Summer Adventures in Patagonia: Tierra del fuego and Ushuaia

Suitably re-fuelled we hit Ushuaia this morning to confirm flights and see a bit of town and get an ‘end of the world’ sticker for our bikes which made the trip without a single problem, not even a puncture!

Funnily enough we also discovered the chocolate shops give you free tasters just for going in…we visited a few!

Interesting town Ushuaia, a bit like Cape Town or Vancouver Island combined with a ski resort, circled by mountains but with yachts in the bay. We are camping at a great spot below the old chair lift with cracking views across the bay.

Our trip across Tierra del Fuego was a treat, with the highlight possibly the afternoon and night we spent at the colony of King Penguins just north of a settlement called Cameron on the east coast of the island on Chilean turf. These Penguins are normally only on the subantarctic islands, but 91 of them have started breeding on this patch of desolate coast on the local farmers land and they have just run a fence around them to keep people from getting too close and hired a ranger to take people in to see them. He was a great guide and as we were the only ones there, we spent the evening with him and shared dinner in his cabin after a great few hours watching the birds incubate their eggs, court and generally do what King Penguins do on a windy beach. We camped there too, it being our first night out of Porvenir.

Between Porvenir and Tolhuin, we had 4 days of biking with no shops which was good fun as we ended up eating as vegetarians and bumming bread from the local farms, which was good for Simon’s Spanish!

As we had taken the less followed route to Ushuaia through southern Chilean Tierra del Fuego, we hardly saw anyone and also had to be careful with water, filtering a few times to get by and getting some from local farms and fishing lodges. This route also took us through the mountains instead of the ‘pure pampas’ of the usual route and we had a nights wild camping in a huge wind but found a spot so sheltered by the local Lenga (nothofagus) that we could cook….

Just before the border crossing, which we had to ford on foot through a river carrying bikes, we stopped for lunch at a Chilean Carabinero (police) outpost to get out of the wind and they offered us their kitchen to eat in….and then proceeded to offer us homemade bread that the cops had made. Wonders never cease, Simon was so impressed by it he declared it the best yet in Chile and asked for more! At the Argentinian border post they were having a Asado (Roast Lamb) for lunch and were about to ask us to join them, but Lucy was too quick to tell them we had already had lunch with the Chileans and had more km’s to bike that day. This was possibly a good thing as true to form the road turned to custard as soon as we had the Argentinian stamp in our passports and we bounced our way through flat hot country for the rest of the day on a road that resembled a river bed. A friendly estancia gaucho crew let us pitch our tent next to their stables for the nights and pancakes (our new found cycling breakfast of choice) renewed our spirits for another long days biking to Tolhuin where we arrived at 5pm and found a cool little grill shop selling ‘chori pan’ sausage rolls and they were delicious. The stancia we stayed at the night before had 39 dogs and all the old school saddles and bridles for their horses. We decided to then split the last 105kms from Tolhuin to Ushuaia into two easier days and so it was that we arrived here yesterday and now looking to do a few day walks in this southern part of the Andes….