Trav­el­ing to the South­ern­most city in the world is pretty excit­ing. Sure, it´s a silly sym­bol, but it´s fun to sit by the sea­side and imag­ine Antarc­tica is right there, barely 1,000 kilo­me­ters away. To know that Canada is 13,000 North. To reach the end of the road, literally.

We were not pre­pared for how bizarre and expen­sive was Ushuaia though.

The city is built on a hill. We huffed and puffed our way up with our back­packs, try­ing to find a bed for the night. Hostals down­hill had quoted 50 pesos a night, much more than we were pre­pared to pay. We ended up get­ting an expen­sive dou­ble room because the dorms were packed.

We walked the main street, San Martín. I felt like I was in a giant open-air air­port: expen­sive restau­rants, gear shops, duty free sell­ing flat screen T.V and the lat­est com­put­ers. This was not a city that catered to back­pack­ers. Indeed, cruise ships stop by every­day, cross­ing Cape Horn, and release hordes of Gore-Tex clad tourists will­ing to spend a lot of Pounds or Euro (always wel­come every­where) for an “end of the world” tee-shirt and a cou­ple of plas­tic pen­guins. They are here for a day and leave.

Mean­while, we were stuck in Ushuaia for at least 5 days, because… let´s just say that it´s not that easy to get out of the end of the world. We were also hav­ing trou­bles with­draw­ing money from the ATM. Most we could get was 500 pesos (about $200). How­ever, we like to with­draw money for the week to avoid pay­ing hefty com­mis­sion fees over and over again. Well, we never truly under­stood how ATM worked in Ushuaia. It seemed to be the lot­tery: some­times you could get 600 pesos, some­times 300 pesos.

Prices had raised dra­mat­i­cally and nor our guide­book nor the tourist infor­ma­tion office fact sheets were up to date. We still tried hard to make the most of our stay but it was not easy on a small budget.

We went to visit Glac­ier Mar­tial nearby. We were pretty dis­ap­pointed: there were more snow in our back­yard on any given win­ter than in the val­ley we had came to admire. We vis­ited the Tierra Del Fuego National Park, despite the 50 pesos entry fee (sup­posed to be 30 pesos accord­ing to the tourist info office…). The 4 hours hike was nice: we faced the Bea­gle chan­nel, admired for­est dev­as­tated by Cana­dian beavers (which were intro­duced in Tierra Del Fuego and are an eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ter), we loved the view on top of the moun­tain. Yet, the land­scape was… very sim­i­lar to Canada´s. Ushuaia itself was quite chaotic , but the har­bor (minus the cruise ships) is nice and on a clear day, the sur­round­ing moun­tains show the jagged peaks.

Yet, after five days, we were ready to go. Being at the end of the world is a cool expe­ri­ence but since our bud­get would not allow for Antarc­tica travel (tick­ets were sold every­where in Ushuaia start­ing from $4,000), we fig­ured there were other places to explore in Patagonia.

So we crossed the bor­der back to Chile… en route to the “Park of Pain”.

Wel­come To Ushuaia!

Ushuaia´s Har­bor

Going Up To The Glacier

Moun­tains And Snow

Tierra Del Fuego National Park

Tierra Del Fuego Scenery

For­est…

And Flower

This arti­cle was fea­tured in the Shar­ing Travel Expe­ri­ences travel monthly roundup in Novem­ber 2009.

Related arti­cles:

1. The Road To The End Of The World
2. An Argen­tin­ian Coin Story
3. Costa Rica, Pacific Coast
4. Beach Bum­ming In Uruguay
5. Col­or­ful Boca