First Stop

It takes 30 hours to get from Bariloche to El Calafate so we stopped in Rio Gallegios for a night as we had to wait until morning for a connecting bus. Big mistake, Rio Gallegios is a small bleek coal shipping town with nothing to see and we had to stay in a hotel (as there were no hostels)that cunningly resembled the hotel in The Shining!!.We were more than happy to arrive in El Calafate and find a really cool hostel.El Calafate is a small town which relies on tourists visiting the area for bread.Like every other tourist visiting the area the reason for our visit was to see the 60m Moreno glacier and we were not dissapointed. We hired a car and drove there for sunrise it was amazing as it was an hour or two before we could see the extent of the glacier in front of us (and we had it to ourselves!).
It is the most amazing thing i have ever seen for once i was speechless!.We just stood for hours watching huge ice peaks sheer off into the water and the deafening noise they made before turning into icebergs in the water,Mal was pretty impressed too.After our morning at the glacier we drove a further 50km to do a spot of fishing(twice in one year!)on our way we stopped to have a picnic and just a couple of hundred yards from us were about half a dozen pink flamingos and some black and white swans which apparently are unique to Argentina.
We drove for hours without meeting a single car it was beautiful but i handed the car back to Mal when the road turned into a river!!.No luck with the fishing so we had to shop for dinner.We hung around El Calafate for a few days as the hostel was great and we met some cool people plus i had a dodgy stomach from some prawns i ate in a restaurant and couldnt face the 16 hour bus journey to Ushuaia!

Ushuaia
We arrived in Ushuaia (the worlds southernmost city)late at night,it was cold and very windy so we deceided to take a room at a hostel close to the bus terminal rather than spend ages looking for a decent one (bigger mistake than the shinning style hotel!!)it was run by an old man with a really strange dog who listen to this...got his son out of bed to give us the room and didnt change the bed clothes!!.Needless to say we moved to a nicer place in the morning.
We went on a boat trip in the Beagle Channel which brought us to the lighthouse which marks the southernmost point before Antarctia. We stopped at bird island and some colonies of sealions. The sealions are beautiful they come right up to the boat but they are really noisy and a bit smelly!.Mal was a little bit dissapointed that there were no Penguins or killer Whales apperently they only stay in the channel between October and March.Ushuaia also has a glacier called the Martial glacier but a little dissapointing after seeing the Moreno glacier it looked like an ice cube!.
We didnt stay very long in Ushuaia as we were short for time as we had to head back up north.