Ushuai, Ushuai

How the name rolls nicely off the tongue. As if being at el fin del mundo isn´t romantical enough, the name itself sounds like a dream. Or like something wonderful to eat. Have yet to find out if it has any significance or how exactly Ushuai came to be called Ushuai though I am curious. Either way, I rather unexpectedly fell in love with it, the idea to visit at all more of an afterthought with time left to kill after Torres del Paine before SJ set off.

Maybe it was the penguins we visited first off on a catamaran tour of the Beagle Channel. Undeniably as adorable as you expect them to be, waddling and playful and full of torpedo-like energy diving in and out of the frigid water (we did confirm with Captain Sergio that were we to fall in we´d die of hypothermia within the first 5 minutes - making the lifevests aboard the boat quite pointless we thought). Seeing them was pretty amazing, especially when one seemed to stop below the boat to look up and right at me. I swear he was making eye contact. (I have pictures!)

Or maybe it was the proximity of things. And how short the walk to the Old Prison and Maritime Museum (yes these are one and the same) or the best hot chocolate. Or to the local favorite Irish bar The Dublin which we visited 4 nights in a row, making conversation with really nice and actually engaging people who had just returned from filming a 9 part documentary miniseries in Antartica, or piloting ships around the world, or were just traveling through like us. Despite being a small Patagonian port town, Ushuai also had a distint international buzz that made it seem larger than it was without being intimidating.

And from most every vantage point, you can see the Beagle Channel and the ships docked there and the glaciers that hover on the northern side. So that even if you´re just heading to the supermarket via San Martin street, you´re reminded you´re at the end of the world because that´s what it looks like when you look around. On my last day in Ushuai, I also walked down San Martin street and past the supermarket to go visit Glacier Martial, just 7 km away. I WALKED to a glacier - from downtown!

Our hostel Yakush also helped make Ushuai feel like home. Having by now honed our expertise in hostels, it was hands down the coziest place SJ and I stayed in in Patagonia. We prepared and ate our meals in a large light-filled communal kitchen where everyone talked to one another as they hustled around the stove and drank from their respective really good and highly affordable bottles of Argentian wine. Light filled also during dinnertime because the sun doesn´t begin to set in Ushuai (or the rest of Patagonia for that matter) until around 9 pm.

So Ushuai is now on my growing list of fantasy places to live one day, alongside New Mexico and Paris and Barcelona. Whether or not this ever happens, it was the perfect place to conclude my time in Patagonia, before heading back up north to face the civilization that more closely resembles what I know, with its bustle and traffic and attainable horizons.