Ushuaia, Argentina, is supposedly the southernmost town on the planet. Anyway, it sits here on the Beagle Channel, named after the ship on which Charles Darwin sailed, HMS Beagle. The weather is unusually warm and sunny, I think we managed to arrive on their one day of summer. The scenery here is spectacular, quite mountainous with glaciers and at lower elevations forests of southern beech quite similar to those in New Zealand. In fact this country looks like the lake country in southern EnZed.
Buenos Aires was its usual mixture of Parisian chic and third world decay. Argentina is a country with many advantages and one serious disadvantage: Spanish colonial heritage. That last is enough to outweigh all of the former. With amazing natural resources and an educated population, they manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory time after time. When they needed Margaret Thatcher as a leader, they instead got her as an enemy. Poor Argentina.
This afternoon we board the ship and sail off into the Drake Passage - arguably the roughest seas on the planet. We´ve taken our seasickness meds and we hope for the best. I understand internet time on this ship costs $1/minute so I probably won´t blog until we return.
