A Train Ride to the End of the World (Day 15 – 12/6/2016)

We woke up early, and feeling refreshed. There’s something about your first sleep off a boat (or so I’m told), but I felt so refreshed it’s hard to explain. I woke up early, we both did, and we hurried down to breakfast before our guide arrived. Breakfast at the hotel isn’t as good as… well.. anywhere else on the trip, but we managed. The coffee was terrible, and tasted like bad tap water, and there was not a selection of warm food to try at all. We could toast bread, and that was about it. Overall, it wasn’t bad as food went, but we’d become accustomed to so much more!

After breakfast, we met our guide from the transfer, and he took us out for the morning. We were seeing the “Train to the End of the World” today, and Jen and I were excited to ride on a train to the end of the continent. Gerardo, the driver, was very willing to educate as we went, and we learned that, in fact, this train didn’t go to the end of the continent, but just to the end of Argentina and the Beagle Channel which separates Argentina from Chile (depending on which map you reference… Chile owns the entire area).

 

 

 

 

The train runs inside a national park, and we had also bought tickets to spend some time in the park. We started off at the train station, and our driver spoke to the local officials and explained that Jen is a very important person in train engineering in the United States, and the staff responded by welcoming us very warmly, showing us the engines, the tracks, and the back room where they are fashioning more engines by hand. The gauge on the railroad (the distance between the tracks) is not standard, in fact it’s less than half what one would expect, and for this reason alone it is very hard to find parts for the trains. They’ve scavenged what they can from far-flung parts of the world… but eventually they’ve found themselves having to fashion their own, and they’ve started the process and are cutting pieces with a lathe. It’s a very neat thing to see, and I have pictures! The backroom tour was a great addition, and we thanked our guide (and the locals) for putting it together. Now it was finally time to ride the train!

 

 

On the positive side, it came with lots of things that steam trains should have, like a whistle. I loved that part. They also didn’t overload our cabin (5 in a space for 6, though Jen was disagree here as it was her who had to have my legs crammed into her sitting-space. We fit, but it wasn’t the best) and the views were quite good save for the rain that seemed to be there just to spurt enough on the windows to ruin our views. The announcements were mostly in Spanish, and while our guide had prepped us with the history of the train this was a little disappointing. You could tell that they were saying the same thing over and over sometimes, and there was a small (ethnocentric) part of me that wished they had taken the time. It’s possible translation was available, and this was our fault… but I’m not sure of this either way at the time I am writing this. It was a good ride, and we stopped in the middle at “Macarena Mountain” and didn’t make more than one or two jokes about it in the middle. It really was a fun little ride, but for the most part our being there seemed an after-thought, and it was had to get that out of our mind. About halfway through, we ran into more rain as well, so the picture opportunities weren’t great (and why you’ll only see a few here).

 

 

 

 

 

Gerardo did a fantastic job of the same, though, and after the train the entire trip through the national part to look at things from ducks and birds to plants and berries, was a lot of fun. We did a lot of driving, got some pictures in the rain at specific places (the end of the Pan-American Highway in Ushuaia, the Beagle Channel at the bottom of Ushuaia, etc..), and got back to the hotel in the early afternoon.

 

 

 

 

Along the way, we grabbed some lunch (empanadas, which were at the tour-house at the national park and were surprisingly good) and ran into Anja! We met her briefly at the tour-house and said hello/goodbye quickly as she headed out the door. We gave her some trouble about following us, and she insisted we were following her, it was fun to see each other one more time! Back at the hotel, we took another trip to Bar D Pizzas for a few more empanadas to ensure we weren’t hungry through the rest of the day. At the same time, we’d bought a bottle of wine for the boat that we’d never had… so we grabbed some glasses for the bar (after a misunderstanding where they tried to pour us a glass, rather than let us borrow one), and headed up to our room. We wrote blog posts, drank wine, and finished our evening mostly from the hotel with one very large exception… dinner.

 

For dinner, it was time to track down some seafood. Jen and I had been talking about this since we came to Ushuaia, and it has been hard to find good seafood. We made a few jokes on the ship about having trouble, and everyone had a different suggestion. Our driver, in this instance, had the good suggestion of going into the restaurant just above the shop that had given us the “free gift” earlier in the trip (remember that place?). He said they have a “bar de mar”, which is essentially a buffet of fish, and they also have an amazing platter of fried seafood as well to enjoy. This sounded good to us, and so we found ourselves walking down the street again, and heading into town with a slight bit of excitement. It wasn’t yet time to get our hopes up… but maybe this was the meal!

 

As it would turn out… it was “the meal”, and so much more than that. We ordered a meal for two that totaled nearly $75 (a LOT for Ushuaia), but showed a picture of all sorts of seafood. Our dinner came with its own side-table, and they placed upon it a feast of shrimp, fish (salmon and halibut), lobster and crab, as well as random other little things like clams, octopus rings (fried but not breaded) and tentacles. We ate it all, and had a few firsts. Jen showed me how to clear the shell off of a very large shrimp that had not been cleaned for us (not sure what these are called), and I’ve also never had octopus tentacle before. They were both good, though the octopus is chewy (as always), and I probably would skip that part. There was also some fish that even the serving staff couldn’t identify that was served whole (guessing it was a filler), but we didn’t try that at all (it smelled *really* fishy, even for fish!). The ceviche was a perfect blend of lime and sweetness that cleansed the palate, and overall this was one of the most amazing meals we’d have in Ushuaia. We finished it off with Freddo, our newly-favorite ice cream shop, and headed back to the hotel late. Tomorrow we didn’t really have a wake-up time and there wasn’t a lot to wake early for. We’d find out the next morning when our guide would pick us up and take us to the airport to leave for Lima, Peru. We were headed to Puerto Maldonado, where we would stay in the Amazon for four days. The flights are intimidating, and I’m not looking forward to it at all. We’ll see how it goes!