a 12-hour bus ride to ushuaia. through scenic tierra del fuego landscapes, along lago fagnano and through the garibaldi pass. also we crossed the strait of magellan on a ferry, where we got to see black-and-white "skunk dolphins" jumping alongside.
upon arrival at our hostal we were immediately greeted with lame jokes by a cute argentine with dreadlocks...he recommended a bar, which turned out to be an irish pub, ugh. i ordered pizza and beer and steffi ordered squid rings and a guinness and THEY DIDN'T HAVE ANY GUINNESS! that's what you get for going to an irish pub at "the end of the world". so she got a "beagle" which is a beer made in ushuaia.
the next day we took a bus to the tierra del fuego national park to take a walk. there was a tiny post office there, where we got our passports stamped with a dorky "fin del mundo" stamp with penguins on it, thus filling an entire page of my passport!
our hike was totally amazing, through lichen-covered, pre-historic looking trees, along a lake. also, at times it was really really muddy. it reminded me of "the never-ending story" where atreyu's horse gets sucked into the mud. the first half of the hike we had good weather, then it started hailing and then raining. it rained for quite a while and we got pretty wet, and it was all foggy over the lake, but then suddenly it cleared up and got sunny again.we saw a bunch of wildlife, including the patagonian goose "caiquen", and also a calafate plant. they say if you eat the berries, you will return to patagonia. unfortunately, we didn't find out until after our hike what the plant looks like. and it didn't have any berries anyway.

also at some point i had read something about there being lots of "canela" trees in the park, which would be cinnamon. i thought that was a bit weird, but hey, it's tierra del fuego and everything looked weird there. so every once in a while we saw these fallen or cut trees which looked like they could be cinnamon, so i was stopping and tasting them but we never tasted anything cinnamony. then later i was reading some info and discovered that i had misread and there are actually "canelO" trees, "winter's bark". no cinnamon trees in the park. so we were just eating bits of random trees...lol

at the visitor center there i had one of the worst meals of my life, i wanted a soup to warm up and on the soup menu they had "escabeche de pollo', which they translated as "chicken in vinegar". i thought "gee, that sounds interesting" and ordered it. it turned out to be 2 cold pieces of chicken with a few vinegary veggies on top, and SWIMMING in fat. i did not finish it.
in town we went out to dinner and had "centolla", king crab. back at the hostal the argentines plied us with red wine and convinced us to come out to the irish pub again. it was totally packed with tourists and there was no place to sit. and still no guinness.

here are the fotos of ushuaia and tierra del fuego national park, hope you like pictures of trees: http://chile.marahtyler.com/#36.0