Ushuaia – Dec 2025

From El Chalten we flew south (from El Calafate) to Ushuaia. This was meant to be so we could board a ship bound for Antarctica, but as it had mechanical issues it had been cancelled. We decided to go to Ushuaia anyway, since the arrangements were all made. If we hadn’t done so much hiking in the previous few weeks then we may well have chosen to stay in Tierra del Fuego and hiked to replace the cruise. But we were sick of hiking!

Not so much that we didn’t go to Tierra del Fuego National Park for the day. We managed to hire an automatic car at the last minute – a low slung sedan, which I cautiously drove on the almost exclusively dirt roads out to the park. The weather wasn’t great so we stuck to the lakeside Hito XXIV track for our first walk. It was quite pleasant following the lake around till you hit the Argentine/Chile border and for some reason it stopped there 🙂

On our way back we finally managed to spot a pair of Magellanic Woodpeckers. We’d been hoping to see these for weeks so we were delighted to spend half an hour watching the male on a tree, and female on the ground. Not long after we started walking again it started raining so the timing was also perfect.

We were glad to dive into the car once we got back to the trailhead. We decided to continue onto the far end of the park – there was a lot of traffic out by this point, and the road was pretty wet with the rain. It was incredible the speed some drivers were getting up to given the conditions. Once at the Puerto Arias car park we ate lunch in the car, and waited, and waited, for the rain to stop.

An hour and a half later we decided it had eased off enough to get out and do some of the short walks which surround the area.

Tom was keen for a few more walks, but I felt we’d had a reasonable cross-section of the park and was happy to call it a day. Fortunately the crazy drivers had eased off by mid-afternoon and we had a less fraught drive back to Ushuaia.

That night we walked down to the harbour to see if we could spot our broken boat. Just as we spotted it, it started heading out of the harbour – presumably to go get repaired somewhere else.

Overnight there was snow which beautifully covered the surrounding hills.

Since we were no longer going to Antarctica we took a day trip on the Beagle Channel. Besides the scenery, the main points of interest were a comorant colony (which our guide had to explain weren’t penguins), a sea lion colony, and then the thing we were really all there for – penguins.

The penguins are on Isla Martillo which is the turn around point for the longer Beagle Channel boat trips. It’s feels somewhat intrusive – the catamarans basically beach their noses on the shore where the penguins are all hanging out, and then the passengers get about 20 minutes to watch them. You can pay much larger amounts to do trips that allow you onto the beach, but given we were less than 10m away from them on the boat I’m not sure the cost is worth it.

Throughout South America the streets are full of different shaped metal baskets. They very much reminded me of disc golf baskets, but in they are actually for rubbish to be but in for collection. I had meant to get a collection of photos but this is the only one I ended up taking.

The weather had cleared by our last morning, and we finally got to see the views of the surrounding ranges from our apartment. (Since Ushuaia is largely built on a slope it seems like every apartment in town has a great view)

I’d been able to change our tickets, at no cost, to fly to Buenos Aires the next day, so that was the end of our very enjoyable time in Patagonia.