Dramatis persona*

helenhead Helen Chick

I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"!

I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!

* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
March 2024
S M T W T F S
« Jan    
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31  

Visitor counter

Visits since May 2016

Recent visitors

BT – Tierra del Fuego

After docking in the morning we had the best part of the day free in Ushuaia, although it took us a while to find a place to store our luggage. Once this was achieved we took a bus to the almost-end of Argentina, to visit Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego for a chance to see some Gondwanan vegetation that made bits of the place look very much like Tasmania.

The glaciated coastline has rivers and inlets bearing glacial melt-water to the sea.

bIMG_6714  bIMG_6720

bIMG_6726

It was the flora in particular that reminded me of Tasmania and bits of New Zealand. I didn’t catch the names of everything, but there was a plant that looked a bit like our waratah or a grevillea, there were some very similar ferns (some may claim that all ferns look alike, but they don’t, and, in actual fact, the photo I’ve included is of a fern that seems quite different from the ones I know), there was a species of Drimys which was not unlike our own mountain pepper (which used to be classified a Drimys but is now in a new genus Tasmannia), and the most striking commonality was the presence of Nothofagus or beech species with their crinkly green leaves. There is some debate as to whether the presence of this family of trees across Tasmania, New Zealand and southern South America is due to the past Gondwanan connection, or because of seed dispersal across the oceans.

bIMG_6718

bIMG_6734

bIMG_6740

bIMG_6781

The other notable doppelganger was an alpine peat bog around one of the lakes, with sphagnum moss and other species adapted for that less than hospitable environment.

bIMG_6736Our track made its way from an inlet, across a variety of terrain and out to a big bay not far from the Chilean border (not that we saw this border). The views of the bay and the snow-topped mountains were quite impressive even though the weather was a little dull.  bIMG_6751

bIMG_6745

bIMG_6753

bIMG_6755

bIMG_6756

bIMG_6773

The rock was decidedly metamorphic.

bIMG_6768

And this is the end of the road. This region around Ushuaia at the bottom of Argentina is known not only as “Tierra del Fuego” but also as “Fin del Mundo” — the end of the world. It is a very long way from Alaska, apparently, and even a very long way from Buenos Aires … which is, as it happens, our next stop. All we have to do is catch the bus back to town, have a mad taxi ride through peak hour Ushuaian traffic jams, pay the excess baggage fee, and catch the evening flight … and hope that, as stated on our itinerary, we would be met at the airport in Buenos Aires.

bIMG_6782

Leave a Reply

 

 

 

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>