aaaarrruughaaaaaeeerrrrrrriiiiiiigh

The title is approximently the sound that the sea lions make for no apparent reason. Our guide said that the sea lions can recognize the voices of their family and I certainly believe it since we heard a wide variety of strange, slightly depressing sounding noises from the sea lions. Pictures will be put up once we get them on a cd. Along with the sea lions, we learned about lighthouses, some birds, and got to walk around a little island learning about how glaciers shape the land and the variety of plant life growing at the bottom of the world.

As Sarah said, we were planning to do the tour mentioned above, some glacial trekking and visit the prison in Ushuaia. Well, the prison was pretty cool. We met a lady from Poughkeepsie who spotted us in the ever-present Vassar sweatshirts. We learned about some of the more famous (or infamous) prisoners, the labor that they did there and generally just checked out the unrestored prison. It was a great museum though with lots and lots of information, we would have been there for hours and hours if we had tried to read everything.

The glacial trekking did not work out as well as the prison or the sea lions. We made it up to the mountain via the chair lift (it is a ski resort in the winter) but everything is still covered in snow, including the glacier. So we couldn't walk on it, or see it for that matter. But it was still a cool walk, up the mountain trying to use the islands of no snow since we only had sneakers and not hiking boots. And then we walked all the way back down to town...our legs still hurt and this was 3 or 4 days ago.

Ushuaia was a great little town that felt at the same time like a fishing port and a ski resort town. That may seem a little bipolar, but it worked. From there, we caught a flight to El Calafate, in Argentine Patagonia. This place is also a lot like a ski resort town since it is all about tourism. The thing to do here is glaciers. There is a national park about 50km from town that has some spectacular glaciers. We took a boat tour today to see some of them. I have never seen anything like this in my life. The water is green because of the minerals from the melting glaciers, the glaciers are blue because the ice is so compact. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), there was a big break a few days ago and the sheer amount of icebergs floating around prevented us from getting very close to the big glacier (Glacier Upsala) and they also blocked the passage to the place where we were supposed to disembark for lunch and a walk around to see more glaciers and icebergs. The decision to come here was influenced by pictures an American couple showed us of the lunch location, with a small lake full of icebergs, a sunny day and a beautiful background. It is really hard to express in words how cool these icebergs were, and I'm afraid (although we don't know for sure yet) that our cameras didn't pick up the colors of the water and the glaciers very well. Either way, it was totally worth it.

At 4 am, we begin a 29 hour bus journey to Bariloche so that we can cross back into Chile near Puerto Montt. Briefly, our plan is to go to Chiloé and then up to meet family in Santiago in two weeks.