Sheila writes:

We travelled to Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost city in the world, by bus from El Calafate. This 17hr trip involved crossing the famous Straights of Magellan by ferry. It also involved four different border crossings because the border between Argentina and Chile is really weird in Tierra del Fuego. Travelling from mainland Argentina into Tierra del Fuego Argentina, you have to pass through Chile - you can't go direct..

And between each Argentina and Chile border is about 2-3km of no mans land.....who does the land belong to and what about the people who live there....? The Chileans are paranoid about fruit and veg and there are really strict fines for people taking fruit or dairy produce into Chile (so sadly we couldn't have an apple or orange or banana for breakfast en route for fear of being clapped in irons at the border!

The landscape in this part of southern Patagonia is flat treeless steppe with pockets of windblown snow and puddles frozen over with ice. It's a bleak place, with big sheep
stations and gauchos on horseback herding massive herds of sheep. Our bus was entirely surrounded at several stages by a sea of sheep!

Ushuaia is a biggish city on the Beagle Channel (yes - Darwin was here en route to the Galapagos!). It's late autumn here, pretty chilly, with streets and pavements even in town ice covered and all the mountains are covered with snow. We've had good dry sunny weather though - and had a fun boat trip on the Beagle Channel visiting tiny rocky islands famous for fur seals, antarctic sealions and cormorants. We even sampled Beagle beer from a local microbrewery on board the boat on our return to Ushuaia). Clare had fun videoing fur seals surfing and diving in the wake of our boat - they're even more playful than dolphins!

Yesterday we climbed up to Cerro Martial, just 7km out of Ushuaia which is the most southerly ski run in the world. Despite the snow, it doesn't open for business until June - so we had to walk up (the chair lift was closed) and got wonderful views of the mountains all around Ushuaia and across the Beagle Channel into Chilean Tierra del Fuego.

Ushuaia's USP is that it is 'El Fin del Mundo'....and everything's the the most southerly example of its kind in the world. Clare checked out the equivalent northern and southern
hemisphere statistics and she'll tell you about that in her blog below....

Clare writes:
I'm saying nothing. But have a guess where might be as far north as we are south in latitude and you'll be in for a surprise!
Another surprise is the large number of ice cream shops this close to the Antarctic. No chippies though. It isn't that cold to be fair - if you wear lots of layers and watch out for the black ice you're fine and probably more in danger of burning your feet on over-enthusiastic under-floor heating!
There are dissappointingly few Beagles in the Beagle Channel, but I think I spotted one in town the other day.