Ushuaia is today’s port. It’s in an area that’s really very pretty, with snow-capped mountains all around. We hadn’t had anything planned for this port. Among other things, I’d read sorta mixed reviews about the various tours, so we thought we might try just getting off the ship and seeing what we could pick up. Got off the ship around 7:30, and pretty much discovered that the town just doesn’t open until about 10am. There were a few cabs trying to sell their services right outside the port, although English definitely didn’t look like it would be a strong point. There’s also a handfull of booths that are set up to sell a few tours, with many of them being Beagle Channel tours on smaller boats (the boats Princess uses for this tour are pretty decent sized, and their tour seemed kinda short compared to what these places were selling). Even most of these places weren’t open yet. Moral of the story, if you’re not going to do a ship’s tour and have nothing planned, unless you plan on getting a taxi guide, there’s not much point in getting off the ship early. (Most of the Beagle Channel trips were for 9:30 or 10am, so the booths must have opened not too much longer after we went through.)
So we wandered up and down streets for a while exploring, looking for places that might get us some decent views of either the harbor or some of the mountains. Basically got a bunch of walking on hilly streets done. Then we headed back to the ship for an early lunch. After that, headed back out into town now that things were open. Wandered through a lot of stores just kinda souvenir shopping. There’s also a small handycraft market right near the pier, although even later in the day only about half the stalls in there were open, although some of the things being sold were interesting.
I think the captain is starting to get annoyed with people being late getting back to the ship, because he made some comment about people using sundials for keeping track of time (and it hasn’t really been that sunny). There were defintely a few people missing at time to sail, and I honestly don’t know if they made it or not. The captain basically said that because of the nature of the distance that we needed to sail to get to the next port, we really didn’t have time to wait around for them.
After leaving Ushuaia and travelling further down the Beagle Channel, we’d been told that we’d be passing some glaciers along the way, and that the port lecturer would be talking about them as we did. Unfortunately, they really didn’t do all that good of a job of letting us know about what time that would be. As a result, we headed to dinner and missed a little bit of the beginning. (I think basically all we really missed was one that came right down to the waters edge, and we did even see that right as we left dinner). We did see a bunch of the other glaciers. Really kind of a narrow channel, and the terrain really reminds me a lot of the type of terrain you see in Alaska.