Impressions of the first 2 weeks

Already 10 days travelling, which leaves still (346 days!). At the moment I´m in Ushuaia, which is as they say here:

´the end of the world and the beginning of everything´.

When I just got in Ushaia I actually had the feeling I was coming into a skiing resort. Lots of tourists, a town that has many hotels, hostels and wooden houses, the colour of the grass, which is yellowish green, the mountains, allthough with not so much snow, and the weather somewhat gave me the impression I was entering Veysonnaz.

Ushaia is on Tierra del Fuego, and as a kid Tierra del Fuego sounded to me as a very interesting place to go there, the name itself is almost a poem, and for me it always had some mysterious glow around it. I still don´t know why, but is certainly different when you hear the word ¨Appelscha¨ or ¨Lutjebroek¨. Maby it´s because of the image of fires (warmth) combined with high snow covered mountains (cold) and people living in a prehistoric way made that has made it romantic. When Charles Darwin came here the native people normally made fires and that´s were the name originates from. The native people (there were living four tribes in tierra del fuego) however didn´t survive their discovery and they now are extinct, mainly because the europeans brought diseases and other nasty things, they weren´t able to stand.

Ushuaia is also the place to start a trip to Antarctica, and to do that you have to bring a lot of money. Reserving in your own country means you have to pay 4000 dollars, here you can buy a ticket if you are willing to pay 3000 dollars, and then you get a cruise for 10 days to Antarctica. I have seen the pictures and i must admit it looks splendid, but now i´m not willing to pay that much money allready, because i´m just started, but a guy i met here although hesitating at first payed the money. He is already travelling for a longer period so I guess his budget can stand it.
So if you want to see pictures of Antartica on this site, please donate some money on my account (postgiro), and when i have enough, i happily will make some pictures on your behalf.

If you want to find more information to Ushuaia this is a link.

http://www.tierradelfuego.org.ar/webcam/
My next story will show you some pictures I have made here.

In Ushuaia i´m in the hostel Cruz del Sur(http://www.hostelworld.com/hosteldetails.php/HostelNumber.8212). The hostel is run by Luca who´s Italian and came to this place several years ago. It´s very cosy, all sorts of people of different ages (I even met here an old English couple about age 60), and at night it´s more a less normal to taste food Luca has been making, and yes like other Italians I have met in the past, they love cooking.

The atmosphere in Buenos Aires was a littlebit different, there it was more a hostel for younger people with a lot of festivities in the night (fiestas, yoga, Salsa and Tango Lessons (by the way Mark S. I can understand your passion for tango, and although I myself are not such a dancer I really love the music on which people tango, tango music is very passionate, and gives you strong feelings of melancholy-which doesn´t mean that i´m allready longing for home and mummy) and we even had a Karaoke night, in which I performed Pink Floyd´s wish you were here. It even didn´t sound awful, listening to the reactions afterwards.

What´s really pleasant about hostels is that you can meet nice people, and it´s not difficult. You just have to open your mouth from time to time, and normally afterwards you travel or do things together for some days to come, until the ways separate. In BUA I met for instance Dave, a canadian from Edmonton, Gerardo, from Santiago de Chili, John from Chicago, and Christel a very cute lady from Capetown, South Africa, and we discovered that Dutch and Afrikaans are still very similar, and that is possible to communicate in our native tongues.

In Ushuia I met Ricard, spanish and living in England, Veronica from Buenos Aires, and Cristiana from Italy. I hope i can learn some Spanish from them, because allthough i can make myself understandable in restaurants and shops, it´s difficult to have conversations because i can´t keep up with their speed. But i´ll learn (i hope).

Three days later allready, and i've been very busy. Together with Ricard, Veronica and Cristiana, we went to a glacier in Ushaia, and because we all are very sportslike, we hired mountains and biked to the start of the walking trail. It was about 8 kilometers upward, and from there we climbed to the base of the glacier. The weather in TDF is quite strange from time to time. Allthough I'm lucky sofar, because there have been very fine days, but for instance today it's quite cold, and the wind is very rough. This also happened on the flanks of the mountain, and we had to hide from time to time otherwise we would have been blown of the mountain.

Yesterday I went to the National Park of Tierra del Fuego and hiked along the coast. I think i've made some nice pictures and probably i'll show you these in a short while. Ricard has left for Antarctica, and i got some Spanish lessons from Veronica who is a spanish teacher in Buenos Aires.

The nights in USH are quite long. Not only because it's light until 10.30 pm, but also because there are a few people that want to go to the pub EVERY NIGHT. As you should know by now, i really don't like these sort of things, so it's really hard to do this. Also because people don't allow you to go to sleep before 2 am, which is actually rather early.

Okee I'm going to work om my pictures now, so this is it for the time being.

love wim