The End of the World

Ruta Nacional (national road) 3 starts in Buenos Aires and 3079km later ends in a muddy car park at the end of a pitted track in the Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego.

After a flight and almost 20 hours on buses we've made it 'el fin del mundo' - the end of the world. Or to be more precise, to Ushuaia, the most southerly city in the world.

This place has a good feel to it, with lots of interesting people passing through, waiting for cruises or exploration ships to Antarctica - the Antarctic Peninsula being a mere 1000km from here. It's also a great place to buy tax-free outdoors gear at great prices - if only we had space in our backpacks!

The temperature didn't get much above freezing today and it snowed in the morning and again this evening, but this afternoon we were lucky and had some calm weather so we went for a hike in the national park. Several inches of snow made what was supposed to be a fairly easy walk into quite a challenge and we had to navigate from signpost to signpost, with the help of tracks from a fox which seemed to like following the path too. Later on we saw one of these Patagonian foxes - very big and with a thick coat - they seem to be quite common in the park as they eat the rabbits.

There also seem to be a lot of beavers in the park. We stopped for a snack beside some beaver pools. They do a heck of a lot of damage to the trees around their pools and we saw several large trees they had started gnawing on.

Visited the last post office in the world. We had said we wouldn't visit it even if it was the last post office in the world, but it was quite cute and surprisingly warm for a hut on a pier on the Beagle Channel.

Bird of the day...

.. Alan tells me it is the fire-eyed diucon. One of the tyrant family, apparently.