One of the perks of traveling is acquiring the ability to sleep anywhere. In the four days I spent traveling from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia, a 3,000 km trip, I slept on a train, in a bus station, on three buses, in one hostel bed, one hostel couch, and a tent in a soccer pitch in some lady´s back yard.
And, best of all, I always awoke well-rested and refreshed. Quite an accomplishment, really. Perhaps I should put it on my resume.
Last you heard, I was in Puerto Mardryn, about to catch another bus south. That one, like most, left a little late, but nothing like the two-hour delay of the train or the bus in Uruguay. The ride took us all the way south to Rio Gallegos, a 13 hour bus ride through zip, zero, zilch, nada, nothing. We had front row seats in the bus for all that nothing. Whoo-hoo. However, the sun started to set around 10 that night, and didn´t finish its brilliant display of orange and red until well after 11 pm. It was one of the most captivating sunsets I have ever witnessed, and well worth putting up with the flat landscape.
Rio Gallegos has exactly nothing going for it. It´s a travel hub, the junction of a few highways, and nothing more. Kyle and I camped in a soccer pitch in the backyard of a woman´s house on the edge of the industrial part of town. We would walk into her house when we needed to use the bathroom or heat water for tea.
Whenever we walked anywhere in Rio Gallegos, it was with heads bowed to the serious winds that constantly blew in from the pampas. I was coughing frequently and hacking up all sorts of yummy stuff as a result of some illness I picked up along the road south from BA. Overall, it wasn´t a pleasant experience. But it was bizzare, and that´s always good in my book.
Our final bus took us from Rio Gallego, across the border into Chile, across a channel on a ferry to the island of Tierra Del Fuego, back across another border into Argentina, and then to Ushuaia, the southernmost town in the world. The last few hours of the bus ride were breathtaking, as the landscape suddenly morphed from flat, barren pampas with only the ocassional guanaco to entertain us, to an Alaska-esque lnadscape of rugged mountains on the edge of the ocean.
To say the Ushuaia is a beautiful place is the understatement of a lifetime. More in the next chapter ¨El Fin del Mundo¨.
And, for the record, going by bus instead of plane saved us around US$100 each.
