Travel Talk and Penguins

When travelling, I suppose you have to be prepared for at least the possibility of some things going wrong. For a couple days I seemed to be having a string of bad luck...I grabbed my sunglasses out of my bag and both arms had snapped off, I forgot a couple small things in one of our rooms, my laptop died, we had to pay surcharges for our baggages because they don't allow as much weight on domestic flights, and then we found out that our flight to Ushuaia had been cancelled.

The agent at the Iguazu airport was not very helpful, basically telling us that it wasn't his problem and that there were no flights to Ushuaia that day. We started to think we were going to have to cancel the Ushuaia leg of our trip. But when we got to Buenos Aires, we found a manager who was much more efficient and got us on a flight with a different airline later in the day and arranged a car to take us to the other airport (a bit confusing, having two airports so far from each other in Buenos Aires). Our flight was shorter than we expected, and in the end we only lost a few hours...whew! So our luck turned around and in any case, none of these annoyances seem as dire when you're travelling and relaxing and seeing all kinds of amazing things.

Our first night in Ushuaia Caroline and I found a really nice place for dinner, where we both had Fuegian trout that was well-prepared and tried a wine from a different area of Argentina, Neuquen, near Bariloche. I had some kind of stuffed pear with mint carrot coulis for dessert...really different!

Yesterday we hiked a bit in the Parque National Tierre del Fuego. The landscape there was really kind of curious...so many things appeared dead or dying, actually. There were many fallen trees. We found this one lake full of half-dead trees that made me feel like I'd stepped into a Tim Burton film.

Next we headed back into the town, where we took a long cruise around the Beagle Channel. We saw animals on little islands - sea lions, cormorants, and eventually...penguins! I have been wanting to see penguins for a long time, and these ones were pretty adorable. We weren't able to get terribly close to them, unfortunately (so no photo of me and a penguin like I´d hoped), but I'm not sure that human contact would be very beneficial for the penguins anyway. It was amusing enough to watch them waddle around.

Last night we tried a speciality in this region - King crab, or centolla in Spanish. They prepare it in a variety of ways (sort of like mussels) and I tried provencal, with garlic, spinach and parsley. It was really very tasty, but funny in that it comes in a bowl composed almost purely of crab, with no side accompaniments. That's one thing I haven't quite gotten used to here - dishes don't usually come with vegetables or grains on the side; you have to order that separately.

Oh, and a bit more about Iguazu. The first day we only had a couple hours at the falls and it poured, so we just did a shorter trail called the Upper Circuit. We were blessed with a gorgeous, sunny day for our second full day. First we did a longer trail called the Lower Circuit. The infrastructure at this place was insane - I don't know how they've managed to construct all those metal walkways. At some points you can get up really close to some (because there are many, many different waterfalls all grouped together) of the waterfalls - close enough to get soaked, in fact! Later we took a toy train up to another area to see what it supposed to be the most spectacular part, the Devil's Throat as they call it in English. Again, insanity. Biggest falls ever, I guess. Then we did a hike through a jungle-like area that ended at a small body of water with a smaller (in comparison) waterfall where we took a quick swim.

Today we have some more time to explore to town of Ushuaia, and late this afternoon we have a short flight to El Calafate. I just got an e-mail saying that our flight time has been moved ahead by one hour and am hoping our air travel will go a little more smoothly this time.