Starting into Southern Patagonia

As our cruise ended, we sailed into Ushuaia, Argentina in the early evening.

Ushuaia is generally considered “the southernmost city in the world”. I was thrilled to see solid land and green trees! We went for a short walk around our hotel…

… and really enjoyed the views.

We were leaving the hotel early the next morning to catch our bus to Punta Arenas, Chile where we were going to pick up our rental car. The front desk called for a taxi, and we waited…and waited… and saw others be picked up by taxis… but ours never came. Finally, as we were nearly panicking that we would miss our bus, the hotel brought around a van and took us into town. We found out that Argentina was playing a World Cup soccer match that morning, and no one was doing anything (in the town of 70,000) other than watching the match. We did catch the bus, with 10 minutes to spare, and settled in for what we thought was a 12 hour bus ride. Nicely, the border crossing into Chile didn’t take nearly as long as we were expecting, and we arrived into Punta Arenas in time for dinner.

Part of the trip from Ushuaia included a ferry crossing (of the Strait of Magellan), in the bus. We were allowed out of the bus for the crossing, and I snapped this pic as we left. The road came down to the water, where the ferry would drop the ramp (unsecured) and cars, semi-trucks and buses would drive on, after the previous ones unloaded -

I thought the clouds blowing up and over a cliff just outside of Puerto Natales was pretty cool -

The wind was really fierce down here, shown by the whitecaps, as seen from our hotel room…

… and it was tossing the Black-necked Swans around -

This was the road heading into Torres del Paine National Park, our first big destination…

… and the first hint of the beauty we were going to explore -

This was our rental “car” for the next month, and you know it’s chilly/windy if Steve is wearing the parka from our cruise!

We arrived to our hotel fairly early, because we were going to take a cruise to see a glacier, but it was cancelled due to high winds. So, we went for a walk instead and were treated to the elusive Magellanic Woodpecker (that birders all over the world come to see, and aren’t always successful). We were just walking in the woods and I saw a flash of red -

Sorry for the blurriness, but I was shooting in low light. This was the best picture I got. (as I write this post, we’re now 2 weeks into driving and hiking, and have yet to see another one!)

I’ll close with a shot from our hotel, near sunset -