Today it's very heavy sleet here- not sure of our plans yet but yesterday we had another fantastic day. We got up before sunrise ( that only means 8am!) to walk into town and get the bus to the national park. When we got to the buses there was a big arguement between the drivers and they all pointed to each other's. In the end they decided that none of them were going as there as there weren't enough people! So we jumped in a cab and headed up the ice covered roads.

We arrived at the "end if the world" station to get the old steam train that the inmates of the prison built and used to get every day into the forest. We were lucky enough to have carriages and were still freezing in four jumpers, a fleece and coat. Back in the day they just used to ride it shackled on a wooden platform in their thin striped uniforms- it's a wonder they survived really.
We puffed out of the station and down to the first stop where there was a frozen waterfall and a reconstruction of an indiginous settlement. After 15 minutes the train blew it's whistle and we jumped back on to continue through the national park. We then passed through the 'tree cemetary' which used to be a forest and was now a huge plateau of stumps where you could see the trees that had been felled by the prisoners to provide heat for both the prison and town.

The scenery all around us was stunning, the huge mountains of the Andes and a glaciar as well as the pipo river- named after a prisoner who was found frozen in there after trying to escape.The train came to a stop at the last station inside the national park and we waited for the locomotive to be moved round to start the run back again... We were both desperate for the toilet but were unable to
use them as they were completely frozen!
After a 15 minute wait we chugged back to first stop and the headed back into town.

In the afternoon we took a boat trip around the archipeligo and up the Beagle channel. The channel is 250 miles long and links the Atlantic and Pacific ocean so was a perfect place for pirates to hang out a hundred years ago!

The first stop was on a small island where we looked at the archeological site that they had uncovered of the Yemone people who were indiginous to the area before the Anglican missionaries arived and killed them all by making them live in houses and wear clothes where the infectious diseases that they had brought with them ran rife. Prior to this they had gone completely naked and this was a key part of Darwin´s theory- they had adapted to live in freezing cold conditions that we would not survive an hour in without warm protection! They also didn´t walk upright as they spent all of their time in canoes and their spines were adapted to it as well as having very long arms to help woth the paddling. I found that really interesting as it is one of the only examples of the human species adapting that is documented which supports the theory of us coming from monkeys...

After that the boat went to see the Cormorants on their island where they said that we could take pictures and pretend that they were penguins (they do look similar as they are black and white but only from a distance) and the the sea lions who were very noisy. The pups were very cute though swimming round the boat and playing in the waves.. We also went to see the fur seals and the famous ´end of the world lighthouse´in the Beagle channel which is still in operation and vital for ships.

By this time it was really cold and raining very heavily so was hard to go outside on the boat and take pictures but we dashed in and out and on the way back to town got a fantastic view of the city. It´s a shame it was too cloudy to see the sunset but all in all it was a great day in Ushuaia!