Antarctica, Part I: Argentina

The Journey Begins!

After a long night of last-minute packing, we set off to Buenos Aires by way of Miami. Things I needed but forgot to pack: Spanish language phrasebook.

Here are a few highlights of Argentina, or, as I like to call it, the Land of Ham and Cheese.

Warning: Long and very possibly boring blogpost behind the cut, with no penguin pictures.


When you think Argentina, you would normally think of beef. Or the tango. Or, if you were kind of strange, the rich fossil deposits in Patagonia including the Awesomasaurus.

My enduring memory will be the ham and cheese sandwiches.

Every single meal on the airplane, except dinner, consisted of a ham and cheese sandwich. Breakfast? Jamon con queso. Lunch? Jamon con queso. Snack? Jamon con freaking queso. Not a peanut in sight. By the time we touched down in Ushuaia I had five of the damn things in my backpack.

And the restaurant menus were basically divided into Meat, which referred to the racks of whole lamb carcasses roasting in every window, and Sandwiches, which meant a list of things like "Ham and Cheese with Onion" and "Ham and Cheese with Lettuce But Without Onion".

But I digress.




The port where we would eventually catch our ship was Ushuaia, the Southernmost City in the World. This is apparently not a catchy enough catchphrase for the Ushuaians, so every object large enough to write on bears the slogan "Ushuaia: Fin Del Mundo!" which has that classy, apocalyptic sound that's all the rage in remote parts of the world.




Ushuaia is breathtakingly beautiful, nestled next to the water with streets trailing up into the mountains that surround it on all sides. Since we arrived a day early, we got to spend some time wandering about. We didn't get to hit the major tourist attractions (such as the historical prison or the Train to the End of the World), but the everyday sights weren't half bad.

A few points of interest:

* There are no mannequins in Ushuaia. All clothing is modeled by giant plastic penguins. In Christmastime, these penguins wear Santa hats.

* There is a diorama of a Yahgan Indian village outside the Territorial Museum of Tierra del Fuego. The plastic Indian in the diorama is naked. I did not discover this until I was zooming in on a picture I took of something else.

* There is an Argentine naval base in Ushuaia. They have a few intimidating little gunboats, one shipwreck, and one mast with rigging that is sticking up out of the ground for no apparent reason.

* The waiters there are some of the sweetest people in the world. They did a heroic job of understanding my incredibly awful Spanish and were even willing to pantomime animals and cuts of meat when necessary. They were also sweet to my Mom who spent her time in Argentina reciting "gracias" and "de nada" with varying emphasis and pronunciations over and over at random intervals. "Graci-AS. Gra-CI-as. GRA-cias. Graaaa-cias."

* There are no live penguins in Ushuaia. However, there are a billion stuffed, stone, ceramic, and painted penguins; five hundred stray dogs; and one guy in a penguin suit wandering around waving to people, having his picture taken, and watching women's asses as they walk away.

* The Artisan's Promenade rocks the socks off any tourist souvenir stand in the city. I bought a little stuffed llama that was knit from actual llama wool by the llama owners themselves. In return, the knitter/owner showed me pictures of her with the llama at their farm in northern Argentina. Llama is very fun word to say in any language.

I wish I'd had more time to spend there, but I'm glad I got to sight-see some before we had to get on the ship. (On the next episode of My Antarctic Adventure: The Ship!)

Some final pics below as proof of the beauty and surrealism of Ushuaia: Fin Del Mundo, Principio Del Todo.









And two panoramas:
Ushuaia from the Airport
Ushuaia from the Deck of the Polar Star

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