Ushuaia

Ushuaia...I am indeed at the end of the world. The southernmost ¨city¨ in the world. Roughly 70,000 inhabitants here apparently. The scenery rather reminds of Vancouver or Iceland with the mountains and bays. Quite spectacular...but that didn´t stop my scuba guide from calling this place the asshole of the world. Being so far south the sun sets around 2300. Been down here a few days now. I´m waiting for my cruise to begin. I had wanted to go to Antarctica but those cruises were running a minimum of 5K even with the ¨last minute¨ price I had hoped would save me $$, so I decided to take a shorter and much cheaper cruise through the Straits of Magellan to Punta Arenas in Chile. Still not a cheap cruise by any means, but supposedly it´s worth the price. I will of course tell all about it when it´s over...for now all I know is that we´ll see a lot of...nature. But I know there´s no internet on board...3 days without internet, don´t know how i´ll survive...maybe it will encourage me to get out and live a little more.

I have indeed been getting out a fair amount though, although today I took a day off from outdoor activities and spent the day in the library working on my spanish by reading ¨choose your own adventure¨ stories in spanish. I never was any good at those things...I always end up dead by a stupid decision...I´ll chalk my failures up to my suspect reading skills...but then my reading skills in spanish really aren´t bad at all anymore. Anyway, I apologize if the writing here isn´t the best. I suppose I`m going to do this blog as more of a stream of consciousness type writing as opposed to serious, edited writing...if you´d call what I did before serious. So, the scuba, yeah, decided to check that out. Only other time i scuba dove was in Vietnam back in June. Enjoyed that experience thoroughly so thought i´d give it another whirl, this time in the cold waters. Of course, you use a dry-suit in the 10 degree water...I had thought a dry-suit meant the suit would be dry...completely dry. Not so, although not much water gets in except through the gloves. Almost all of your body is covered...the parts of your face that aren´t quite covered do get painfully cold when you first get in...but thankfully my body acclimated quickly enough. Didn´t see a whole lot other than king crab nesting grounds but it was good. I was more interested in the technical aspects of diving than seeing stuff anyway. I did it on a Sunday so I was the only student; the other 4 guys were the instructor and 3 of his friends, which definitely helped make it more of an authentic experience for me since we spoke spanish the whole day. Carlos, the instructor, actually invited me back to his place for lunch with his family afterward. Ended spending most of the day there. All in all, a great day...always good when you really get to know local people.