so that everybody flying had to sit around and wait for hours at a time. The schedule was just a piece of paper to drive the passengers nuts. I picked up my tickets and booked a hotel for the nights before the cruise departure. After throwing my stuff into my backpack I took a taxi to the airport and hurried up to check in only to sit and sit and sit at the airport. I wondered if we would ever take off but eventually we did. The flight was very long with a single stop along the way to drop off and pick up a few passengers. When we flew over Tierra del Fuego we could see beaver dams and all the trees down from the beavers. Tierra del Fuego is overrun with beavers. Ships were taking live beavers back to Europe from Alaska and the ships sank going around the horn. The beavers swam to shore and established a colony and with no predators they have multiplied to ridiculous numbers of beavers. For a while people tried to raise them for their fur but due to the mild climate the beavers stopped having the deep thick fur that was wanted for the fashion trade so nobody would buy the second rate furs. They gave up and all the beavers are wild now. We could also see the tail end of the Andes mountains, the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn the southern most point of the Americas as we circled for landing at Ushuaia and Tierra del Fuego.
I checked into my hotel and walked around town. My travel agent had thrown in a day tour so I went on that. We drove West and rode a little train around for a nice view of the Andes diving into the sea. We also visited a sled dog farm that looked like it was right out of Alaska. I walked along a stream and saw some of Argentina's famous big trout in the stream, unfortunately the season was closed for fishing. When I got back from the tour I went to the town museum for an hour or so before heading back to the hotel for an early night. I enjoyed the little quirky museum. The Story of Shackleford and his men was told and they had lots of artifacts from their ill fated attempt at the South Pole. Those guys were tough in a way that not many people are today. How they survived like they did is just amazing. Wiki has a good article on the survival ordeal here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Shackleton
There was also a history of the penal colony that started Ushuaia as a city. Many infamous prisoners were housed in this remote prison and the museum tells their stories. There was also the history of Tierra del Fuego including the original inhabitants. When the first European ships approached Tierra del Fuego they saw large fires burning on the land. The original people who lived there were a tall race of indigenous people that wore no clothing what so ever even though the temperatures were freezing in the winter. They would build big bonfires to keep warm. When the European sailors landed the indigenous people died off from diseases that the sailors brought with them. There was a picture of the last three surviving natives at the museum but they have all died off. The women used to grease themselves up with seal oil and dive for food in the icy cold waters. How they survived without clothing in that harsh climate I can not imagine. They were tough like Shackleford I guess.
Ushuaia is a small town that looks like it would fit right at home in Alaska or Norway or someplace like that. The houses are mostly built in a nordic style. There was some manufacturing of electronic devices, some oil drilling and processing and a few other small businesses along with a bit of tourism and commercial fishing. Not much else happening there. I did go to a local bar and ended up talking to a local girl that wanted me to take her traveling with me because she just wanted to get out of Ushuaia. She worked as an assembler at the electronics company in town. We talked and had a few drinks and hung out at my hotel for a few hours. We had fun so I told her to contact me in a couple of weeks and she could come visit me in Buenos Aires but she never contacted me again.
The next day we loaded on the boat for the cruise.
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