January 9th, 2009

Woke up after the first night in my new tent to realize that I was not prepared for the cold here in the South. My feet were two enormous ice cubes. Scarlett and I had squeezed into my one person tent. We had enough space, but realized with the condensation from two people in a one person tent we woke up a bit wet, and would have to figure something out for the coming days. Breakfast was yogurt, and we headed to meet Haukur in town and figure out what to do in the coming days.

Finding a place for lunch that was somewhat affordable was a futile effort so we settled on a cafe on the main strip after 45 minutes of searching. Scarlett, having her father´s side of the family coming from Argentina, has friends all over the country and so the next day we were to take advantage of these connections and head to a new locale but first we had to stock up for some nights in the mountains.

Before the supermarket we checked out the one cool museum in Ushuaia, dedicated to the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego, who are all but wiped out today. In the theory of the great human migration from Africa, over the Siberian land bridge, Tierra del Fuego was the absolute last place on earth to be populated. The province gets it´s name from Magellan when he traveled through here and saw the smoke rising from all the fires the indegenous people always kept burning. They lived naked in this brutal atmosphere and kept fires burning at all times, even in their canoes as they fished. They were an incredible people who had adapted to their environment here but were unfortunately killed off by the white man´s diseases when they came storming in, bringing Jesus with them.

Eating dinner on the street on the side of a supermarket was a new one for me, but we are living cheap. Cheap and happy.