Calafate y Ushuaia

 

Hola, gente linda!

Here are some photos of my 5-day trip to Calafate and Ushuaia! It was beautiful (and cooold) down there!

 This is glacier Perito Moreno: named after a scientist who studied the insects who live on it. The bugs look like black crickets and are able to survive because of the sticky coating on their skin. Luckily I only saw the little guys in photos, not in person! lol.

 We trekked on Perito Moreno for about an hour.

 ...Wearing these spiky shoes! We had to walk like ducks when ascending (with our feet positioned like this: \ / ) to make sure the all the spikes hit the ice in front of us at once, and descend in sort of a march.

 Glaciers, we learned, are formed from the accumulation of snow in between the mountains. When the gaps between them fill up completely, the snow all compresses, and the eventual overflow forms glaciers! They're millions of years old. Compared to these glaciers, our entire lives are a snap!

 I love the color of these témpanos (icebergs)! I like, too, to see all the trees at the bottom of the mountains. Guanacos (like orange llamas: my favorite Patagonian animal) live in these mountains. They're a natural thermometer for residents, because the colder it is, the lower on the mountains they go!

 After all of our iceberg adventures (which lasted two days), we got the chance to go out and explore the pueblito (the little town). One of Christina Kircher's (the president's) houses are there! We explored the souvenir shops, ate calafate-flavored ice cream (Calafates only grow in this region: that's why the city is named Calafate! They're similar to blueberries, but a little more sour), and went to a wonderful vegan cafe (pictured here) where I ate mushroom pizza and drank Patagonian tea. I bought my first souvenir from Argentina in a wool shop we visited. The Patagonian region is famous for its wool (they have sheep, llama, alpaca...). I thought the style and colors of this scarf were really cool, so I bought it! It's sheep's wool, $25.

 We took a 4x4 to the top of a mountain and looked at the mountain pieces the glaciers and old rivers left. The landscape reminds me of the moon!

 I love this graffiti! An homage to indigenous art. (I've learned so many words for "indigenous!" Indígena, autóctono, indio... I'm proud of both what I've learned about the American Indigenous and my vocabulary advancement! lol)

 Now, some photos from Tierra del Fuego in Ushuaia! This old lighthouse (which was replaced by another, which looks more like the lighthouses we're used to seeing) marks "the end of the world" — it marked the last place explorers could stop on their journeys to Antarctica. Darwin passed through this area on the Beagle, and Jules Verne wrote about this lighthouse.

 We visited the prison museum in Ushuaia and took a guided tour. In the old days, Ushuaia only had about 300 residents, and this jail held about 500 prisoners. It was a high-security prison (at "the end of the world!"), and sheltered political prisoners (anarchists, etc.) and the most dangerous of criminals. The prisoners learned crafts and made things like tiles and doors. The cells were all tiny, and some of the prisoners wore ankle restraints and weights. It's terrible to imagine innocent political dissidents living this way!

 I thought this was funny: a door between the iron bars of a jail marked "Salida" ("Exit").

 After another 4x4 trip (this one off-road), we ate choripan (Argentine beef cooked over a fire and eaten with bread: "chorizo" and "pan," meat and bread) and chorizo in a refuge made of leña and chapa (timber and sheet metal) and heated with an old stove. We also drank wine. Argentina is famous for wine: it's delicious and relatively cheap!

 The next day we rowed inflatable canoes in Lago Argentino. It was beautiful out there, and fun to row a boat!

 The forests we walked through were full of lichens called "barbas de viejo," old mens' beards, which only grow in places where the air is really pure. It was full, too, of fallen trees. Because the glaciers that passed through made the land a lot less fertile, the trees were forced to spread their roots across the top of the land instead of growing downward. The wind (which is strong!) blows them over a lot. We walked for four miles through this forest and stopped to look at foliage and views around the lake.

 I love the colors of these rocks!

 The shells were also beautiful! My pictures of them didn't really turn out, but you can see one (a purple color) towards the top right.

 I loved the colors of the water!

 We stopped to rest on some hills by the lake. They felt like they were covered in turf. The guide told us that they weren't formed naturally, but are mounds of old remains from the Yamaná natives' food wastes (seashells, bones, etc.). The guide found an arrowhead right at the top! Here you can see us all looking for something cool of our own (with no luck, lol). The Yamaná ate sea lions and covered their skin with the animals' greasy fat in order to develop a warm, waterproof coating. I wonder what happened to them! I'll have to do some Wiki research about that later.

 Here is a view of the same hills.

 ¡Qué lindo! How beautiful!

I had a wonderful time, but was glad to return to Buenos Aires (pictured here)! I love being in the city, and this one in particular! =)