South America Blog
About this blog
Wayne Bernhardson is the author of Moon Handbooks to Buenos Aires, Chile, Argentina, and Patagonia. Here he shares his vast knowledge of South America and its people.
Recent Posts
- The Papal Cumbia
- The Uruguayan Sacraments: Tango & Mate
- Taxing the Tourist: Argentina's AFIP Aims Low
- Fortress Falklands: A Book Review
- Pope Argentinus I, The Musical: Ragtime Meets Tango
- Credit Where Credit Is Undue?
- ¿Adios Hugo?
- When "No" Is A Positive
- Chile and Its "Crazies"
- The Oscars: A Post Mortem, So to Speak
- Sacrificing the Atacama? A Chilean View of Dakar
- Chilean Oscar Faceoff? "No" v. "Kon-Tiki"
- Friday Digest: Southern Cone Nuggets
- Dancing in the Mud? The Andean Aftermath
- Floods & Mud: Summer Storms Hit the Andes
The Cruise News from Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego
The other day, nearly 6,000 cruise ship passengers disembarked at the commercial pier of Ushuaia, a city of roughly 65,000 people on the Beagle Channel. That sounds like a lot, and it is a lot, but in December 2007 I was in the Falkland Islands when some 4,000 cruisers descended on the town of Stanley (population 2,186). Most of those passengers are from huge vessels like the Carnival cruise liner in the photo here, at Ushuaia, but the more adventurous arrive on smaller ships. more >>
Chile, at Sea and on the Screen
On both the Navimag ferry from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales, and the Cruceros Australis cruises through the fjords of Tierra del Fuego, the quality of services is remarkably good. By that I don't mean the food and drink, which are good enough (for the price) on the Evangelistas and well-above-average to exceptional on the (far more expensive) Mare Australis and Via Australis.
Rather, I mean the information and even the entertainment available on board. Unlike many cruise ships, they are not trivial - the guides on both routes present competent to sophisticated accounts of Patagonian natural history, discovery and exploration, and even climate change. more >>
Tierra del Fuego Has a Winner!
It took longer than I thought, but we finally got a winner from last Thursday’s quiz, whose answer was Tierra del Fuego. I didn’t think it was so difficult that it would take a Caltech postdoc - Kuenley Chiu of Glendale, California - to answer it. Even then I had to provide a hint--Kuenley and one other reader who came close were thinking too small, and proposed Isla Gordon and Tucker Islet, both of which are part of the archipelago (the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego is the largest of many islands here). I had to advise them to think big, and I’ll take the blame for making the quiz sound more difficult than it really was, and I’ll try to be clearer the next time around. more >>
Darwin v. the Penguins
For all the faunal observations he made in The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin was strangely silent on penguins. Only off the shores of Uruguay and on the Falkland Islands did he bother to mention the birds that, for so many people, are one of the main reasons they visit the Southern Cone countries (though penguins are found as far north as Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands, almost all of them breed in sub-Antarctic and Antarctic shores).
Darwin’s primary penguin sightings came in the Falklands, where he described a confrontation with one of the birds: more >>
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