After Puerto Natales we spent another few weeks in Patagonia with Punta Arenas the first stop. We met up with my dad here and spent a few days exploring the town and its surroundings. We visited a penguin colony where we also saw a skunk and a nandu (which is a bit like an ostrich). We also went to a good museum here which explained something that had been puzzling us. In Puerto Natales they seemed to really like sloths, all the street signs had a picture of a sloth on them, there were taxis with sloths painted on the side and even a big statue of a sloth on the way into the town. We were a bit puzzled by this as sloths tend to live in jungles and thought maybe they just really liked sloths. It turns out it is not a sloth but a Milodon which was a kind of enormous ground sloth which was wiped out when humans arrived on the American continent. An almost intact milodon had been found in a cave near Puerto Natales preserved by the cold weather which explained all the sloth references. There is a famous cemetery here as well which has some pretty spectacular graves. The European settlers in Patagonia were from all over the place so there were some interesting names to be seen like Jorge MacNeill and Pedro Milosovic. After this we crossed the border to Argentina and took the boat over to Tierra Del Fuego. The name means land of fire in spanish, when the first Europeans sailed past it was very smokey from some fires so they named it land of smoke. When the king of Spain heard this he decided land of fire sounded much more romantic and called it that. Ushuaia which is the main town on the island is supposedly the southern most town in the world (if you ignore the antarctic bases and a town in Chile.) Here everything is called the End of the World bar/restaurant/cafe/laundry/public toilet etc. We took a trip out on the Beagle Channel (named after the ship Charles Darwin sailed on) and saw more penguins, sea lions and a preserved estancia. An estancia was a kind ranch where they kept lots of sheep.

We left my dad in Ushuaia and started to head north for the first time in a while with a short flight to El Calafate. The scenery was drastically different here, a lot drier and flatter after the mountains and snowy forests of Tierra Del Fuego. The main attraction here is the Perito Moreno glacier a couple of hours out of the town. Although we had seen a few glaciers by this point this was definitely the most impressive one. There were a few miles of boardwalks along the front of it and you could get really close to it. It was the longest one we had seen and also the tallest. There was a lot of activity when we were there with big chunks of ice falling off into the lake and you could constantly hear creaking and groaning as it moved.

We carried on northwards with a 24 hour bus journey to Puerto Madryn. This was where all the Welsh settlers arrived in patagonia in the 19th Century. They have mostly been assimilated into mainstream Argentinian society and don't really speak Welsh any more but there are a few Welsh tea houses around and lots of Welsh sounding street names. Here we took a boat trip out to see some Southern Right Whales (so called because they were the 'right' whales to hunt as they had lots of fat and floated when killed). Harpooning them is kind of frowned upon now though so we settled for taking a few pictures. At one point there were ten whales within sight of the boat and we couldn't believe how close we got to them.

After Puerto Madryn there was another overnight bus journey north to Buenos Aires. It was strange being in such a big city again after Patagonia but we were starting to look forward to it. We didn't do anything amazingly exciting in Buenos Aires, its more about eating nice food (mainly steaks), going to nice parks, looking at nice buildings and going to pubs. We did manage to spend a week there though and still didn't have enough time to do everything we wanted to. I spent my birthday there and luckily it was the last game of the Argentinian football season the same day so we went to see Boca Juniors v Banfield. The football itself was terrible but the atmosphere was amazing, certainly beats tannadice in December (although they don't do bovril or pies.) We said goodbye to Argentina for the moment and caught a boat to Uruguay where we plan to spend Christmas and New Year on a beach. So you may not want to read the next entry which will just go on and on about how nice the weather is and how lovely the beaches are while you are all freezing and its dark outside. You have been warned...