20221227 Tuesday December 27, 2022- Ushuaia, Tierra Del Fuego National Park
The dreaded moment of the cruise has arrived. Luggage tags and disembarkation instructions were delivered by our room stewards last night. Also last night, we discovered that we were booked on a different tour bus than the rest of our party, despite multiple requests that all members of our family be on a single bus tour. That got fixed in the morning.
The Viking Octantis had tied up at the Ushuaia city pier leaving us anchored just outside Ushuaia. Viking Polaris will have shuttle service into town via a catamaran ferry which will operate every 30-45 minutes between 8:30AM and 6:30PM. The Viking Polaris will then reposition, docking at the city pier at 8PM.
The locals observe siesta between about noon and 4:30. Then they party hard into the night, so if you want to do some sight seeing in town, it had better be either early or very late. Since it’s daylight until about 10PM, that shouldn’t be much of a problem.
We spent the morning dealing with the tour bus situation and breakfast. Then we started the process of packing our suitcases. John’s suitcase was successfully fetched from the Ushuaia airport by Viking transfer agents and delivered to his stateroom, so he could pack his newly purchased clothes and personal care products for the trip home.
The bus tour took us to the Tierra del Fuego National Park which is just west of Ushuaia. We had toured this the last time we were in Ushuaia with Princess Cruises, but compared to the Princess excursion, this Viking excursion was less crowded, but more rushed. We didn’t get to see the ranger station exhibits, and spent just a few minutes at the first lake stop before being rushed off to lunch. Lunch was at a different venue that overlooks a lake.
During the Princess tour, we did walk through the exhibits in this building, but ate elsewhere. The dining room is like a large cafeteria but for groups, they do provide table service. There was a small group from a Ponant cruise that had their tables setup with what looked like 4 stemmed glasses of various sizes at each place setting. We only had one stemmed glass and one tumbler. The food was supposed to be all you can eat, but they apparently ran out of roasted lamb. The lamb had been served on what looked like a small hibachi style griddle. What was on it was various bits of lamb that had been cooked over a flame BBQ style, but hacked into odd bits. There seemed to be a lot of back bone and neck, which were similar to ox tail, but it wasn’t really up to our expectations. They served a flan for dessert. It was probably the only meal during this entire cruise where we didn’t overeat.
We visited a bay where the world’s southernmost post office is situated in a shack on a pier over the water. It had just closed its doors for Siesta when our bus arrived. There are trails into the woods and along the rocky shoreline. The rocky shoreline reminded us of home, although our Douglas fir trees have been swapped for beech trees in Tierra Del Fuego. Two interesting features of these trees are galls that are associated with “Darwin’s Fungus” or Indian Bread mushrooms, which are edible and supposedly slightly sweet if harvested before the spores are released. They look a bit like popped pop corn kernels. There are also hanging parasitic plants that look like mistletoe. These are called Chinese Lanterns.
The last stop in our bus tour was at a Bahia Lapataia, literally the end of the road which runs from Ushuaia all the way to Alaska 17,848 km (11,090 miles). We have seen a couple monster overlander RV’s in Ushuaia that are probably planning on making that epic road trip.
The weather was not very cooperative for our tour. It was cold, windy and frequently wet. The bus windows fogged up terribly, and when we asked them to turn on the AC, they said in Ushuaia they don’t have AC. But then the driver did turn on the fan and the windows cleared up within a few minutes. But then he turned it off and never turned it on again, even though the coach windows were completely obscured by fog. If given the opportunity to rate this excursion, it will get a failing grade. But the kids got to see the beautiful geography, flora and fauna of Tierra del Fuego. We would rather have made one more landing in Antarctica, but the weather and wind gods just weren’t going to let that happen.
The Viking Polaris was anchored in Ushuaia harbor and used a commercial catamaran to shuttle passengers to shore, but there was not adequate capacity to avoid a huge back up when it came time for the tours to return to the ship. People ended up standing out in the wind and rain for quite some time before we all ended up back on the Polaris. The ship will be moved to the dock sometime in the night so we should be able to disembark down the normal gangway in the morning and our luggage should make it to the airport ahead of us.
Ben and Janet took advantage of on board booking promotions to book our next Viking cruise. This will be to the Mekong River with Hanoi and Bangkok extensions pre and post cruise in February 2024. The river cruise ship for the Mekong is unique to the fleet, so it will be interesting to see how that smallest class of their ships stacks up to the rest of the fleet.
Nobody is looking forward to dealing with airlines and connections tomorrow.
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