Packing Is Going To Be Tricky...
⬅ previous ⬆intro next ➡Day 13 ~ January 26 ~ Ushuaia to Buenos Aires
Amanda goes for a run early in the morning, and gets this dramatic shot of the town sign.
We leave the hotel down this wood-framed corridor...
...and lo and behold, we're in another wood-framed corridor at the airport! We think it's quite new, but this turns out to be a mistake: it was opened in 1997! Queues for bag drop and security are slow, though: maybe those systems are a bit tired now.
In Departures, there's a shop that sells wine with penguins on the label. Absolutely no idea of quality, and no white, only red or rosé, but Amanda decides she has to take a chance and buys a bottle of the rosé.
Then on to the plane with no more wood to be seen for now.
Jetsmart is indeed very smart. We're not flying with them, though, and our tail is extremely unexciting as you can see in the previous picture.
And at Buenos Aires, we disembark through a symbolic birth canal or something. Never seen one quite like this that I can recall.
Baggage takes quite some time to arrive and I'm getting rather desperate for the toilet, but there don't seem to be any facilities this side of the exit. We have one bag, and fortunately Amanda is not in quite such need, so eventually I leave her waiting for the second and and rush out. I find Jeremias, our local Audley rep, waiting and explain the situation, but it's only a minute or so before Amanda emerges with the other bag.
I don't know if we somehow missed something or whether the Argentinians practice bladder control as a national sport, but it seems odd.
Although it's a domestic flight, we have arrived at the main international airport some way out from the city, so it's an hour or so to drive to our hotel.
We're now back in Audley's hands, of course, so we're not surprised to find the hotel much more to our taste. From the outside, you could easily walk straight past, there's nothing but a small sign telling you it's a hotel at all, but inside is another matter entirely. It's very different in detail to the place in Santiago, but it's got the same boutiquey feel and I think it's hard to imagine anyone liking one but not the other.
We look onto an enclosed courtyard, which the hotel cat is currently guarding.
Downstairs, this is the breakfast end of the through lounge.
And this is the library end.
And it leads onto the courtyard where the cat is now resting from its arduous duties.
Right, off for a little walk around the neighbourhood and finding some dinner (the hotel doesn't have a restaurant, so that's not an option).
The Moroccan Courtyard – Patio de Marruecos – is a pretty little garden space just on the next corner from the hotel.
We're very close to a semi-pedestrianised area that will start to get buzzy as the evening draws in.
We've found ourselves a nice-looking little place. We're still quite early, so there are few other customers yet and we don't have anything much to give us a feel for the place, but then they deliver the wine in penguin caraffes!
Ok, this is the place for us!
And then there's the food! This is for one?!
Amanda's gone for salmon and salad, but she's not going to starve either.
We're delighted to say that the quality matches the quantity. Superb.
The chefs work in an open kitchen just behind me (you can see the same area in the pictures Amanda took of me earlier, but nobody's actually cooking in that exact spot in those.)
Finally, when we come to pay, I offer my card but they tell me there's a chunky discount for cash. We haven't bothered to get any Argentinian pesos, but we've got some US dollars, and as in most parts of the Americas they are every bit as good as local money (if not better). Now we have 10,000 pesos in change. That's about £5, so best not get too excited.
That's an enthusiastic recommendation then for Las Petunias.
We walk back past this. London buses in Ushuaia? Traditional English pillar boxes now?
But no, look at the top where it's got some moulded lettering “...E HALLET MARSHALL” (the beginning is bit hard to see at this resolution, but it's definitely that), and there isn't the GR royal cypher or similar that a British one would have had.
So off to Google, and ignore most of the junk results (especially the AI which is particularly bad), and we can find an Argentinian online architectural magazine article (in Spanish) which tells us,
The iron pillar model was imported from England, which inspired the later design for the Post and Telegraph Office. It was manufactured for the entire country, first by the metalworking company Talleres del Fénix, owned by Bash Brothers and Jorge Hallet MarshallAccording to the article they have no real function today (other than to be somewhat vandalised, I suppose) so I'm not sure what today's Argentinian postal service offers. Perhaps unlike the UK, they don't have public letter boxes at all any more?
On this note, I bid you farewell for the night.
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