Thursday evening (6pm Brasilia time)
May 3rd, 2007
GPS: S54 47.494, W068 18.944
Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina
End of the world

I am so sick and tired of airplanes.  I don't think Rob and Sean are as badly off as Justin as I, simply because they have seemingly adequate legroom.  

It feels like my legs go crazy and i have to move them and i can't move them and they get mad at me and say 'hey move you moron' and i can't and i get all jittery.

Anyways, we're finally (almost) done with the airplanes – just the one from Cartagena over to Panama City, and we're all finished.  Of course, i'll probably be saying this in a few weeks about the motorcycles, but at least I can pull over if i really need to.

I don't know if anybody else has ever had to do this, but it really sucks to get up at 3am.  I used to have to do it when I worked at IBM, and I never wanted to go back to it.  Even with the earplugs, I was unable to sleep on this flight, and I crashed, hard, for about four hours when we finally got into our (again, very nice) hotel rooms.

When we landed in Buenos Aires, we had a real hard time finding the taxi driver that our hotel had sent over.  He did show up, but then took off again when he saw how much stuff we had, to find a bigger truck (we weren't really sure, though, that this was where he had gone.  All we knew was that he had told us to wait, and then he took off).  What a relief, then, when we landed here in Ushuaia, at the end of the world (here there be monsters), and our guy was waiting for us.  He even spoke fluent english, and gave us some pointers on restaurants and electronics stores.

Apparently the whole continent of South America is under cloud cover, and threatens rain everywhere.  The weather here is about 3 degrees, windy, and alternately rain, hail and snow.  The roads are covered in a slick skim of black ice that had us slipping most of the way (we were walking) down the driveway to the hotel.  The forecast for Tuesday, our projected date for departure, is much the same.  Yay.  Landing in Ushuaia was a little nerve-wracking.  We hadn't been able to see the ocean, or land, since we took off from Buenos Aires – just clouds from horizon to horizon.  

When the plane started to descend to Ushuaia, we sank into the clouds what seemed like almost immediately, and stayed in them for almost 20,000 feet.  Didn't come out until about 3400 feet above sea level, and it was a surprise when we finally did, to see the ocean suddenly almost close enough to touch.  Ushuaia is a coastal town, and the airport is immediately on the coast, so as we descended closer and closer and closer to the ocean, with still no land in sight, i began to panic just a tiny bit.  Not to worry, though – we came down on the suddenly-not-ocean runway just fine.

Justin made a post earlier to Facebook, saying something along the lines of 'Ushuaia is like Banff, on the ocean'.  Very true.  Just up the street from the ocean are snow-capped mountains, and snow-covered valleys 'tween them.  Which we will soon get to ride through.  Apparently the first 150 miles or so are really terrible – muddy (icy) gravel roads, potholes big enough to hide in.  After that, though, the Pan-Am highway is mostly comparable to a secondary highway in Alberta, so pretty high quality roads after that.

Rob and Sean did most of the unpacking and sorting while Justin and I took it easy and slept most of the afternoon away.  Thanks, guys.  They also managed to rent a little (very little) car, a Chevy diesel Corio or something.  Tiny little car, has metal studs screwed into the tires.  There are also apparently some drivers here from Buenos Aires.  We were cut off, honked at, and forced to swerve out of suddenly shared lanes multiple times.  We decided to park, and hoof it the rest of the way.  Cause it was safer.

Haven't found any naphtha for my stove, but we all did get some extra gloves, balaclavas and neck warmers.  Rob also managed to pick up a sleeping bag, 'cause he hadn't planned on needing one.  We (all) corrected him.  Good news on the Rob front, too – he was able to find the charging system things for our GPSs.

Have I mentioned that I love the beer, here, in South America?  For eight AR Pesos (one peso == ~1/3 of  $1 USD) we each got a 1 litre beer with lunch.  And that's restaurant prices.  Went to a real liquor store, and picked up six bottles for about 3 pesos each.  It's just slightly more expensive than bottled water.

The internet connection here in Ushuaia is by far the slowest we've experienced yet.  Image uploads keep timing out, and what does manage to make it takes forever.  Augh!  It's almost as bad as having NO interweb!

Oh, for anyone that's reading this off the website, and was frustrated by the inability to make a comment without creating an account – that's been fixed.  Anonymous posts are now accepted (sorry 'bout that), and we'd love to hear from ya.  

More pictures uploaded.  More news as events warrant,
Ryan Noble
Ushuaia, Argentina