B & E: 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.