Back to Reality

We've just spent the last 3 days travelling from the end of the world to the 3rd biggest city in South America- Buenos Aires. The beginning of the trip was very eventful where upon catching our 5am bus out of Ushuaia we found out from a screaming bus driver that our travel agency had sold too many bus tickets, so me and nadja were relegated to a minivan for the first 3 hours.

We were already annoyed about not being told about that when 15 minutes into the ride we had more important things to worry about - our van driver was falling asleep. So the next hour was spent watching his weary eyes close and having my ever-more sweaty hand ready to grab the wheel. We`d told him several times but he kept on insisting he wasn't sleepy, only to slowly drift onto the gravel 5 minutes later... he even put on his sunglasses so we couldnt see his eyes.

A few more repeats of this and we forced him to pull over and told him either he leaves us there or I`d drive the rest of the way, cuz there was no way we'd continue with him. So for the last 60km I drove the minivan, with him sleeping in the passanger seat and 4 relieved Israelis and Nadja in the back. We were laughing the whole way at the ridiculousness of it all, only to be pissed when the manager of the bus company couldn't have cared less.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful, with us getting stuck at the Chilean border for 3 hours cuz of a national border guard strike. From Rio Gallegos (still very south) to Puerto Madryn (Penguin Colony) we took the best bus of our lives, with fully reclinable seats and the whole downstairs of the bus just for us 3! We spent an hour jumping around all the seats before we finally settled down to watch the longest sunset of our lives.


In Puerto Madryn it took us forever to find a car to rent, with all the agencies being closed until 5pm. In the end we got ourselves a little shakey Clio and took off to a nondescript brick-housed Welsh colony where we had english tea with custard face tarts. That night we camped in the volunteer fireman's campgrounds with strong winds blowing our tarp off every so often.


The next day we got lost in stupid Trelew on our way to the biggest penguin colony outside Antarctica, with up to 500,000 penguins living there. It was amazing how close we could come to them. We came in the perfect season, when their babies are just being born and we got to see a few little black things waddle around under their mothers' stomachs. Its also weird that they picked this arid place to have their colony, with there being just rolling desert hills with little shrubs under which they make their nests.


There were penguins for as far as the eye could see- some coming close enough for us to touch them, although we resisted our urges. We were so drawn in by them that we forgot to check our watches and we ended up having to run back to our car and race (and I mean race) back the 230km to the town where we had our bus booked for 2pm. But after doing some rally in the dirt roads we made it back with some time to spare, only to find out that our bus was 1 hour late anyways.

21 hours later and we arrived in the HUGE terminal of Buenos Aires, finally reuniting with SM and Monica and spent the afternoon eating Asado (BBQ beef...mmMmm) and walking around parks and shops. We even met a street performer that we had met before in Lima!