The next day I got on the bus for Ushuaia Argentina; the southernmost city in the world. Ushuaia is on an island called Tierra del Fuego, which means "land of fire" in Spanish. It's called Tierra de Fuego because when the Spanish came they saw fires all over the place because that was the local natives way to keep warm. The island was only about a half kilometer from the mainland but we had to take a ferry across. We drove on a dirt road on the bare grass and very windy Chilean part of the island for a couple of hours until we got to the border with Argentina. The bus dropped me off a couple hours into Argentina at the second largest town on the island called Rio Grande. I waited there for an hour and got on another bus to Ushuaia. There were a few more trees on the Argentinean side of the island, but it was still pretty barren. The final part of the drive into Ushuaia was beautiful. We entered a pine forest and went past a nice long lake surrounded by mountains and up a pass and descended down into the city. Ushuaia is one of the prettiest towns I have ever seen. It's in a bay that looks more like a lake because you can only see the open ocean on the south east corner of it, and it is surrounded on all the other sides by mountains of all different shapes. There is one very large mountain that springs right out of the edge of town that looks like a perfectly symmetrical pyramid, and the other mountains are perfect for hiking. On the southern part of the town there is a nice ski run with a lift that springs right out of the town itself. I saw a map while I was there of a ski resort that was about an hour away, and it looked just like a ski resort back in Colorado. It had a bunch of lifts and runs through the trees and a couple of lifts that went to the treeless top of the mountains it was on. I got the impression it was like a little paradise that nobody knows about, tucked away in the corner of the world.

The bus dropped me off on main street, and when I got out there was an old woman waiting there who wanted to take me to her hotel a couple of blocks away. She was talking to me the whole way to her hotel. I stayed in the front room with an Israeli guy who had been there about a week hanging out with some girls he met there and teaching them Hebrew. This woman was very religious and talked to me for like a half hour every time I was in the kitchen. The Israeli guy said she was doing the same thing to him and that he told her he doesn't believe in Jesus because he is Jewish and she got all upset because of that. I decided to make her happy and told her that I loved Jesus too which made her very happy and started talking to me like I was her best friend. She told me she was really sad because her husband and son weren't religious and started to cry and then left for the church which she seemed to do like five times a day. She made a point to tell me every time she went out that she was going out to meet people from her church. Once a guy came over and she said he was from the church. I told her if she wanted some help talking to God she could buy some Rose essential oil and smell it, and she got really excited and got out her pen to write it down, but I told her it was expensive but she could buy Rose petals and that would help. I saw her husband sitting in the kitchen one day. He had really long hair and a really long beard. I asked him if he was her husband and he said "yes, unfortunately". He was drinking wine and looked bemused. He started telling me about how there are financial problems in Argentina and it's Americas' fault because we're racist against Argentineans. Then he went into his sons room on the other side of the hallway. Their son was always in his room listening to Bon Jovi and playing video games. Ushuaia is in a cool setting with the town built up against the mountains. It was very expensive though, I spent 20 bucks just for two days worth of food at the supermarket. It was there that I had my first Argentinean barbeque with all sorts of different meats which was delicious, and a stark difference from Chile.

After Ushuaia I went to Rio Gallagos which was the windiest city I have ever been to. I stayed at a camp sight near the bus station and walked into town and it all seemed kind of depressing, mainly from the gale force wind. Then I took a bus to the town of El Calafate and got a room. The next day I went to see the glacier Moreno which was very interesting. It is a glacier about 18 kilometers long and five wide. It was the only glacier in the world that was still growing up until 1988. It was growing because in 1930 or something some kind of ice-barrier broke up in the mountains which allowed another glacier to feed into the main glacier and add more pressure to push it forward so it came 75 more meters forward at a fast rate until it blocked a lake-river that the glacier comes at from the side, until one side of the lake is like 10 meters higher than the other side and the pressure blasts all the ice away every four years until the last time it happened in 1988 which was attended by the president of Argentina.

This was a tourist town but it was totally empty which made me kind of sad. It was in a beautiful setting next to a lake up against the mountains. I bought a couple of cartons of white wine and drank both of them with my dinner which was a mistake because all of a sudden I was totally hammered and crazy and decided I needed to get weed, so I stumbled outside and started asking everybody on the streets if they knew where to get weed. I walked by a little tourist agency hut and saw about 10 young guys in there and because they were young and it was at night, I automatically figured that they were having a party so I walked in and asked them if they knew if I could find weed and they said no, so I started telling them how much I loved weed until they all walked outside and one guy was left and I was talking to him until I realized he had never said anything to me, and had just been watching me. So I started walking home and the next thing I remember is waking up the next morning with barf all over me and feeling like hell. I needed some good food so I went to a nice restaurant that was empty except for me and I told the waiter how I thought Argentinean wine was bad and he said it was really good and I told him that the cheap white wine was bad and he said "of course". I got on the empty bus back to Rio Gallegos and took the first back and then got the first bus to Puerto Madrin on the way to Peninsula Valdez.

Puerto Madrin was more interesting than Rio Gallegos. This was a bit of a tourist town where people buy tour to see the peninsula. I took a tour to see the whales in the bay. This is the only kind of whale in the world that floats when it is dead so they were almost driven to extinction by the whale hunters because they are so easy to kill, because all they had to do was shoot them and go off and shoot another and round them up at the end of the day. We got on a boat that was on a trailer and then was backed up by a tractor until the boat was in the water. We floated around with a whale family for a while which consisted of the father, the mother and the baby. They were swimming under the boat and spitting water. There was an American guy on the boat who was translating what the tour guide was saying. This American guy had lived there for five years after he went to Bolivia to take a picture of an eclipse. He was selling videos of killer whales on the peninsula attacking and killing sea lions. Then we drove the eastern edge of the peninsula and stopped at a plateau that overlooks some beaches where the sea lions live. There was a beach to the north that was as long as the eye could see, that was actually an estuary and was loaded with Sea Lions. I walked down a trail to a lookout a little bit above a pool where there were many Sea Lions and Sea Elephants basking in the sun, which seemed to be all they did with their lives. I walked in the distance and saw a couple of Killer Whales hanging out waiting for a Sea Lion swimming in the ocean looking for fish. Then we drove to another cliff and looked down on hundreds of Sea Lions and a few dead ones. I looked in the distance and saw thousands as they extended as far as I could see. That night I saw Kiss of the Dragon with Jett Lee.

That night I took a bus to Mar Del Plata which is the biggest sea side city in Argentina besides Buenos Aires. It was a pretty city with rolling hills and a nice beach in the city center where I watched a roller blade relay race. I stayed there one day, and the next morning I took a train to Buenos Aires. The train was a rickety one and the guy sitting next to me was looking at me with eagle eyes for a while and then asked me where I was from. He was a basketball referee. He said the reason Argentina was having economic problems was because Argentineans aren't patriotic as a country and just stab each other in the back, and the politicians are thieves. He said the other reason was the floods and he pointed out the window as we were rolling by the outskirts of a suburb of Buenos Aires where we could see water totally inundating a residential section, drowning out the cars and getting in the houses. He said nothing could grow and the cows didn't have enough good grass to eat.

When I got to Buenos Aires I walked into a neighborhood were there were some hotels and a cheery old man approached me and told me I should stay in his place for eight pesos a day and he would give me a rate if I stayed longer and I could bring girls there. So he showed me the door and walked off, so I knocked and a stupid-grumpy looking guy answered it and I said an old man told me he owned it and it was eight pesos a night. But the guy said no it was ten, so I left and was looking for another hotel when I saw the old man again and he took me back and said the guy who lived there was just the host and it was eight pesos. I got a room and called my friend Santiago.

Second time after my trip to Brazil

The bus to Buenos Aires was nice because most of the passengers on the bus were Argentineans and I felt refreshed to be around more civilized people who I could actually speak to. I stayed in the same hotel as before because they had my backpack, but it wasn't in the basement anymore, it was in the old guys house which I thought was weird because the basement was empty. My bike was at his house to and I had to wait a couple of days for him to bring it over. I went to the same bar, the Shamrock bar and met a dude and an English couple had just arrived and were doing a tour of southern South America. After a little while they said they wanted to go and catch the new episode of Angel and they invited me so we was an episode about an old guy who takes Angels body and tries to screw lots of girls but can't get anywhere because he's too violent and scares them away and kicks peoples asses. Then we went out to another bar that was totally empty except us, and then ate at a restaurant and they were marveling about how cheap and good the food was. I took them to the "cathedral", a small Tango place where Mariana took me and we were waiting for a show to start and Mariana showed up. At the end of the night there we went to a Chinese restaurant and then went to my room at about four in the morning. At about five in the morning the caretaker woman came to my door and was pissed off that Mariana was there and said she would have to leave at eight in the morning. I told her that Rodolfo told me at the very beginning that I could bring girls there and she said I should have told her that Mariana was there and told her we got back at four but she said that didn't batter. Mariana and I were up for another hour or so and went to sleep at about six and the lady was buzzing me at eight and said she had to go at that minute so Mariana said she knew a nice hotel that was only 20 pesos so I gathered up my stuff and we went there. The new hotel was way better. It was within walking distance to Mariana's' house and the Cathedral. I ended up hanging out in Buenos Aires that time for 20 days because the institute I worked for, Barrigi consulting, kept delaying paying me. When I first got there I went into the place and they remembered that they owed me money for the two months that I worked there but they said they needed boletos so I brought them the same boleto book that I showed to Gisela but she said it wasn't the right one but when I showed it to the other woman she said it was good but they told me I needed a proof of residency document so I went and paid the 10 pesos for that and showed it to them so they said in a week they could pay me so I showed up a week later and picked up my check but it was only for October and I had to remind them that I worked in November too and they told me I would have to wait another week for the other check. When I got home, I noticed the check was post-dated for April 25 which wasn't for another three weeks. And when I picked up the second check and I couldn't open one for myself but Mariana still had a bank account on the outskirts of town so we took a bus about 50 minutes to it and discovered that you have to deposit the check the same day as it is post-dated for which meant a big pain in the ass for Mariana so I called them and asked them if they could change the date so I could get the money before I left and the guy said no and started to explain it in Spanish so I gave the phone to Mariana and she talked to him a little bit and she told me they didn't know I was going to Santiago. But I didn't complain because she was still willing to cash the checks and send the money to me when she got it, but when she did she sent me an American Express check but I couldn't cash it because there are no American express check but I couldn't cash it because there are no American Express offices in Santiago so I had to send there check back to Mariana to get the money back from the bank but she said all the banks in Buenos Aires closed down for a month and wouldn't open up until after she left to Portugal but her mother would take care of it but she didn't and Mariana didn't return any of my emails until recently and now she says she is trying to figure out what is going on with the bank. The time I had there with Mariana though was very nice. She was spending all her spare time with me in my hotel room and i was hanging out in there smoking weed that she hooked me up with on the mall from a friend of her ex-boyfriend. I got a huge block of strong weed for like 18 bucks. I was listening to music and relaxing, it was a nice time for me.