A Reputable Journal

Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world.  It is in the Patagonia region, and the Tierra Del Fuego province of Argentina.  Thats a lot of geographical trivia for you in one statement.  Another fun fact about Ushuaia is that the Pan American Highway comes to an end here.  You can see Jane and I standing by the sign marking the southern end of the highway.  It doesn't look like much of a highway at this point since it is gravel, but nevertheless you could get on this road and start riding and 17,848 km later you would find yourself in Alaska.  Now that would be a bike ride.

Although Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world we are not as far south as you might imagine our latitude is only as far south as Washington DC is north, so there are no issues with permafrost or any of the other problems that plague the far north cities.  Interestingly though, there are glaciers very near the city, and we cruised by them and hiked near them today.  Ushuaia is located on the Beagle channel.  This is the channel that the famous ship carrying Charles Darwin discovered.

Our day in Ushuaia was full of hiking with people we've met from Cruise Critic.  There were 11 of us that had joined in a private tour with Christine and Craig from Australia.  Our driver and guide, Edgar, was very pleasant, and knowledgeable.  He stayed awake the entire trip!  He hiked with us and pointed out interesting plants and things along the way.  Our main hiking was in the Tierra del Fuego National Park.  Here are a couple of photos to give you an idea of how pretty it was.  Jane and I are going to try to find an Internet Cafe in Punta Arenas so hopefully with some speedier connectivity I can get some larger versions uploaded to Flickr.

One of the interesting things I discovered on the hike was how similar this area is compared to northern minnesota.  Its striking how the effects of the glaciers leave exactly the same marks even though we are in completely different parts of the world.  In some places you would think you were on the shores of lake superior instead of standing next to the Beagle Channel.

After hiking in the national park all morning, we got in the van and drove to the ski area above the city.  Here we were able to take a ski lift up the mountain to another hiking area.  If we had more time we could have continued to hike up the mountain to the glacier.  Sadly, the hike was too long and we didn't want to miss the ship!  While we were doing a short hike at the top of the lift we were lucky enough to see an Albatross soaring in the sky.  These birds are huge, with wingspans of up to 3.5 meters!  Sadly it was too far away to get a decent picture.

Here's a shot of the view on the way down the ski lift.

And here you can see our ship on the pier with the city in the foreground.

So far I would say that Ushuaia is my favorite city of the cruise.

We have great table mates this cruise!  Kim and Rico from Houston, Shyla and Yogi from Ohio, and Rachel and Howard from New Jersey.  We look forward to sharing stories of our day with them each night at the late seating.  This is worth remarking on because we have seldom had good luck with our dinner companions.  From the guy from Hutchinson who kept asking me “you gonna eat that?” to Marge (not sure thats her real name) from Jersey (definitely sure she was from Jersey)  who complained every night.  Here’s a sample of one conversation:
Marge:  They never have any good soup on this cruise!
Brad: What kind of soup do you like?
Marge: Cream of Mushroom
Brad:  Well, we had that last night
Marge (exasperated): But I didn’t order it last night!
This sort of luck has continued for us cruise after cruise, until this one.   Except for the cruises we have taken with our great friends Brian and Holly!  Anyway since it is just the two of us on this trip, we are grateful for the companionship.  Now lest you think this post is going to be about dinner and our waiter, I’m going to shift gears and tell you about our day.  We were in Puerto Madryn, but the excursion we had planned was a trip to the Valdez Peninsula.  This was an excursion that we booked outside the ship through Forastero Tours.
We were among the first 20 people off the ship this morning, wanting to get ahead of all the big tour busses that were heading the same place we were.  We met our guide and driver on the pier and hopped in their car.  Our guide introduced himself – I’m not going to tell you his name, because I’m convinced he will be an excellent tour guide someday and I don’t want what I’m about to relate to you to harm him in any way – and proceeded to tell us that this was his first time leading a tour, and that he was still studying for his certification as a guide.  He also hoped his english was good – it was passable.  The next thing he should have said was, “so you’re in luck, your tour today will be half price!”  But that isn’t what he said.  In fact he didn’t say all that much, period.  He did tell us that there are four main economic industries in Puerto Madryn, The Aluminum factory is number one, something, something, and then tourism.
Now, its a long drive from the port to our destination on Peninsula Valdez, about 169km in fact.  The other interesting factoid about this part of the world is that the ecology around Peurto Madryn is steppe or steppe-like?  A large unforrested region of grassland.  This was a combination of small shrubs and sand.  In other words there is really nothing interesting to see on this drive, except for the occasional Guarananca or Piche – but I’m getting ahead of myself.  Well, not really, there were two destinations for todays trip.  First, the San Lorenzo Penguin Colony, and second Punta Norte Sea Lion and Elephant Seal colonies.  Oh yeah, the last 76km to the Punta Norte are on gravel road.
So after riding most of the way in silence, we are approaching the Penguin colony and our guide says.  “In a few moments we will be at the penguin colony, here is a penguin”  At which point he pulls out a picture of a penguin.  He continues:  “Penguins are black and white, with a white band up here (pointing to the white band on their head) and a black band here (pointing to the black band).  I think both Jane and I were struggling to keep a straight face at this point, but one of us managed to say “interesting.”  Of course what he didn’t know is that this was “interesting” in the Iowa/Minnesota sense of the word.  Here concludes the fascinating section of the commentary on penguins.  To summarize:  They are black and white and have two bands.
Let me add a bit more detail that I learned on my own, and from the lecture given by the naturalist on board the Infinity…  The penguins that we were about to see are called Magellanic Penguins, named for Magellan who sailed these parts back in the late 1500’s.  Maybe now you are getting a sense for the title of this post? Ferdinand?  Ferdinand?  anyone? anyone?  Yes, Ferdinand Magellan!  I’m so clever.
I know I’m sounding a little snarky about the tour today, but it really turned out just fine.  because we were just the two of us on our own tour, we got to the Penguin colony well ahead of the masses, in fact we had the place all to ourselves, and that made it worth it right there.  Would I have liked some more insightful commentary?  Sure.  But the kid was sincere and earnest so its hard to be too upset with him.  If I’m upset with anything its with Forastero tours for sending us a rookie.
Anyway, without further ado, here are some penguin pics for you!  yes, we were up close and personal with the penguins.

This little guy was not happy.  I think he was hungry and Mom was not coming through.


After the Penguins we continued further up the road to Punta Norte where we saw both Sea Lions and Elephant Seals.  Punta Norte is the only place in the world where you can see the Elephant seals.  At other times of the year, and at high tide, you also stand a chance of seeing an Orca coming into try and catch a baby Sea Lion, but no such luck today.  Anyway, here’s a shot of the beach, you can see the Sea Lions down below.  the Elephant seals are way on the far right end of the coast here and we could see them with the binoculars, but not so well with the camera lens.


After watching the Sea Lions we found a nice place to sit and enjoy some sandwiches for lunch.  While we were eating lunch the friendly neighborhood Armadillo (piche en espanol) came around hoping we would share with him, or her Im not sure how you tell with Armadillos.

The last and final episode with our young guide happened on the way back to the ship.  We had to take the exact same route back to the ship that we followed to get to Punta Norte, but lets just say the ride seemed shorter for some people than for others.  Yep, he actually fell asleep on the ride back!  I think the driver was ready to reach across, open the door and push him out.
Its funny how all of our excursions involve both a driver and a guide.  In each case we are led to believe that the driver does not speak english.  In this case I’m pretty sure the driver was much more experienced than the actual guide, as he seemed to know many of the other guides at Punta Norte.  Furthermore I think he understood and probably spoke english just fine.  He also did an excellent job of scanning the countryside and the road ahead for interesting animals.  We could tell that he was the one who would spot them and then tell our guide what was coming up.  His job today was to give junior some feedback on his first outing.  I’m pretty sure he got an earful!
The day ended on a very positive note.  Jane got on a roll at the craps table and ended the night over $400 ahead.  She made a lot of other people at the table very happy too.

I’m sitting here watching the sun come up over the city of Punta del Este.   The water is perfectly calm except for the waves created by some of the tender ships taking the earliest of early passengers over to the pier.  There are plenty of clouds in the sky today, but there is still the occasional blue patch.  We are close enough to shore that we can see the beaches spread out in all directions.
We don’t have anything planned for today except to tender ashore and walk around for a bit.
Yesterday we were in Montevideo, we had arranged a tour with Marta along with a group of people from the cruise critic message boards.  It was a driving/walking tour of the city, along with a stop at the Bouza Winery just outside the city.  The winery is only about 10 years old, which is about the average age for wineries in Uruguay.  Since it is getting toward the end of summer here they were just starting the harvest, so we got to see some of the equipment they were using for squashing and processing the grapes.  There were also a lot of very ripe grapes on the vine.
Here is the aging room where they age some of their wines.  Some of the barrels are made of french oak, and some of american oak.  The winery is pretty scientific about how they keep track of which batch of wine comes from which section of the vineyard.  They also keep 20 bottles from every harvest for every different kind of wine they make.

After the tour, of course we had to do a tasting. We had a white blend, along with a rose, a merlot, and a red blend.  We asked to try their Chardonnay and their Malbec, unfortunately they only had the chardonnay left for tasting; it was good but I actually liked the white blend we tried originally better.
After the tasting, we were all tired… Big surprise right!  But we had a little more touring left to do.  We climbed montevideo’s only large hill where we were treated to a great view of the harbor and our ship.  Its right in the middle of the photo below.

Overall it was a nice tour.  Last night was the first formal night on the ship, and it was fun to get out the old tuxedo again and enjoy some good food and a nice show, iBroadway.  Jane and I can both check frog legs off the list of foods we have tried.  Guess what?  They taste like chicken.

It was a beautiful two days in Buenos Aires.  Lets start with moving in to our room on the ship.  Other than the taxi driver overcharging us dumb Americans for the ride from the airport to the Puerta de Crucera everything about the checkin process went very well.  Our room is great, we have this curved wall of windows that makes you feel like you are just suspended out over the water.  Our sitting area is really a great place to just hang out and watch the sea go by.  The luggage all arrived intact, and we were even able to smuggle a few bottles of wine we picked up at the airport onto the ship.

We had two nice surprises on checkin:  First, our room is close enough to the Internet Cafe that we actually get a wireless signal in the room, and because we are in a suite we get 180 minutes of free wireless.  That may not last the whole trip but its a good start.  The second surprise was that we had a complimentary meal at the SS United States for our first night on the ship.  This is the only specialty restaurant on board, and it is definitely a good one.

It was hard to choose from the menu there were so many good options.  I had Diver Scallops wellington with truffle emulsion, Lobster Bisque, Surf & Turf (more lobster tail for the surf part) and of course chocolate souffle for desert.  Jane had similar except she had a pear and goat cheese tart instead of the diver scallops, and a salad instead of the bisque. We washed it all down with a nice bottle of Far Niente Chardonnay.

When we were leaving the restaurant the cruise director happened to be outside the door taping a segment for the next days onboard news and information channel.  We waited until we though it was safe for us to sneak by him inconspicuously, but that was not to be.  He spotted us and pulled us over for a quick on camera interview about our dining experience.  So, now we are famous for a few days.

Our second day in BA was even better than the first.  The main activity for the day was a delta river cruise.  Just north of Buenos Aires is a huge river delta, formed by the Plata river as it finishes its journey from the mountains of brazil and empties into the Atlantic Ocean.  We met our tour guides out front of the cruise terminal and they drove us through the city, pointing out interesting sites along the way.  Actually our driver and the owner of the company, Gaston, didn't say too much since he did not speak English, but our guide and interpreter did a great job.

We arrived at the Marina and got on board the boat.  It was a beautiful new 30 foot cabin cruiser, perfect for river cruising.  We took off up one of the main channels and just cruised along enjoying the sun and warm weather.  We laughed a bit at the fact that there are actually billboards along the side of the channel.  This gives you an idea of the amount of water traffic that uses this part of the river.  In fact the delta is home to a lot of people who commute by boat, and is the equivalent of going up to the lake for many other BA residents.  Everything in the delta uses water for transportation.  Everything from grocery delivery to garbage pickup is done by water.

Need some groceries?  You just put a bag over the end of a pole on your dock and the grocery boat will stop for you.  On garbage day you just hang your bags of garbage out on the end of the dock and the garbage boat takes them away.

After cruising through some residential areas we anchored in a very peaceful side channel to have some lunch... A nice local cerveza and some meat and cheese.  It was good, and light, which was perfect since we were still plenty full from our meal the night before.  Note to mike and Sarah, We signed up for six sessions of boot camp while we are on board, and although the first session was during our tour, we did work out before hand!

After the tour we got dropped off in downtown Buenos Aires where we walked through the busy city streets, and looked at the shops and bought a souvenir for Josh.  Josh:  check out the Buenos Aires football clubs.

Of course we had the obligatory lifeboat drill, but then we enjoyed our sail away from Beuenos Aires in our room:

At dinner we went to our regular table in the main dining room, its located right next to the windows on the very back of the ship next to the captains table.  There was a little mixup at first with 10 of us thinking we belonged at this table for 8.  The waiter got that sorted out by moving this english couple to their proper table.  It seems that they were seated at our table the night before when 6 of us were eating at other places.  We really seem to have a nice table:  One couple from Houston TX, another from Ohio, she is the dean of a small college,  and another couple from New Jersey.  We had very good conversation, and it looks like it will be fun to get together and compare notes with them each night.

Have you ever had an experience where afterwards you said, "it took my breath away!"?  Today was one of those experiences for me.  I was awake, with the sun, at about 6:30 this morning;  3AM back in Decorah, but we were so tired from the previous two days that we were in bed before 10, and slept soundly through the night.  After having some coffee and breakfast in the hotel, Jane and I took off on the "Inferior Falls" hike.  The inferior falls trail is the lower trail that takes you down to the base of the falls and the river.  We were literally the only ones on the trail, and it seemed that around each turn there was a view of the falls more beautiful than the last.  I posted a bunch of photos to my flickr account, its a lot of waterfall pictures, but you just can't capture the beauty of it all with a camera.  I've been experimenting with the exposure bracketing feature of my camera, and so some of these are three images combined into one using the HDR editor on Aperture.

As we neared the bottom of the trail we spotted a pair Toucans up in the tree, along with several other interesting birds. You can see the Toucan in the picture below.   At this point we were also able to buy our tickets for the boat trip under the falls....  But first there was a walkway that went right up to the falls.

I am the person in the mist in the picture below.  This was one of those wild kingdom kind of moments..  In your best Marlin Perkins voice you can say:  "While Jane stays safely dry at the beginning of the platform Brad will tame the raging river and get drenched."  And this was the experience that literally took my breath away.  You just can't believe the force of the falls until you get right up to it like I did.  The wind that is created by the crashing of the water is like being in a thunder storm, and before I even realized what was going on, I was completely soaked from head to toe.  Between the force of the wind, and the perceived force of the water my breath just went right out of my lungs.

As I think about my own experience standing at the end of the platform, I have to wonder about the people that built this thing!  Who in their right mind would go to work each morning,  to build something where you were thinking that if you slipped, (and I'm sure that during construction it was plenty slippery) you would get smashed against the rocks below you by water with thousands of pounds of force.

There is lots of wildlife in the park, we saw many species of birds, and a little hamster size rodent.  Others in our group saw a snake eating a frog -- sorry I missed that one.  But the most prevalent creature were these little things that we though were ringtail lemurs, but the locals had a different name for them.  Here's one of them begging lunch off another tourist.  Their snouts are quite long, and we were told that they are a member of the anteater family.

After our experience on the platform, our next goal was the boat ride.  On this ride you get some great views of the falls from the river, and assuming you have a waterproof camera, some good pictures.  Then after you have seen the beauty of the falls the captain of the boat plays a game called "lets see how close to the falls we can get without going under."  In the picture below you can see the boat ahead of us headed into the falls.  I'll admit that when I was standing on dry land and watching this I was thinking to myself, "who in their right mind would get into a boat and do that?"  But, when we were actually in the boat it seemed perfectly safe, and the boat was very stable.

Jane had the Flip video camera inside a waterproof bag when we got on the boat but mostly the video is a wall of white, and sound.  Here's a little bit of video from when we are near the falls, but not yet in the roiling water:

We were really glad we did the boat ride, as we got to see the even larger Brazilian falls that you can't see from the hiking trails in Argentina.

After hiking back up to the hotel, we picked up my camera and got a new battery for the waterproof camera and set out for the train ride to El Diablo, this is another cool little hike where you go out to the top of the very large falls, and stand and watch the water spill over.  The water levels are quite high this year which makes everything even more spectacular.  Here's a couple of shots from the top of the falls.  Again, there are more without me in them on flickr.

After all of this hiking in the Jungle heat and humidity, we were quite tired and hot, so we headed back to the pool at the hotel to relax and rest up for a while.  Our final stop of the day was back in the city of Puerto Iguazu where we had a dinner reservation at Aqva restaurant.

We booked a round trip cab ride (200 pesos) at the front desk, which turned out to be a great deal.  We had a very personable cab driver named Ronny, who took us for a little site seeing and shopping before dropping us off at the restaurant.  After dropping us off he waited for us to eat and then took us back to the hotel.  Before dinner we had a beautiful view of the river from the city, where you can see Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay at the three corners of where the river splits.

The restaurant is decorated in Pacific Northwest style, and the food is a great blend of Argentinian and Italian cuisine.  We had a fantastic meal of Argentine steak and a lovely bottle of Malbec.  My steak came with a leak tart which was surprisingly delicious, and Jane had potatoes that were stuffed with cheese and ham.  The service was top notch, and we had the opportunity to chat with the owner, Jorge Antonio, who was very nice.... We topped off our dinner with a tiny bit of Limoncello.  The Limoncello was quite possibly the best we have ever tasted, so we asked the owner if he made it himself or imported it from Italy.  He said he made it himself and promised to share his top secret recipe with us if we sent him an email.  Just when we thought we were ready to leave the owner brought us a complimentary glass of Argentinian champagne to keep us happy for the ride back to the hotel.  If you get to Iguazu you should definitely check out Aqva.

And so it begins.  Another travel adventure.  This one just Jane and I.  The itinerary is a South American Cruise from Buenos Aires, Argentina around Cape Horn and up to Valparaiso, Chile; with many stops along the way.  Here's a summary of Days one and two.

We left Decorah with our friends John and Llew at 8:00AM to drive to the airport, we have several plans for getting back from the airport -- the nice thing is that we didn't need to park our car at $20 per day for 16 days.  While we are away Josh and our God daughter Liz are in charge of the house.  Decorah friends take note of that last sentence!  We are flying American all day, and of course the first face I see when we get to the American Counter is the infamous Cat -- see my first post from JTerm travels.  Luckily we got our luggage checked in just fine without her.  When we got to the gate we checked with the gate agent to see if we could change our seats on the Dallas to Buenos Aires portion of the flight.  I really wanted to find a seat with a power port.  Nine hours in the air could require a recharge of the iPad.  She was so nice that she moved us to a bulkhead/exit row seat -- nine hours of legroom!!

The rest of the air travel was uneventful, and we arrived in BA right on time.  Jane and I both managed at couple of hours of napping during the night, but nothing particularly restful.  BA is 3 hours ahead of central time so jet lag is not going to be a big factor.  Once off the plane we had to go through immigration and passport control.  We have to pay $140 each to visit Argentina, this is listed as reciprocity for the Visas that we make the Argentinians pay.

The plan was to get through immigration as quickly as possible and get on our car to the other airport (Jorge Newberry) where we are taking a flight to Iguazu for two days before the cruise.   We had reserved the 3:05 flight but were really hoping to get to the airport in time for the 11:35 flight.  We knew it would be tight but were hoping to avoid spending valuable hours in the airport.  Here's where the plan started to fray...  After paying our reciprocity fee we got shunted out of the line for people from the US into the line for Argentinians and other visitors.  This line ended up being much longer and slower.  As the minutes ticked away we resigned ourselves to an afternoon in the airport.  We did meet two very nice women who were traveling alone, one was going to antarctica as part of an academic expedition and the other was celebrating her birthday by going horseback riding.

We ended up sharing our car with Denise -- the horseback rider -- The drive from BA International to Jorge Newberry is supposed to take anywhere from 15 minutes to 3 hours depending on who you read and what time of day, our drive was a harrowing 45 minutes.  Drivers here make up their own lanes and rules as they go along.  We got to the airport just after 11:00 which we were sure was too late for the 11:35 flight.  But luck was with us and the flight was delayed by an hour, so we were able to change to the earlier flight  -- with no change fee!

We cleared security and found our way to gate 3 where we met up with several people from the cruise critic message board, I'll just call them the CC people until I get to know them better.  Jane has been conversing online with some of these people for almost a year, and it was fun to meet up with some fellow americans to pass the time.

We arrived at the Iguazu airport, and the plane parked at one of the two gates.  We waited forever for Jane's bag, and then got a cab to the Sheraton, which is located in the Iguazu National Park.  To summarize, we left Decorah at 8:00AM on the 24th and we arrived in Iguazu at 3:00 on the 25th.  A long days of travel! Just as we left the airport it started to rain, hard!  But, by the time we got checked in to our room and started to think about what to do with the rest of the day the rain stopped again.

Iguazu is amazing!  The falls here are huge, you just can't believe the volume of water that pours over these things every second.  For those of you as old as me who are into movies at all, these falls are the sight of the movie The Mission.  Here's one picture to whet your appetite.

I took this one on what is called the upper falls hike.  Its probably the driest hike we are going to take.  Next up is the lower falls hike which I will do in my swimsuit, and a boat ride that goes right up to the falls.

To finish off the story of our first day, we met up with the CC group again to have a drink in the hotel bar and dinner together.  I think this is going to be very nice to know a few people going into the cruise.  The dinner was pretty good.  Jane had seafood risotto and I had a nice Argentine steak.  The funniest thing was that Jane got dripped on through a leak in the roof when the rain started up again.