I'm in a bus station in the town of Rio Gallegos on my way to El Calafate. Yesterday was an adventure. The national park outside of Ushuaia is a 15 minute drive, but you have to pay 50 pesos to get there via a bus service. The "bus" was in fact a van, and the 50 pesos included drop off at the park and pickup at set times throughout the day.
Ushuaia is awesome. It feels like Juneau. Yesterday I hiked through the town and into the forest towards a glacier with yet another friendly German, this one named Cedric. He had some great quotes, including "everywhere you go, you find a German guy." I agree with him. About the view, which pictures can't do justice, looking out over the Beagle Channel, he said what I've appropriated as the title of this post, as well as "
I'm about to catch a bus to Ushuaia, a city which calls itself something like the city on the edge of the world. It's about a 30 hour bus ride, assuming I make my connecting bus at 5am tomorrow morning. Hopefully it's an hour or two late so I don't have to wait a long time in the bus station, but not so late that I miss it. Puerto Madryn was amazing.
I am on the bus to Puerto Madryn. My last day in Buenos Aires was ominously Friday the 13th, and I started the 20 hour bus journey during a thunder storm complete with lightning and torrential downpours. It's day two of the journey and the bus is actually quite comfortable. There are televisions, and they played some strange but very cool DVD that was a medley of hit music videos from the 80s that went on for about an hour.
I think that eight days is too long to go without a post, as I've gotten a number of "are you alive?" emails. I am indeed. As proof, I've posted some more pictures, which can be found here. I can't get the embedded link function to work, so you might have to copy/paste. Sorry. EDIT 2016-04-09: changing to link. Most are from Buenos Aires, but there are some from San Antonio de Areco as well.
Heard today: Prince, Cake, Robbie Williams, Toto, Greenday, Survivor, Earth Wind and Fire, The Verve, A-ha, Wang Chung, Billy Joel, Lenny Kravitz, Paul Simon, Laura Branigan, Marvin Gaye (you know which song), Vanilla Ice, The Beatles, The Cure Trick learned today: An incredibly dense, very weird looking gourd, called a calabaza, can be slipped into your produce bag to add weight and increase the price. The gourd is often not discovered until you get back to the hostel and wonder where it came from.
I got to my hostel in Buenos Aires Tuesday at...noonish I think, BA time. My flight left Seattle at 7:18am on Monday, got into Dulles/DC at 2pm, and left again for South America at 10pm. Amazingly, walking around killing eight hours at Dulles, I ran into Henry Shue, who is a philosopher at Oxford. Somehow I recognized him from a talk he gave at UW three or four years ago on the ethics of climate change and torture (kind of a two topic talk).