Stuck at the bottom

One of the 'pimp' sea lions, surrounded by his flock of women and their
subsequent offspring. Appparently each older male sea lion gets about 8
'wives' to toy with and boss around...not bad.

Out of sheer boredom and a desire to look 15 again, I shaved my
beard. This was taken on our mini excursion yesterday.

The bus drivers trying desperately to fix our bus during a random breakdown in
the middle of Nowhere, Tierra Del Fuego. Using some kind of zooming
technology I'm sure you could see Jason sleeping and Ryan reading aboard.

Well we've reached the bottom of the Americas and now have the painstaking task of going back up north. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but we've found that leaving Ushuaia (where we are presently located) is a much more difficult task than getting here. After looking for hours into flights, boats, buses and cars and having no luck, the decision has been made to bus out of here Friday morning at 5am for 12 hours back to Rio Gallegos, where we were just prior to meeting my pops and Doris. Given this evidence, it has been concluded that travelling north is going to be a lot more work than travelling south, don't know why this is, but it seems to be the (il?)logical conclusion to draw.

After my dad and Doris left us in Punta Arenas, we stayed one more night living the high life (courtesy of father's departure gift!), then it was an early bus ride towards Ushuaia. It was a 12 hour ride or so, basically entirely during daylight hours, so unlike Ryan, who has the ability to read on buses, and Jason, who has the ability to sleep anywhere, I quite literally stared out the window the entire time, looking at the barren landscape drift by. Highlights include watching sheep run from the bus, llamas hop over fences and a really big fire that a bunch of guys were standing around.

Yesterday Jas & I decided to continue on the whole hiking fever that Doris got us started on, and trekked our way up a local ski mountain. Some pretty nice views and it felt good to have a little snow blowing in our faces. Today we hoped on a boat to go check out the Beagle Channel and some wildlife. Probably wasn't worth the cost, but it was cool to see some sea lions wrestling. No idea what we're going to do with the rest of our time here, hopes of sneaking onto a fishing boat in the middle of the night were quickly dashed by port security sometime early Tuesday morning, leaving us with probably sitting around the hostel playing cards.

Pictures! As you should have already noticed, I've decided to adopt a caption format.