End of the World
This was one of our
favorite excursions for the whole trip! Ushuaia is beautiful and
we were on a bus with a very well-informed guide and the bus made frequent stops.
This gave us free time to
explore and photograph each area. Ushuaia is the world's southernmost city
and one of our stops was "The Road at the End of the World".
We traveled through the
Ushuaia suburbs into the Pipo River Valley and
entered into the Tierra del Fuego National Park. This pristine reserve protects
the southern area of the sub-Antarctic forest, and offers stunning scenery.
Carved by the massive glaciers that once covered the region, the park is a
masterpiece of dramatic tableaus. There were towering mountains
draped in Ice Age glaciers, rivers bordered by virgin forest, and sapphire
lakes circled by peat bogs and beaver-dam ponds.
Our first stop was Ensenada Bay
which looks out over the Beagle Channel. Named after the ship that
carried English naturalist, Charles Darwin, the channel boasts towering
snow-capped mountains, and a rough-hewn coastline dotted by islands in all
shapes and sizes.
Our second stop was Roca
Lake where there were lots of people camping and
picnicking. The lake was gorgeous. Our final stop
was one of the travel world's most unique and
unforgettable milestones: the end of the world! Lapataia Bay is the last
stop on the Pan-American Highway, an astounding marvel of civil engineering
that begins in Alaska and stretches nearly 12,000 miles across two
continents. Guinness' Book of World Records lists the highway as the world's
longest "motorable road."
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