JULIE PRINCE FLOWERS

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I'm going to follow my sister-in-laws lead and let you all know about my wonderful mother-in-laws new website. She has been doing flowers for a few years and is amazing!!! Her work is so beautiful. Check it out and tell your friends! She did my bouquet pictured above.

PATAGONIA-Tierra del Fuego

Once you get to Ushuaia, it doesn't seem like you can get any farther south...but we did. We rented a car and drove south, following the peninsula as it hooks into the Atlantic. Aside from having "tea" at the Buenos Aires hotel, the other activity Liz had her heart set on was seeing the penguins. This was actually much harder to accomplish than it would seem. There is one island in Tierra del Fuego that has a colony of penguins who come to breed and rest during the summer months. This island is a protected wildlife habitat and so only 18 people are allowed onto the island each day. If you can get on it is great because you can walk around with them...if not you can get on a boat that circles the island and you take pictures from the boat...which is lame. We rented to car because the harbor you leave from is about two hours away from Ushuaia and due to annoying circumstances there was only one spot on the bus but two on the boat...so we drove, which ended up being much better. The drive winds through the heard of the Tierra del Fuego wilderness, which is full of dense forests and dozens of beautiful trout streams. If we had more time down there I would have spent 2 days just fishing. As with all Patagonian weather, the wind can be intense...below is a "flag tree". There are not many in the area, but they are all bunched together on a bluff. That is one tree that only clears the ground by about 2 inches in a few places.

More "flag trees".
This is the after driving through the mountains, we began to descend down to the harbor.

These are whale ribs and vertebrae...when Europeans first came here, it is rumored that the beaches were littered with whale bones.

We got to Harborton Estancia and took a small boat out to the island...it was a rubber boat that we slowly beached so as to not scare the penguins away.

There are two species of penguins here. I have forgotten their names but one has orange feet, wings and beak. This one builds a small rock nest on top of the ground and then sits on the eggs. This one is more endangered because the eggs are easier to get.Here you can see both species of penguins found in Tierra del Fuego. The smaller ones to the right are the other specie an they are only black and white and much smaller. They dig burrows and hatch their eggs underground. Almost all of the penguins you will see are of this kind.

The penguins here only have one natural predator...it is this bird below called a SKUA. It eats the eggs. This one was being nice because it had its baby on the log.

The species that burrow are only about 2 feet at the tallest.
This is an adolescent "black and white" penguin. You can tell because they are mostly gray for a month or so.

Mother and baby.
If you ever got close they would lower their head and turn it for some reason.

As usual the area is amazing.
Liz likes this picture....I don't know why.

They are very noisy...it was actually pretty loud with all of them in this field.


There is a new baby.


Our boat driver was wearing this full body, water proof Helly Hanson jump suit when we got in the boat...which made me a little nervous initially.
This is Harborton Estancia where we left from...that boat was not the one we took. That is the one for the losers who don't get to walk on the island...haha.

PATAGONIA-Ushuaia

We left the glaciers in El Calafate and flew down to the most southern city in the world...Ushuaia. This city sits ocean side at the bottom of South America as Argentina trickles into a peninsula. As you can see below, the Andes continue all the way down and the city sits between them and the Beagle Channel. This area of the world is very interesting because the Chilean peninsula runs right along side and from one island to the next the boards change. The continent breaks up down here into a series of islands all surrounded with channels of water coming from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. As such the oceans and weather change ever five minutes....it was windy and it was cold. This is obviously a port city with a big fishing industry as well as your chance to jump onto an expedition boat to Antarctica. These trips can run for two weeks and upwards of 30,000 dollars a person. Everything here was so green, a nice change from the deserts in upper Patagonia. Ushuaia is right in the middle of the region called Tierra Del Fuego (Land of Fire). Below is a picture we took while on a boat going out into the channel.

We took a boat out into the channel to visit some of the islands where the (now extinct) local tribes used to live. There are many islands out in the channel between two big sets of mountains...one belonging to Argentina and one to Chile.

These islands have been uninhabited for almost a hundred years now and due to the extremely low pollution in this part of the world, they are very pristine.
Behind us is the Beagle Channel and Ushuaia is sitting at the base of the mountains.

Liz was cold...as usual. But it was really cold so its okay.
The colors were so amazing, it was almost surreal. The sun doesn't set down here until almost 11:30pm so there is tons of time for taking great pictures in this light. This was about 10:00pm.

A colony of sea lions.
The lighthouse that sits out on the farthest island out in the channel.
The boat also took us to see some other sea lion colonies in the area.
Lots of cormorants and a seal.

The one in the middle with the big head is the male and these are all his females. They all lay on top of him to keep him warm....haha.

Ushuaia


They have a ski resort up there in the winter.

PATAGONIA-El Calafate

The main attraction for people going to El Calafate lies about 50 miles outside the town at the Pietro Moreno Glacier. Next to the polar ice caps, this is the longest continuous glacier in the world. It is part of the Great Southern Ice Field that extends west of the Andes along the Patagonian Santa Cruz region. It is also located within Glacier National Park. It is the third largest reserve of fresh water in the world. I have put a lot of pictures up of this glacier and many of them look the same but it was only to emphasize how enormous this thing it. You truly cannot comprehend how massive it is until you are next to it.

If you follow the glacier into the distance you can barely see it split into two frozen rivers running to the left and right.
The glacier is draining into Lake Argentinio on it's far left and right sides. But the middle section of the glacier actually extends over onto the land and it is at that contact point that you are continually hearing the cracking and seeing ice fall.
The next two pictures are of the glacier's contact point with the land. We were standing here because the cracking noises were the loudest and ice kept of breaking off as the day heated up. If you look at the next two pictures in succession you can see a piece of ice missing in the second picture...this missing chunk doesn't look that big but it was about the size of a suburban or two. In the picture below, the piece of ice that is still there is actually falling...i got the picture while in the air.
It you look at the dark indigo blue section of ice below...that is where the ice broke off. You can't image how great the colors are with the newly uncovered ice. As the ice continued to break off, we kept on hoping that we would see a frozen caveman or woolly mammoth stuck in the ice...perfectly preserved.



When you stare at this glacier and think about just how long it took for this to form, carve this valley and begin to melt...it makes you understand how we are just a speck in the time line of the world when compared to things like this.



We got in a boat that took us down to within 200 feet of the glacier itself. They won't get much closer than that because from the surface of the water the glacier rises to between 200-250 feet. If pieces break off and fall they can create enormous waves that can capsize the boat.

PATAGONIA-El Calafate

After 3 days in El Chalten we caught a bus back to El Calafate which is the only town in Patagonia with an airport. We flew in there days before but never saw the town, so now we have come back. We spend our time in the area between hiking around a lake called Lago Roca and going to the Perito Moreno Glacier. All the pictures in this post are of our day spend at Lago Roca. This lake is fed by the Perito Moreno Glacier and is an hour outside of the town. It seemed pretty remote when we got there in the morning but as the day went on many Argentinians came with their families to picnic. It really was a pretty place to go and take a rest day. We don't have any good pictures of them but the shoreline on one side of the lake was completely pink because it was full of flamingos which come here during the summer.

We hiked around the lake and then up a hillside to a meadow out of the wind for a picnic. We ate a bunch then ended up falling asleep in the sun for two hours. We both sun burned our faces which peeled until we got back to the humidity of Dominica.
We wandered through this forest which had green mossy stuff hanging from every branch. They all swayed in the wind which kind of made it seem eerie, I think it made Liz nervous.

The snow covered peak in the distance is where the glacier ends in a lake that feeds into this one.



I saw this rock while we were walking along the lake shore. It looked like a hard boiled egg that had been cracked but not opened. We looked at it for a while and debated whether or not to touch it. I barely touched my finger to the top of it and the entire rock collapsed into a hundred pieces. It scared me for a second as if I had acquired a some new power to destroy things with the touch of my finger. As I looked at the pile of uniform pieces it seemed as if the rock had made the decision to die, as if it's time had come. Maybe all these rocks had silent lives that were all destine to end at some time