Birdwatching in Ushuaia

April 10, 2024July 11, 2024 / Maria / 4 Comments

We arrived in Ushuaia very late at night and took a taxi to our hostel. It was a harsh welcome because Buenos Aires was 30 degrees and Ushuaia was more like 10 degrees. It didn’t help that our room at the hostel could only be accessed from outside and no one had turned on the radiator before we arrived, so it was freezing on the first night.

We had a full day excursion booked, so it was an early rise the next morning with a 6am wake-up call. But it was worth it because we were taking a tour to Isla Martillo to walk with penguins! We were very lucky that it was a gorgeous day, which can be hard to come by in Ushuaia. Ushuaia is the most southern city in the world, and is popularly known as “the end of the world”. So even though it’s summer in February, the weather can still be quite harsh. It didn’t get much warmer than 12 degrees the whole time we were there and it can get extremely windy. One of the locals told me it does get up to 25 degrees sometimes, but there was fresh snow on the mountaintops while we were there.

We were up early enough to catch the sunrise as we walked down to the waterfront to find our tour. Ushuaia is in Patagonia, but it is more commonly associated with Tierra del Fuego, a large island at the bottom of South America. Ushuaia is located on the famous Beagle Channel, which separates Argentina from Chile. It’s also the starting point for most cruises to Antarctica, so there were a lot of ships of all sizes docked in the harbour. We enjoyed the sunrise over the channel and then jumped on a bus to drive 1.5 hours towards Haberton Ranch to catch a zodiac to Isla Martillo.

One of the most popular activities in Ushuaia (aside from Antarctica), is to cruise the Beagle Channel to see penguins. There are a ton of pleasure cruises that leave from Ushuaia and motor down to Isla Martillo to observe the penguins that nest on the island. There is just one tour (Piratour) that allows you to actually go on the island. It was definitely a costly tour, but I don’t regret paying extra for it because it was fantastic!

There are only 20 people allowed on the island at a time and you have to be accompanied by a certified guide. Our group was split in two and we spent the first hour visiting the Museo Acatushun at Haberton Ranch, while the other group toured the island. The Museum has the largest collection of marine birds and mammal bones in the world. It’s an eccentric place – the owner was an enthusiastic collector of whale bones, but they can be pretty stinky, so she basically bought the ranch as a place to store all her bones and then turned it into a museum. She’s since passed away, but the museum is now staffed by energetic biology students, who run daily tours and then clean bones in their spare time.

Tierra del Fuego is a great place for a bone museum though because it seems to be the place where whales go to die. We saw one dead whale washed up on the beach on our way to the ranch, and another one from the boat on our way to the island. But it’s a cool place and the students that give the tours are very knowledgeable. We had a fun time and it’s a super scenic location. It was quite chilly and windy and it really contributed to the “end of the world” vibes. It kind of hit me at that moment, the gravity of where we were and how lucky we were to be there. I’ve wanted to visit Patagonia for at least 6 years now, and it felt unreal to actually be doing it.

As cool as the Museum was, the penguins were infinitely cooler. We took a zodiac for about 15 minutes to Isla Martillo, where we disembarked with our guide to walk the island. There are two types of penguins that nest on the island – Magellanic Penguins and Gentoo Penguins. Occasionally you can see King Penguins on the island as well, but they don’t nest there. The Magellanic Penguins don’t really like the cold, so from what I remember, Isla Martillo is one of the most southerly colonies of Magellanic Penguins and they only migrate there in the summer to nest. The Gentoo Penguins are more traditionally found in Antarctica, but this colony can be found on the island year round.

I would hate to have to be one of the guides shepherding people around the island. It’s really important to stay together as a group and to always be with your guide so as to cause the least disruption to the penguins. But as you can imagine, people more or less lose their minds the second they see a penguin, so there was a lot of trying to keep the group gathered together. But it’s really such a cool experience. The boat drops you right on the beach and you visit the Gentoo colony nesting on the rocks first. There are Magellanic Penguins all over the island, so after that, you walk a little bit inland to see some of their burrows. They don’t seem bothered by people and it was cool to watch them waddling around. But my favourite was watching them swim. They’re so slow on land, but they absolutely whiz through the water!

We spent about an hour on the island before getting picked up by the zodiac and returning to Ushuaia via bus. We had a few hours of break time in the afternoon and we spent some time exploring the town. Ushuaia was not at all what I expected. It’s the “end of the world”, so I was expecting a very small town and was completely shocked to find dozens of mid-level high rises stretching across the oceanfront. The town is nestled on the foothills of the Patagonian mountains and because of the Antarctica cruises, it’s absolutely crawling with people. The actual town population is ~82,000, but I’m sure that balloons quite a bit with all the tourists.

Because of its location, seafood is easy to find and we quickly learned that the delicacy in Ushuaia was king crab. We decided to save that for our second day and instead, found a nice restaurant selling roast lamb, another Patagonian delicacy. We ordered lamb with roast potatoes and vegetables for two and received a ridiculously delicious and large portion of lamb! We ended up bringing half of it back to the hostel and eating it again for lunch the following day.

In the evening, we returned to the waterfront for our cruise of the Beagle Channel. Cruising the Beagle Channel is one of the biggest attractions, and like I said, a lot of people ride all the way down to Isla Martillo to view the penguins from the boat. We didn’t need to cruise that far, but I didn’t want to miss the channel, so the evening cruise was a great compromise!

One thing I loved about coming from Canada to Patagonia in February was the increased amount of daylight. Sunset was still 5pm in Vancouver at that time, so it was a real treat to enjoy a 9pm sunset every night in Ushuaia. Our cruise left at 6pm, but instead of having to motor all the way down to Isla Martillo, we got to circle around the Channel observing all the marine life! I think it may have been Seth’s favourite day of the entire trip and we had a blast on the boat because there were a ton of other very enthusiastic bird nerds on board that we quickly befriended.

It was pretty cold, so a lot of people stayed huddled inside the heated part of the boat, but we spent the entire cruise on the roof. Seth had his binoculars of course, but most of the other birders were sporting very large cameras. We hadn’t been able to find a quality English bird guide yet, so we took advantage of the other birders identification skills and had a great time spotting wildlife.

The highlight of the cruise for the birders was spotting a Blackish Cinclodes, which is a pretty unremarkable little black bird, but apparently it’s super rare and was flying around the boat for a solid hour, so all the nerds were in a tizzy over it! I’m not sure what my favourite bird was, I’m still pretty partial to oystercatchers, so maybe them, but it was cool to see an albatross.

The highlight of the tour for non-birders is probably Faro les Eclaireurs, which is a small lighthouse structure on a barren rock. It’s probably known as the “lighthouse at the end of the world” if I had to guess. It did have a bunch of sea lions hanging out on it at least! What I found more intriguing was the fact that the Channel is basically the border between Chile and Argentina, so while you’re cruising around, you have Argentina to the east and Chile to the west!

The tour finished around 9pm and we made a quick exit back to the hostel to try and catch up on some rest before another big day exploring Tierra del Fuego National Park. Check back next week for that!

Two days in Buenos Aires

April 4, 2024July 11, 2024 / Maria / 4 Comments

My last post ended up being a step by step instructional on how not to get scammed out of your money in Argentina, so now let’s talk about the actual fun things we did in the city! Our first activity in beautiful Buenos Aires was a walking tour to try and get a lay of the land and learn a bit of the city’s history. As with most major cities these days, there’s a free walking tour that leaves daily. Buenos Aires is such a big city that they actually have multiple tours, we decided to do one of the Retiro and Recoleta neighourhoods, but I’d really like to the do the city center tour as well.

I find free tours are always excellent because they rely solely on tips (so tip well)! I’ll admit, our tour guide was a bit long winded and the tour was close to 4 hours, which is a bit on the long side, but we learned a lot of interesting history that served us well through the rest of the trip. Probably the most interesting tidbit was about the Falklands War between Argentina and Great Britain in the 1980’s. GB claims ownership over the Falklands, which Argentina disputes, so in 1982, they invaded the Falkland Islands and were at war with Britain for 10 weeks until Argentina surrendered.

What was interesting wasn’t so much the war, but rather all the government propaganda that we observed about it after the fact. The Falkland Islands are known as Islas Malvinas in Argentina and even though it’s still a part of Great Britain – and hundreds of Argentinians lost their lives in the war – there is still (40 years later) government-published propaganda all over the country stating “las Islas Malvinas son Argentinas”. I’m definitely not going to make any sort of political comment on the sovereignty of the islands, but it was interesting to observe public opinion throughout Argentina. It reminded me a little of Quebec trying to claim Labrador as part of Quebec on contemporary maps, even though Labrador is a part of the great province of Newfoundland and Labrador! But I digress, lol.

Buenos Aires is a city that has been heavily influenced by the French (architecturally anyways). We witnessed the same thing in Santiago. Even though both countries were colonized by the Spanish, they’ve been independent since 1816 and 1810 respectively. So quite a long time. Traditionally Buenos Aires was considered an aristocratic city and was very wealthy, but as we saw with the country’s inflation issues, that’s no longer the case. The thing I thought was missing from the Buenos Aires walking tour (that we got on the Santiago tour), was a discussion of the indigenous history. But they love to brag about Avenido 9 de Julio (the widest street in the world) and how they won the most recent world cup! Messi definitely has a presence in the city!

So the two neighbourhoods we visited looked very wealthy and European. We ended the tour at the gates of the Recoleta Cemetery, which is basically a sub-city of mausoleums. We decided to have lunch first and I had my first serving of risotto and seafood. The food is definitely interesting in Buenos Aires (and Argentina in general). I was expecting a more vibrant food scene in Buenos Aires, but to be honest, it’s a lot of hamburgers and pizza. Seafood was easy to come by (and for a very good price), as was risotto, which is a personal favourite of mine. Otherwise, the only thing in Buenos Aires that seemed at all “Argentinian” was the empanadas. But they were unbelievably delicious, so I made it a point to track down one a day for a snack during the rest of my time in Argentina.

The cemetery really did feel like a city of the dead. Some of the mausoleums were very elaborate, while others were decrepit or downright creepy. You have to pay to go in, but it’s clear the graves are only being managed by surviving family and not the city. Eva Peron’s (Evita) seemed to be the most popular one, but it’s a bit lackluster in comparison to some of the more elaborate monuments. The whole place is a bit spooky, but it was a cool experience.

The main thing I wanted to do during my short time in Buenos Aires was to visit El Ateneo Grand Splendid bookstore. El Ateneo is located in a former theatre and was named as the “the most beautiful bookstore in the world” by National Geographic in 2019. As an avid book lover, I think every bookstore is beautiful, but architecturally, this one definitely has an edge over others! Plus there’s a really cute café located at the back of the store on the old stage.

We actually ended up visiting a lot of bookstores while in South America. What was most striking to me – compared to some of my other travels – was that because Spanish is so widely spoken, pretty much every bookstore we went to stocked Spanish books exclusively. Comparatively, when I visited Finland and Vietnam, there were a lot more English books. It was still fun to visit the bookstores, but it felt a little like being starving at a feast!

After the bookstore, we returned to our hostel for a leisurely swim in the rooftop pool and enjoyed a free drink at the bar before walking nearby to our tango show for the evening. There are a huge number of tango shows in the city and we picked the El Querandi dinner and tango show, mostly because it was located close to our hostel. But it ended up being a great show! The dinner was fantastic – they had all local dishes, so I sampled the humita, which is a local corn dish from Northern Argentina, and the Patagonia stew, which features lamb. The show was also great and takes you through the history of tango, showcasing different styles of how tango has evolved in the past 100 years. In my opinion, it’s just gotten sexier over time!

On day 2, I was determined to visit Palermo. I’m not sure why I was so obsessed with visiting Palermo over other parts of the city, but I heard it was really nice and it drew my attention. First we did a bit of walking around city centre to see the Playa de Mayo and Casa Rosada, and then took a bus over to Palermo. To be honest, I thought Palermo was a bit of a letdown. It’s a nice enough area, with leafy streets and lots of restaurants and shops. We went for a walk all over the neighbourhood, but ended up just getting acai bowls for lunch. We took the bus back to San Telmo a bit early and decided to visit the San Telmo Market instead. I really liked the market! It had a lot of food options and I had the best empanada’s of my entire trip!

And that was pretty much it for our time in Buenos Aires. Like I said, there’s a lot of attractions that we didn’t do. It’s a very large city and our time there was so limited. I would have loved to sample some more wine while we were there, but it will have to wait for a future trip to Mendoza. We got a taxi to the airport in the late afternoon to catch our flight to Patagonia. Our first stop was to Ushuaia, the most southern city in the world! Check back for the next part!

Rockcut Trail: Little Harbour

March 13, 2024July 11, 2024 / Maria / 1 Comment

In addition to the East Coast Trail, I’ve done a fair bit of hiking on Twillingate Island. My mom grew up in Twillingate and my Nan has a beautiful property in Bayview, so I spent a lot of time there growing up. I’ve done several of the trails over the years, but in recent years, the trails have been re-branded as the “Rockcut Trail” and I’ve been impressed to see a lot of work being put into expanding and maintaining the trails. Twillingate is a bit of a tourist metropolis in the summer time, so it’s nice to see some care being put into the trails. You can learn more about the full trail system on their website – in total there are 13 trails identified on the Island, 5 of which have been branded as a part of the continuous “Rockcut Trail”.

I’ve done both the French Beach and Spiller’s Cove Trails in the past, but not recently enough to write about them. So this past summer (2023), I hiked a new section of the trail, which is known as the Lower Little Harbour Trail. It can be done as a round trip hike out of Little Harbour, or as a longer hike through to Purcell’s Harbour. I was visiting for a few days with Emily, Karen, and Grant, and it was super hot out, so we opted to just do the Little Harbour loop, which totals 5km.

We thought it was going to be an easy hike (which it might have been in cooler conditions), but it was actually a fair bit more challenging than we anticipated. You start by walking down an old access road to Little Harbour, and then you spend most of the hike navigating around the headland to Jones Cove, before returning back to where you started. The majority of the hike is exposed on barren rock, so it’s incredibly scenic, but could be very windy in the right conditions. It was not windy when we visited (rare) and we had the sun beating down on us (also rare).

There’s a few viewpoints you can hike up to and during our visit, the bay was filled with icebergs! The trail gets a little technical and goes into the trees before Jones Cove, but the beach at the cove is gorgeous and they’ve recently constructed some brand new tent pads at the back of the beach! We stopped for a break and me and Emily went for a quick swim in the ocean. It was absolutely freezing, but refreshing on such a hot day.

After Jones Cove, the trail crosses back over the headland and you return the way you came, but I’d definitely be keen to return on a future visit and continue on to Purcell’s Harbour. I have a strong connection to Twillingate Island, so I look forward to completing all the trails in the future and this is hopefully the first entry in a new series!