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| House in the woods, viewed from the muddy trail. |
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| First good view of the town from the road down. |
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| Suburban Ushuaia. |
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| More suburban Ushuaia. I like the way the infrastructure is slung across the roads in a way that feels very frontier town, but the parked cars are quite ordinary and modern. |
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| I think I would quite like to live in this house. |
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| The animal train starts here. All aboard say woof! |
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| Looking back towards the mountains. |
In the morning we left our suitcases to be collected. The next time we would see them would be on the ship. In the meantime we were given a time and place to meet for embarkation. Until then we had the day to ourselves. Since it was a moderate walk into the town and, crucially, downhill, we opted to walk. This worked out well on the whole despite the weather making some feeble attempts at drizzle, or perhaps it was mist. The nearest thing to a mountain near me is Highgate and there's a bus to get me there.
Our journey uphill to the hotel the day before had skirted the town so I was unsure what to actually expect of the town proper. This was by far the least researched part of the holiday. It had been described as being largely a functional stopover prior to boarding and I'd given little thought to it beyond that. We would be bused in, sleep, then board the ship. So it was a pleasant surprise to realise we had time to explore the place a little.
We followed the road down for the most part. There was a trail alongside the woods that was more direct, but recent rain had left parts of it treacherously muddy. Aware that we had few clothing options with our luggage en-route to the ship, neither of us wanted to have to spend the rest of the day with a muddy arse.
We saw few people and little traffic on our way. At one point we met a dog in the middle of the road. I stopped to photograph it, at which point another dog appeared. They started trotting along after us, and were soon joined by a cat. I became worried that we would arrive in town followed by a vast train of stray animals and quickened my pace. Fortunately said animals presumably reached the correct conclusion that they weren't going to be fed by us and gave up the very slow chase.
As we approached it became clear that the town was unsurprisingly mostly a strip hugging the bay. A scattering of houses settled quickly into a sort of rustic sprawl which eventually revealed the one long shopping street. There were some shops on the sea front too, but the bulk of business happened one street back. It was also no surprise that most of the shops were in service to the Antarctic tourist trade. There were shops selling all the clothing and equipment you may have forgotten to pack, or even lost in transit. I bought a neck gaiter with cool little drawing of penguins on it. I already had a gaiter, but I will fully admit that during the process of kitting myself out I went a little mad with the budgeting. The gaiter I had brought was rubbish and it was time I corrected that. As I will explain later, this was a good move.
A lot of the shops sold penguin figurines carved from rhodochrosite, a pink mineral that is Argentina's national gemstone. Actually, the word figurine is selling them short as some of them were more or less life-size. None of them were cheap. None of them were to my taste either, handily saving me money that was better put towards a huge slice of cheesecake at a café.
Once refuelled with sugar we spent the rest of our spare time at the Maritime Museum. This is several museums in one, situated in an old prison building. Dubbed The Prison at the End of the World, it comprises a central structure with five wings radiating from it like a sunrise. One wing is a museum for the prison itself, and tells its story through a series of dioramas featuring mannequins inside the original cells. Others house exhibits on the maritime history of the region, Antarctica in general and local art. You can spend a long time there. We skipped through some of it as we had a pressing engagement with a ship.
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