Antarctica - Day 5

After a year of planning, 2 days of travel and 2 days of waiting around in Ushuaia, the big day where we all finally get on the ship is here!  I got up pretty early to make sure to get all my stuff packed up and ready to go, as it has to be taken to the lobby of the hotel next door by 9:00am so that it could be picked up and taken over to the ship for boarding.  It finally feels like the trip is real, but but now that my bag has been checked in next door there is still another 6 or 7 hours of waiting around to do until we can actually go through customs and board the ship at 4:00. 

Needless to say, the wait dragged on and on and seemed to take forever for 4pm to roll around.  I ran into Randy and Bob, the guy that went to dinner with me last night before so we all wandered around together while Randy looked for a few last minute clothing items.  The shopping helped pass the time a little but even after all that, there were still 5 hours to sit around and wait. Tick tock, tick tock….  I won’t bore you with the tedious details of the wait more than I might already have.

Everyone from the trip started to gather at the port at around 3:30, all seeming to be as anxious as I was to get this show on the road.  We milled around in front of the port Entry for a while until the time came to finally get our carry on bags scanned and board the ship. It was pretty funny in that the security scanning processed seemed like it was much more for show than for true security. They never even really watched the x-ray of the bags passing through.

Walking down the dock I passed 3 much bigger cruise type ships before reaching the Ushuaia and it pretty funny to realized our shipe was about half the size of any of the others docked there.  This was certainly going to be a no frills kind of sailing.  No pool, so spa, and rooms about 1/3 the size of rooms on any cruise ship I’ve ever seen.  I'm not complaining at all though, as I wanted this trip to be more about the adventure of getting there than one where I just sat in high luxury feeling totally disconnected from the world outside.  I want to feel like I earned the right to be there once we crossed the Drake.

The only thing I was nervous about for the trip was to find out who I would be sharing a room with since I didn't pay the extra money to have a solo cabin.  I just hoped the person I was sharing the room with would turn out to be a nice easy going kind of guy. I figured I'd be in the room a very limited amount of time anyway, so I saved my money to put toward the hotel rooms on the trip.  The guy that was assigned to my room turned out to be from Washington as well.  I don’t know if that was just totally random or not, but it was kind of nice to at least have something in common with him.

Here are a couple of photos of the room showing just how sparse it was and showing the shared bathroom.

Everyone got settled in to their rooms pretty quick and then headed up to the “lounge” area and the deck to watch the ship pull away from the dock at 6pm.

We are finally under way!  Looking back at the town on the way out, you can really see just how big the mountains are and how the close in around the city.  It’s really pretty and I can hear the excitement in everyone’s voices now that we are moving and the trip finally feels real.  Here are a few shots from the deck of the ship to show you what it looked like as we started the trip.

The ship spent the first 4 -5 hours sailing through the Beagle Channel which is the body of water between Argentina and Chile.  The water was nice and calm and the day was beautiful out there. I was actually surprised by how warm it was here today. 

As with all cruises or trips on ships like this, there is a safety briefing and then dinner tonight and I think I’m going to try to get some sleep after that.

As part of the safety briefing, they told us to not expect these calm seas when we wake up in the morning as we’ll be entering the Drake Straight sometime later tonight after 10pm.  It guess that means its time to find out if the Drake will live up to everything I’ve heard.

We were being told that the seas will be “calm” for the Drake in one breath, and then warned about always making sure to use both hands on the rails when going up and down the stairs and being told if we wake up in the middle of the night and get out of bed, to make sure we are fully awake first… and to take time to feel how the ship is moving before actually getting up. 

Hmmmmmm…. Sounds ominous.

Antarctica - Day 4

When I finally woke up, I realized just how tired I must have been because I think I slept close to 10 hours and had maybe only woken up once all night!  That’s so rare for me that I can’t even remember the last time I slept that long or that well.  I felt great this morning so got ready for the day and grabbed my camera and decided I would explore the rest of the town and take some photos of murals I had seen the day before while out exploring.  It seemed like there were a few dozen murals throughout the city and I decided I would only shoot the better and more interesting ones I could find.

The mural above, has become very famous on Instagram from what I was told, and I guess it's a popular place for tourists to stop and pose with the penguins with all kinds of crazy selfies and shots of themselves.  I didn't go looking for any examples, but I assume you could find them out there if you try looking as I watched 4 different couples taking those kinds of shots here, spending 15 - 20 minutes each trying to get that perfect photo to impress their friends I guess.  LOL   I kept coming back until I finally got a lucky break between the Instagram fanatics and snapped my shot in about 3.5 seconds. I just wanted to get one with my life and see more of the town than just this mural I guess.  LOL

The following are all part of a long mural along a wall near the hotel I was staying at. I couldn't get the entire thing into one shot, so I broke it up into pieces... 

The following was just really interesting to look at and I wish I could have found out more about the story behind it.

I always enjoy exploring new places and getting away from the streets designed to draw in the tourists… so I headed up the hill to the top of the city and started to wander through the neighborhoods just seeing what life was like or at least trying to get a feel for what it must be like living here.  People seemed friendly and although the streets and sidewalks were a bit beat up, the houses looked well kept and I even passed a few people already out cooking meat on the barbecue, either for lunch or if they smoked it all day, for dinner.  Argentina is known for its meet, and I’m thinking they take it pretty serious from how much care they put into slow cooking it.

I passed a few playgrounds that reminded me of the playgrounds in Germany, where there were big fences around the soccer fields and basketball courts to keep the balls from flying out into traffic.  There were kids playing in all of the ones I passed by. The laughter and noise just made the streets feel alive and kind of made the walk that much more fun. 



After a few hours of wandering the residential streets, I decided to head back down to the hotel as it was getting close to the time for our first meeting for the excursion.  The trip still didn’t feel real even though I was now 7700+ miles from home.  I don’t think it will feel real until I’m on the ship and we pull out of port, but at least the meeting where we get our passes and last minute info will make it feel like it’s really going to happen.

The meet and greet with the group going on the expedition went really well and I met some of the people that were going on trip and met a few people I knew I would have fun hanging out and talking with while we sail south for 48 hours.

After the meeting ended,  I grabbed dinner with one of the guys I had met, and we decided we had to try out a steak place just down the street from the hotel.  When I said they were serious about their meat here, I don’t think I really knew how serious until we hit the restaurant.  I made the mistake of ordering the “big steak” and looking at the price I assumed it was going to maybe be an 8 oz steak. Imagine my surprise when it showed up and looked to be a pound if it was an ounce!  Yikes!!  Those of you who know me know how slow I eat, and I quickly realized two things… one, I could never finish that steak, and two… if I even attempted to try, I might be there 4 hours or so. LOL  The steak was excellent and I did my best, but think I barely managed to eat half of it, without anything else but a couple of bites of mashed potatoes.

Now that I was full, and I had been walking half the day, I decided I should attempted to get one more really good night of sleep, as it may be 12 days before I sleep really well again.

Antarctica - Day 3

Got up at 3:00 am so that I could shower and be ready to head out of the hotel by 4:00am and get to the domestic airport here.  Even though it was so early in the morning, there were still a lot of people out and about on the streets of the city, looking like they were just heading home after a long night of partying, or maybe just moving on to the next part.  I asked someone about that at the airport and they said that the city parties all night long every Friday and Saturday night and that was totally normal.
The good news was almost everyone I saw that morning was walking so the streets were pretty empty and I got to the airport in less than 15 minutes.  As bad as immigration was coming into the country, security to fly out to another part of Argentina was so quick and easy and I was through security with plenty of time to spare.

The only real difference between flying domestically here as opposed to most other countries I've been to, is that to check a bag, you have to check it at airline’s counter where they weigh it and put in on the conveyor belt, but then you are handed a receipt for the bag and sent down the hall to a cashier window to pay the checked bag fee. It was strange they couldn't take the payment at the counter.  The cashier was kind of hard to find at first, and then after I paid the fee, they printed me a new boarding pass and sent me on my way.  It was a totally different and not all that efficient experience really, but the airport wasn’t busy at the time so it really didn’t add all that much time to my check in process.  If I wouldn’t have been so early, it might have been more stressful as there were only two people there to collect the baggage fees for all the flights that morning.

The flight to Ushuaia was smooth and only took about 3.5 hours. Ushuaia is known as the city at the end of the world for good reason. I have to admit it wasn’t what I expected or pictured in my head.  I was thinking this would be some really small port town where a few ships docked, but it was actually a nice sized town completely surrounded by big mountains that seemed to loom over you as you walked around the streets there. It's beautiful to see the way the mountains loom over the city like that.

I hadn’t eaten in over 24 hours so I was getting hungry and since I got to my hotel before I could check in, I hit the restaurant there and had some lunch.  By the time I finished lunch, my room was ready and I got all checked in and settled, and decided to head out and explore the town a bit.  I hadn’t slept much in the last 24 hours, so it was just a short exploration of the main street with all the tourist shops and restaurants tonight. By the time 10pm rolled around I was beat and called it a night and thought I should try to get as much sleep before getting on the ship as I could, since I knew sleep would be hard to come by once on board the ship.