Well, yesterday was a long day.  We were up bright and early at 6:30 am in order to get our bus, but Justin was starting to feel really sick.  We had sprung for a hotel in Rio Gallegos (which was really nice except for the strong smoke smell in our room) and they gave us a nice breakfast of coffee, teeny-tiny sweet croissants, and rolls with butter and jam.  Unfortunately, Justin wasn´t able to eat much and we were a little worried about the bus.  We loaded up our backpacks and walked to the bus station (about 30 minutes).  No problems getting the bus, but it was about 30 minutes late.

It was our bad luck to be seated in front of a horribly behaved little boy.  On our last bus trip (37 hours) there was a kid right in front of us and he was an angel!  Not this one.  He screamed, whined and kicked our seats the entire way.  We also weren´t able to lie our seats back because he was on his parent´s knee.  We also had to stop at 4 border checkpoints and get out at 2 since getting to Ushuaia involves crossing into Chile and then back into Argentina.  The first of these stops took over an hour and we had to sit on the bus while the driver did paperwork.  He left the heating on and we were all wilting by the time he got back.  Justin was obviously not feeling well, but he was a trooper and managed to sleep for most of the trip.

Guanacos!

The scenery up until Rio Gallegos had been incredibly bleak and pretty unchanging.  The grass grows pretty thinly and the land looks very, very dry.  There didn´t even appear to be any livestock.  After Rio Gallegos things got a lot more interesting.  We saw Rheas and Guanacos as well as cows and sheep.

Strait of Magellan

We took a small ferry across the Strait of Magellan in Chile!  And the further south we got the more incredibly beautiful it got.  The moon was full and it rose over the first mountains we´ve seen here – amazing!

Lighthouse at the Strait of Magellan

The bus made it to Ushuaia at 10:30, only one hour late and we had no trouble getting a taxi to our hostel.  It´s the nicest one we´ve seen yet, and hopefully will be a good base for exploring the area.  We´ll probably take it easy today to give Justin some more time to recover, but then we´ll have lots of beautiful landscape to explore.