Ushuaia

After more than a month in big cities, we were craving a change in pace and flew to the end of the world (literally)!

Ushuaia is a small port city surrounded by snow-capped mountains and national parks and is the closest sizable town to Antarctica. Although the chilly temperatures and icy winds took a while to adjust to, we loved soaking up the clean mountain air, beautiful scenery and lack of crowds.

 

 We stayed with the most lovely Argentinian family in Ushuaia who offered to take us along for a traditional Sunday bbq in the national park Tierra Del Fuego and drove us around some of the beautiful viewpoints within the park.

Elise enjoying screwing up Ben's panorama

Although we don't usually take organised tours, we decided to splash out on a tour of a nearby island which is a protected natural reserve for penguins. The full day tour involved a small bus to a private farm, passing by some incredible landscapes including famous "flag trees" where the strong winds have warped the shape and direction of the trunk and branches.

The most amazing thing about the tour was that we were able to walk with the penguins and get within a metre or so of them as they went about swimming, waddling and shedding their feathers. On the island there are two types of penguin and one random King Penguin who they think may have gotten lost at some point and wound up in the wrong colony. He was definitely the most impressive of the bunch but the others were cute also.