Arrived in Ushuaia at 8pm, booked into Antarctica Hostel....nice :o) ...but a bit more expensive than the rest of Argentina. Most of the hostels have been between 18 and 25pesos (3 or 4GBP), but this one is 30 (5GBP). It's really clean and friendly and has free internet so happy to pay a bit more.
Went to Dublin bar for a couple of drinks with some people who had just come off the last cruise ship from Antarctica - I was going to try to hop on a late deal to get there but I'm too late - it's too cold now and the cruises stopped running so I'll just have to pop back another time.

Saturday - The weather is pretty much the same as England at the moment - much warmer than I had imagined :o) Went for lunch with a couple of guys from my room in the hostel (Kun and Sebastian) and also accidentally met up with Brian who I met before in Bariloche. We all went to the prison museum and the Fin Del Mundo (end of the world) museum - both were really interesting. We had some drinks at the hostel and then everyone from our hostel room went for dinner at Moustaccio (great name for a restaurant!!). It was really fun - a good mix of Argentinians, Dutch, German and lil old me representing England.

It's been really interesting meeting people from so many different countries - and it's been really amazing that the majority of people have been really nice and generally quite interesting. In the whole 2 months I've been away, I've only met 2 duff people!! The first was an Irish girl in Rio, who I then had the misfortune to bump into again in Bariloche, she was just a bit rude and snotty but quite easy to ignore!! The other one was a guy in Ushuaia, which it why I just thought about this now - this guy is talented tho' - he is able to irritate an entire room full of people within 2 minutes!! You gotta hand it to him, that's really quite impressive!! ... this guy is so desperate for attention he prances around the hostel, up and down the stairs, around the chill out area - just trying to get people to notice him!! We were trying to guess where he was from but we all got it wrong - he was Dutch!! (....Rachel, Brian and Kun were horrified by this!! - and I was really relieved he wasn't English!! ha ha)

Sunday - Sebastian, Kun, Brian and I went for a hike up to the Martial glacier. The glacier is not the most impressive glacier in the world, but the view from the top was really nice - you could see right across the city and the Beagle Channel, but the weather was a bit pants, quite cold to begin with and then it started raining as we got to the top, so we got really wet and cold, but we warmed ourselves up at the bottom with some soup in the cafe.

We went on a beaver tour in the evening - a few years ago some bright spark decided to bring 25 pairs of beavers to Argentina to breed for their fur, but because of the climate the fur they produced wasn`t good enough quality. So, the beavers were set free into the wild with the expectation that they would just die, however, instead they multiplied really fast and there are now over 100,000 of them living around Ushuaia. There are no beaver preditors here so they have no threat, except from man. It is becoming a big problem though because they're destroying the forests to build their dams, there are soooo many dead trees around. In an attempt to cull a few of them, the government will pay 15pesos for each beaver you kill - if you want to become a beaver-hunter, you can go to the government and they will give you 12 beaver traps and some instructions!!

Anyway, despite there being so many of them, we just managed to see 1 male from a distance - the weather was too cold and rainy so it was a bit duff really. The tour included a snack and wine so we went to a cabin in the forest for most of the tour!! Not the best 100pesos I've ever spent, but you can't rely on wild animals to parade on demand or on the weather to be great all the time!!

Monday - The weather cleared up and it was a really sunny day so I hiked up to Cerro del Medio with Sebastian. It was a bit muddy, but it was a really nice hike through the woods. We made it up to where the trees ended and we could see the view across the channel and city - a much better view than from the Martial glacier. 

We had a BBQ in the evening (Kun, Seb, Brian, Rachel & I) - Sebastian wanted to cook a traditional Argentinian asada (Argie name for a BBQ) for us - the weather was a bit cold to be sitting outside, but we drank red wine to keep us warm!! .....asada includes several different cuts of beef and sausages - I think I probably ate more meat in one evening than I have in the last year!! ...but everyone keeps telling me Argentinian beef is the best so I had to try it all!

Tuesday - went for a boat ride along the Beagle channel with Rachel and Kun - we saw penguins, the lighthouse, Port William and some sealions which was really cool, but the sea was a bit rough on the way back so I spent the last hour of it with my eyes closed feeling a bit nausious.....must remember to avoid boats in the future!!
In the evening we had a few drinks at the hostel, went back to Moustaccio for dinner and then to the Dublin Bar.

Wednesday - Went to the national park to hike along the coast with Anne Marie and Rachel - it was a really sunny day so it was a really beautiful hike - along beaches and through the forest. We stopped off at the Fin Del Mundo - end of the world post office to get our passports stamped too.
Rachel and I went to buy our bus tickets - she going to Pto Madryn and me to El Calafate. We both need to go via Rio Gallegos so we booked the same bus on Friday morning - 5.30am!! eeeek. Bus ticket cost 143pesos (24GBP).

We were supposed to be going to a tango show in the evening, but dinner ended up taking a while so we ended up in another Irish bar instead - really nice cocktails!! We did go to check out the tango show, but it wasn't really a show, it was just a milonga (tango dance hall) so there were just lots of locals dancing tango - we would have had to pay to go in so we didn't bother. 

Thursday - had a lie in!! The weather was a bit pants again - rainy and cold so I spent most of the afternoon downloading photos but I screwed up the labelling on the ones from Pto Madryn so they're all jumbled up again....ahhhhh!! I packed all my stuff and then met up with Rachel, Sebastian and Anne Marie for dinner and a few drinks at Galway Irish bar. We decided to stay awake all night so we'd sleep on the bus the next day so we got tickets for a magic / juggling / mime type show thing (apparently this kind of show is quite popular in BA) - we got picked up at the hostel at midnight and went to a really amazing bar / restaurant just outside Ushuaia. The bar overlooks the water and has a huge window so you can just sit and look out across the water - the whole place is made of wood and stone so it felt really warm and cozy. The show started at 2am - it was quite bizarre - not really sure how to describe it - a cross between laurel and hardy and clowns - including the custard pie in the face thing at the end!! It only lasted half an hour, but we stayed in the bar til 4am and got a taxi back to the hostel. There were still a few people up so it wasn't too much of a problem to kill time til catching the bus at 5.30am.....