It was a bittersweet farewell to the ship on Sunday morning. We are usually happy souls but have truly been in our element for the duration of our time aboard the MS Roald Amundsen. Sad, sad, sad to say farewell to the expedition crew who turned out to wave us onto the coach. In fairness, perhaps they were just making sure we left. We are super happy we chose to book this excursion prior to the afternoon flight back to Buenos Aires. Having achieved all our shopping goals on Saturday night, mooching about on the single main drag of Ushuaia all morning would have been, well, a drag.

The excursion began with an exceedingly scenic drive and our first stop was at the Ushuaia Husky Park. They do dog sledding in the winter months and hiking in the summer months. Billed as 'hiking at the end of the world' it was certainly a pleasant 30-40 minute stroll over a beaver dam and spongy peat moss and there were stunning views to the mountains and glaciers. (Pictured.) We followed a loop and ended back at their rustic lodge for coffee and spiced apple cake next to a pot belly stove. Seriously good. We took ourselves off to visit the huskies after the coffee - 70 odd of them - then it was back on the coach.

We are now pretty familiar with the Pan American highway that covers 18,000 kms between Alaska and Ushuaia - but still interesting to hear about people taking upwards of a year to bike or travel the entire distance. We had an excellent guide today who was full of fun facts. Including the fact that the Beagle Channel never freezes and has a year round temperature of around 5 degrees. With Tierra del Fuego / Fireland being an island and completely unattached to the Argentinian mainland, they need to take a ferry - it's only 7 km but does require the locals to go through the border with Chile which adds to the travel time. There will be a ferrry from Argentina mainland to Argentina TDF - one day - but it will be 30 km and 5 hours - so not a lot of time saving.

Our next stop was the scenic viewpoint at Garibaldi Pass which looked out over two lakes - including Escondido lake - which is very popular for trout fishing in summer. There was a small stall flogging jewellery and fridge magnet type souvenirs but we're hanging on to our Argentinian pesos right now for the taxi from the airport to the Hilton in BA and again the following day back to the airport. Any spending on luxuries can wait until we figure out what that will cost.

We had stunning weather the whole morning, not too hot, not too cold and not too sunny so it was well timed altogether. We finished up and arrived at the airport at about midday - theoretically with only a couple of hours until our flight departed. But this is South America and flights seem congenitally incapbable of running on time. Firstly there was torrential rain for an hour or so (lucky we had our excursion in the morning), then, after 5 hours of hanging about the airport, we were finally on the way. It was a long flight, 3 hours and 30 minutes roughly and we were literally in the back of the bus at Row 29. Took a while to get off the plane, but the bags didn't arrive until well after we reached the carousel - so must have seemed an age for the Row 1 people. We shared a cab into the city with our neighbours off the ship. It was quick, easy, efficient and cheap - about A$20/couple - unlike the daylight robbery and sheer irritation of paying A$250 for the shared coach ride organised by the ship. Funnily enough, we thought our neighbours were German. They were actually Russian though have been living in the states for 20 years. Definitely folks to keep in touch with. We made it to the hotel by 10.30 pm (long before any sign of the robbery-coach. Even then, it wasn't time for bed immediately, we had our big bags brought up from the Hilton luggage storage and had a crack at repacking for tomorrow's flight before eventually making it to bath-book-bed stations. What a trip.