From the southern most point into the Drake...

What a day!  A day of days.  A king amongst days.  Okay, that may not make a lot of sense.  I'm exhausted.  But in a good way.  Like I said in the last post, things started out pretty darn early, and the jet lag, sleeping on planes, etc. didn't help.  Let me give you a little more detail.  From Buenos we went to the airport - the local one this time, so it was closer and smaller.  From there it was a 3ish hour flight to Ushuaia, most of which was spent in either deep conversation about the fate of society and/or education, or sleeping.  As we got closer to the airport, the landscape grew more and more dramatic - ragged mountains sticking out of the earths surface like a bones, dusty gray and sharp, and wholly unlike the time rounded peaks of our weathered Appalachians.  The descent was one of the roughest I've been party to in some time - our charter passenger plan was buoyed and dropped continually as we made our way down to the tarmac that lay between the sea and the land.  It was a dramatically beautiful place, a town tucked into one of earths most southern spots, and seeing it from above made it three dimensional.  And then it was over and we landed.

In appearance Ushuaia looks not unlike a western ski town - well, at least the newer houses do.  It seems that the newer part of it is a derivation from a simpler past.  We - all 160ish of us - were put on buses and given a rolling tour of the national park.  I could have spent hours, scratch that, weeks wandering the glacial valleys and scrambling up the smaller peaks surrounded by those giants of stone.  Listening for Megellenic woodpeckers thrumming away on trees and wandering those forests, forests so different from the northern woodland I'm used to.  But our boat awaited.

The catamaran was a three level number with observation decks and we toured the Beagle Canal and Ushuaia harbor.   There are a crazy amount of birds in the channel!  We saw all sorts of birds.  Crazy birds!  The first albatross was spotted - a black browed albatross.  Skuas, a slightly villainous bird known for stealing food from other birds mouths and for being a known chick killer were also there.  Giant petrels - which look a bit like a terridactyl (sp) followed us as we traced the coasts and peeked into rookeries.  Giant Petrels are actually the most mobile of the albatross group and move quite quickly on land. Sea lions were also spotted, though not by me.  Now mind you, all this happened with the most amazing backdrop of mountains you've ever seen.  All of the photos I took were using my DSLR, and I'll need to put them on this computer to let you all look at them.  And I plan on doing that soon.

We then boarded the ship I'll be on for the next 10 days and slowly made our way to the Drake.  We had a lovely dinner with new friends, explored the ship which is AMAZING, met our naturalist liaison Rab Cummings who will be one of the main points of contact for Grosvenor Fellow and he gave us a tour of the finer parts of the ship, and at 10:30 it was still light.  BTW - side note - there are some big waves rolling in right now. I took some medication, but the map showed red which stands for rough water.  So we've got that for at least 3-4 hours tonight.  The whole ship is rocking.  We're down low - close to the center of gravity, so we're experiencing a lot less sway than those above us.  But its still significant, and its only getting more intense.   Whats more, 3 days ago this same ship was hit by a rogue wave about 10 meters high on the port aft side and two rooms had the windows broken and are currently boarded up.  They have water they are trying to get rid of in them and, well, they don't have any windows.  So I fully redact my earlier desire to experience the real deal down here.  Ignorance is bliss people.

PS - as I'm finishing up this entry the next day (the ninth) I can report that the sea was a roller coaster last night.  But the meds and wrist bands worked, and it was oddly enjoyable to hear the sound of the sea outside the port window and feel the ship rise and fall.  Other people didn't feel the same way and had taken ill.  There are ropes around the ship to hold onto in the areas without handrails, and you can understand the old sailors adage 'one hand for the ship' more concretely when going through this place.

As I stood on the bow this morning, watching giant waves rock this 200 foot vessel, I couldn't escape the feeling that I was just a small spec of minutia on the massive canvas of earth.  What a canvas it is though. What a painting indeed.



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