I'm still a stranger in a strage land

Weird place-ness continues...

Yesterday we got picked up before the sun came up to go out for 10 hours, 7 of which were on a boat to experience the crazy Glaciers of El Calafate. We got to the port, got on a catamaran (boy, do I love a catamaran), and set sail for a long haul over the weirdest water that I have ever seen. It's called "glacial milk" here because it is glacier water, and the sediments are held in permanent suspension. Here's a pretty good representation of what it looks like against a wall of rock, which is what this whole place is made out of:


We started to see some icebergs, which were small after seeing the ones in Antarctica, but still very pretty:




check out the water dripping off of this one:


Eventually we rounded a corner and were shows way off in the distance, Upsala Glacier, which is packed in with bergs, so we could not get very close. They wheeled us around the corner and we saw this, flowing like an avalanche (in slow motion), coming down the mountain (thanks Pepper). This is Seco. Check out how the trees roll right up to just before the glacier line:


And then round another corner to see Spegazzani, which rolls into the lake:


(that wall of glacier, up from the lake surface is about 100 meters tall, just for scale).


I think this piece of ice is proof that there are Decepticons hidden in there somewhere, waiting for Megatron to find the all-spark and return them to service:


ANd then a long haul over to another finger of this impossibly huge lake (like, you sometimes cannot see the other side, big) to see Perito Moreno (also really huge), but it was really sunny out and very difficult to photograph. I bet Chris has better ones:




And then back through the desert (this is right outside of the port)


for a bus ride home through every crazy steep, dirt road in this town in a huge bus to drop everyone back off at their hotels. I'd tell you more about that, except that it would make my mom concerned for my safety and I'd have to get an email about it about not getting on buses like that again.

Today we are off to El Chalten, where we hope to see Mount Fitz Roy. I'm not sure what the big deal is about this mountain, but Chris wants to see it, so 3 hours of us driving through Guanacos is what we will do!

A bit of Ushuaia Catch-up

Feeling almost human again after a 4 hour nap today so I thought I'd review what has happened in the past couple of days.

Monday: We were forcibly extracted from the Vavilov and told that "we don't have to go home but we can't stay here." I bid a teary-eyed goodbye to the crew and our new friends and we headed into Ushuaia since it was 9 am and we were not yet allowed to check into our hotel. After a failed attempt to get on another boat to go look at seals (it started raining), we decided to go to the oddest museum ever (TM) with one of our new friends, Lindsay.

It was a Maritime museum (yo ho yo ho a pirates life for me... I think they jacked this guy from Disneyland):


And a prison museum:


And an art exhibit. Weird.

After that, we checked in and dropped off our luggage at our new residence, which is a bed and breakfast sort of place called a Hosteria. Happily for us, no one else wanted to get off the ship either, so some of us met up for dinner:






Tuesday: We had, somewhat stupidly, gotten really excited about penguins before we left and booked a 6 hour boat ride to a place called penguin island. Evidently, we did not get the memo about the fact that there would be Penguins in Antarctica. It turned out to be pretty awesome anyway as we saw a totally different species of penguin, the Magellanic, who are smaller and apparently do not stink as much as their neighbors to the south (there were also a couple of Gentoos hanging out on the beach with these guys, trying to blend in, which is funny, because they totally don't.) (I am now a penguin nerd and can identify like 10 different types of penguins by sight alone. Yay Berna, our ornithologist on the boat.)

I present to you, the Magellanic:


And here they are, on the beach:


In addition, they stopped at a southern sea lion colony:


And the light house:


Then we met up with some of the people from the ship for Hot chocolate before heading up the hill for bed.

This morning we got picked up super early to go on the southern most train in the world, which turns out to be a very short ride on not the train that was actually originally there, but it was a pleasant ride through some of the forests of Tierra Del Fuego National Park.


After that, we got picked up by our van to get driven around the park for a couple of hours to look at the native trees of the area.






We came back this afternoon and crashed out pretty hard for a few hours before going out for dinner tonight.

This town is pretty odd. There seems to be a dog communication tree going on at all times, so every dog in the town, and there are a LOT, is constantly barking. Also, about 50% of the houses are under construction so there is constant pounding and drilling and sawing going on. There also seems to be no zoning or city-run facilities, so sometimes there's a sidewalk, and sometimes there's not. Sometimes there's stairs up the hill, sometimes there's a big ramp, and sometmes there's a pile of dirt. There's really nice houses next to empty lots, next to odd stores next to state institutions. It's all kind of random. Here are my two favorite stores.
The Futurama Store (WTF?):


Mr. Cock (coffee for baby and kids???):


Anyway, the full set is up for Ushuaia here. Tomorrow, we head to El Calafate, where Chris is ging to attempt to drive in South America for the first time!