Back in Ushuaia after a night and two days of hiking in Tierra del Fuego National Park. The cabby dropped me off by the first trail yesterday at around 9 am and I had to wait around for another half hour till it got light enough to see where I was going. It`s winter time down here and right about now at the end of May Ushuaia get`s around 8 hours of daylight, though in a month that`ll drop to about 4 or 5. Of course that means they also get summer days that last from 3 am till 11 at night. I`ve never seen days like that; I imagine the first time I`m up in Alaska during the summer I`ll have red eyes for about a week before I adapt to the schedule.
The park was great. It`s a smaller sized park, much smaller than Torres del Paine where I was in the middle of March. Over yesterday and today I covered every trail but one and walked probably a little over 30 kilometers which is definitely good for the belly I`ve been cultivating here lately. I set up my tent around 4 o`clock yesterday afternoon and crawled in a little while later. It was kinda odd having so much night, usually I`d be thrilled to have 15 hours of nighttime to sleep but still being adjusted to a 3 am bedtime from Buenos Aires I ended up laying around for a while singing songs to myself. I got up to piss in the middle of the night and outside the tent it struck me how dark it was. The sun never completely gets to the other side of the planet leaving a tiny bit of light covering the sky which is just enough to keep the stars from showing, which I`ll admit was kind of disappointing. The horses stalking the campground would grunt every once in a while and this scared the hell out of me till I figured out what it was.
It rained a little during the night and to give you an idea of how cold it was when I woke up this morning the raindrops on my tent had turned to ice. I imagine it got to around 25 degrees or so but with the humidity it felt much colder. Which, admitedly, was just what I was hoping for. I think I saw all of 12 or so other people in the park, plus a bunch of birds and even a few foxes which are pretty adjusted to humans to where if you wave food to them they`d cautiously approach but if not they`d swing a wide U around you and be on their way. I was trying to get a picture of one of them and I noticed he kept on trotting around directly behind me and then stopping. I wanted to stay where I was squatted to see what he`d do from behind me but then I thought better of it which was probably the best choice. There are no teeth marks on my ass, so all the better. At one end of the park is Lapataia Bay which is, well, the end of the road for this hemisphere. This means that by road you absolutely cannot go any further south. In honor of this monument to Being Really Far South they built a pretty wood deck and a sign that says "Buenos Aires- 3,063 kilometers. Alaska- 17,848 kilometers." Holy fuck that`s a long way.
The bus back into Ushuaia earlier today broke down which made me remember the bus Dan and I took in Cuba from Havana to Trinidad where we were stuck at that tourist trap rest stop for 3 and a half hours drinking mojitos and we saw what I still think is the ugliest dog I have ever seen. That poor thing, it was so godawful ugly I can still remember it`s beady little eyes looking up at me from the middle of it`s ugly, ugly face. Even the dog Vince and I saw in Heredia with the giant piece of something growing off its side wasn`t this ugly.
The last trail I did today follows a lake until arriving at, of all things, the Chilean half of Tierra del Fuego. Illegally I stepped past the "End of Trail you Dirty Argentine Stay Put" sign back into my favorite country and miraculously felt the weight of economic depression lifted from my shoulders and during the ten minutes I sat down resting on a log looking at the lake I could talk free of this ridiculous accent and know that where I was didn`t just elect a cross-eyed president. Speaking of which, 8 days ago was supposed to be Sunday Election Day in Argentina (also known as You Poor Bastards Pick Your Crook Day) but Carlos Menem withdrew his candidacy a few days earlier because Nestor "Cross Eyes" Kirschner was gonna beat the pants off him and Menem wants another shot the next time around which he surely wouldn`t have if he got creamed this time. It`s a pretty smart move if you think about it, though the nice lady whose house I`m staying at now was pissed off because she was really looking forward to sticking it to Menem by not voting for him. Usually I don`t like the idea of a democracy being where you vote against someone instead of for them (ahem, United States) but with the way she put it I had to agree. So Argentina`s new president is Nestor Kirschner who has won the world`s most difficult job of starting Argentina on the path out of it`s 30 billion dollar debt. Yea, good fucking luck, buddy. I`ve been told he`s probably nothing more than a puppet for the outgoing president Duhualde who was also a crook so, well, it looks like you might be screwed again Argentina. Only time and millions of dollars worth of money laundering will tell. What still confuses me, however, is how Kirschner was sure to win in a country so obsessed with physical appearance when he`s cross-eyed. Can you imagine how difficult it must be to look serious when it looks like you`re reading the paper and watching tv at the same time? Or every time you smile you look like you`re drunk? Okay, okay, I`ll stop picking on the guy. I`m sure he`ll make up for it in bribes.
So now I`m full and have a bus ticket to Rìo Gallegos that leaves tomorrow morning at 6 fucking o`clock am. This bus follows the most bureaucratic route ever as it has to pass through Chile and back into Argentina on it`s course north out of Tierra del Fuego. Count `em, folks, that`s 4 stops for customs just to fucking get there, not to mention through two countries that don`t exactly have the most positive attitudes towards each other. So to prepare for that I`m off home to shower for the first time in a while and sleep like a baby after all the hiking I`ve been doing. Some guy in this internet cafe has a cell phone that rings the Indiana Jones theme song.