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

punta arenas

so we set off for our 2 weeks of vacation, flying to punta arenas.
the hostel we picked out is cute and small, a run-down house with a bunch of bedrooms and a nice atmosphere. there are tents with people camping in the yard. in the kitchen there is a crazy old stove that provides heat for the whole house.
we walked to the shore, which is the strait of magellan, so that we could stick our hands in and take photos. we are a bit disappointed that we can't enter the port to look at the big ships.we book a boat to the penguin island, isla magdalena, for the next day. and we have already noticed that there are germans everywhere here!
in the evening they fire up the grill at the hostel and make anticuchos (shish kebab) but i go to bed early. at the hostel there is this crazy polish guy who is planning on kayaking by himself to ushaia, through the magellan strait. he plans to do the trip in 3 months. previously, he hiked alone in the torres del paine national park in winter, during which most of the park is closed because impassable. he also hiked across the campo de hielo del sur (the third-largest ice field in the world after the arctic and antarctica) on skis, parts of which have never been visited by humans before because there is no reason to go there. his tent and his food as well as he himself were blown away in 200 km winds, but he continued hiking without food for 3 more days.
there was also a 48-year-old american lady with a bike that folds up and comes apart and fits in its own suitcase. when you are using the bike, the suitcase becomes a trailer for your luggage.
the next morning we got a van at 6:50, to get a boat to the isla magdalena, the penguin reserve. there we walked around the island for an hour, taking pictures of thousands of penguins. back on the boat, we were served coffee with a shot of pisco, and then we went to Isla Marta, where we saw a bunch of sea lions and cormorants from afar. there were huge waves on the way back, the boat was slamming up and down and a few people got sick. it was like an amusement park ride.
here are the photos from punta arenas:
http://chile.marahtyler.com/#34.0

and here are the photos from isla magdalena, way more fotos of penguins than are really necessary:
http://chile.marahtyler.com/#35.0

once some american lived on the island for a year as a thesis project to do a complete census of the population and counted almost 200,000.

oh, and the internet at the hogar is broken. the transformer for the router burned out or something. i am sitting in the mall next to a giant plastic christmas tree. they are playing "winter wonderland" and people are walking around in tee shirts and sandals.

back in civilization..

after 2 days hiking in the national park torres del paine. too tired to write, only posting so that my mom knows that i haven´t died of swine flu..

punta arenas

flew to punta arenas today, beginning 2 weeks of vacation.

the timing is bad since apparently on friday the tia of the casa azul was fired. so the kids are without a tia, tia betty will be filling in for the next two weeks and then they will hire a new tia for the casa. the kids are kind of freaked out, some of the newer arrivals have never had tia betty as a casa tia before. and now we are leaving too, they were confused and thought we were going forever. so it´s too bad that we are leaving them now without a familiar tia. but i guess firing the tia wasn´t planned much in advance.

anyway. it is cold here. and really windy, 35 knots today. and the weather changes quickly. it hailed twice today, and drizzled. and in between it was really sunny.

we dipped our hands in the strait of magellan...and tomorrow we are going to see a penguin colony!!


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jessica

on sunday night Jessica (11) also threw a huge tantrum. she was here in the office building watching tv in the dining room, which is actually completely forbidden....but everyone makes exceptions for her. she is the deaf/mute girl and its impossible to control her anyway, she basically does what she wants. since she goes to a boarding school during the week, she is only here on the weekends and somehow there is no way to punish her for not doing what she is supposed to. Her center of life is supposed to be her boarding school, and the hogar is just supposed to be a help to the school, but that has been changing, her center of life is the hogar now. partly because her sister is now here, i guess. also, because we've been taking sign courses, she can communicate better with the tias, she is a little bit less of an outsider.

anyway, at 9 pm Tia Flor came to turn off the tv and send her to bed, but she freaked out and locked herself into the Sala de Estudio. So Tia Flor had to get the keys from the director to unlock the room. Jessica then escaped and went outside, where she then wandered around in the pouring rain and tried to test whether she fits through the bars of the fence to escape.

It took 3 people to forceably drag her into the building, then she was kicking and screaming on the floor. She can't talk, but she can make sounds, when she crys she makes a weird moaning/howling sound. They couldn't really move her, so they just held her down on the floor, hoping that she would get tired out and calm down. After about half an hour I didn't hear her anymore, so I guess they had taken her back to the house.
But a few minute later, she was out front again, this time only in her socks, standing in the rain. Then she took off her socks and was running around barefoot. They called an ambulance and got 2 paramedics to take her inside again. They said that her symptoms were typical of a nervous breakdown and took her to the hospital. There they said that it's possible that she has schizophrenia, but didn't want to give her any drugs because of her age. In any case, they need to get her checked out, they have found a neurologist who speaks sign language. Obviously,, her treatment is going to be expensive and the Hogar will have to pay for it. Which is really bad timing because at the moment the Hogar is going through a financial crisis...more on that later.

Last week she was in such a good mood and really well behaved. She had just won a gold medal in some Special Olympics in Santiago, in running, and was super nice to everyone. Generally though, she is badly behaved. You can't yell at her because she can't hear, and if she wants to ignore you she just looks away, then you can't communicate with her at all anymore.

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