I can’t believe we are actually here.  No hiccups en route. I believe we just about made it out of Ireland 2 hours before a semi-hurricane hit.  We hooked up with John and Patricia in Buenos Aires as planned. It looks like an interesting city. Looking forward to spending a few days there on the way back. Anyway, here we are in Ushuaia. The town is bigger than I expected – population approx 60,000. It is nestled between the Martial Range mountains and the Beagle Sound.

We had an interesting landing! Close to water and mountains.

Vavilov behind me in Ushuaia

Ushuaia from the air

Our ship awaits

From what I could see, Ushuaia survives mainly on tourism. Cruise ships for the short 6 weeks or so of the Summer and skiing in the Winter months. We only had a few hours to explore the town before boarding our ship, the Sergey Vavilov. Margaret, the energetic one, set off by bus to do a walk in the Tierra del Fuego National Park. she explored the trails for 2 hours in the company of an Argentinian man, the details of which I am having trouble extracting from her!!!  John, Patricia and I set off to the other main attraction in the area, the Maritime Museum. The museum was originally a prison housed with second time offenders. In reality, it looks like this prison was set up as a means of populating Ushuaia so that Chile couldn’t get any greater foothold in the region than they already had.  This tour afforded us our first view of Antarctic wildlife – all stuffed mind you.

Margaret in National Park

Being sailors, it’s hard to get away from the concept of provisioning. So, despite the fact that we were going on a catered cruise, we still felt a compulsion to add to the huge supply of already purchased duty free. So we had a last minute dash to buy tonic, bottled water, lemons, cigarettes…. We had to draw the line when we saw Patricia heading off to the deli counter to buy cold meats.  Some of this frenetic activity was fuelled by the fact that Margaret mentioned that she had seen, on the tour company’s website, a picture of the breakfast table with a carton of orange juice plonked in the middle.  From this we deduced that we would be slumming it for the next 3 weeks. Bear in kind, we knew this was no Caribbean or Med cruise.  This was a Russian scientific ship, which as tourists we were funding.

We boarded in the evening, and as we sailed up the Beagle Channel towards the Malvinas (or Falkland Islands depending on where you stand politically), we got familiar with our new surroundings.  We were flabbergasted. Our cabin is spacious, bright, en suite, plenty of storage space and huge windows. A nice bar (although not many use it – more on that later), a really good sauna, gym, lecture theatre and 3 amazing meals a day. Not much chance of losing weight on this trip.

Settling in