Tierra Del Fuego - a day in the park, 'bonding' with Quark!!

The Hotel Los Niros at dusk...
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My last morning at La Posta I spent organising my accommodation for Punta Arenas and Puerto Natales on hostelworld.com, after my conversation with Anne the night before and was ready with my ‘new’ bag from the Argentinean Airline by the time the taxi came to get me.

That took me to the Hotel Los Niros which would be for 1 night and where I would meet up with some of the other passengers going on the Quark ‘Classic Antarctica’ Cruise. The next day was to be a tour of Tierra Del Fuego National Park to meet up with the rest of the passengers.

Donna, our very informative guide for the day
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This was to be a very informal 'bonding' experience for all of those on the cruise having been accommodated for the night in two VERY nice hotels, one in Ushuaia, and the Los Niros to the east of the town in the countryside more, where I shared a lovely room with the two young ladies, Jen and Mel, that I had been booked into a cabin on the boat with.  It was an idyllic spot and while Jen and Mel went to eat in the hotel I made full use of the facilities and had a BATH!!! with bubbles and a glass of wine it was fab - the only thing missing was Radio 4 and the Archers!!   Then the next morning we checked out before boarding a bus to take us for a trip round Tierra del Fuego National Park - our bags were collected from the room and there was a general relaxed and efficient air about the whole thing, which looking back really set the scene for the next week and a half.

To prove I was there!!
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There were two bus loads of us, and we had a great tour guide, I think her name was Donna, who told us all kind of remarkable facts about the Park. The one that really sticks in my mind is about the beavers.  Thirty breeding pairs were introduced (by man) in 1947 - the area was very sparsely populated then, extremely impoverished and any attempt to provide some kind of living for the locals was in some ways probably not a bad idea.  However, I doubt if employment for the locals was the prime motivation - at that time beaver fur would fetch a fair price world wide, and here was a habitat, which looked ideal, inhabited by peoples who needed work. I get the impression that the 'fast buck' has been a kind of pattern for the emigrants to Patagonia in general - have read tales of gold rush and the import of cattle - none of it seems to really work and this particular one has grossly backfired.

Chronic beaver damage...
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You see the weather in Tierra del Fuego, although fairly inhospitable the best of times, never really drops its temperatures quite as low for quite as long as the native habitat of the Canadian beaver - in fact for the beaver its probably quite comfortable!  So much so that their fur doesn't have to grow quite as thick, or as long as at home.  (I wonder what the long-term effects of the climate change for British ex pats to Spain will be?  A change in the function of sweat glands maybe?) The pelts were just never good enough for the market.  So the project was abandoned and so were the beavers.

View to Chile across Lago Poco..
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There were about 30 breeding pairs or introduced in the 40's - and with the improved climactic conditions, and no predators at all once the humans gave up on them now means at the last count there are 70,000 - great for the beaver population, they're never going to face extinction - well not for a while anyway, because their method of creating their habitat, tree felling, damns, general wet devastation of wooded areas, is at an increasingly quickening rate destroying the natural habitats of all the other creatures in the forest, is destroying the forest itself.

Strange sweet edible fungi.
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I saw it, I saws vast tracts of rotting and fallen timber, areas of swamp created by the beavers dams, which once they've had all there is to be had in an area they just move on - maybe two lessons to be learnt from this for us - one is that the beavers (and everybody else!) are going to run out of forest they can live in 15 years if the destruction keeps accelerating as it is (see any parallel with mans activities?) and the other is the route cause of this in the first place - mans desire for profit - OK, it could be said that there was a need for employment, a need for effective clothing, but I'm not going to believe anyone who tells me the fur trade of the 1940's was being run for those motives, I think the driving motive behind a lot of mans activity, especially in the last century was this profit lust, was the economic drive - the get rich quick as you can that also lead to the gold rushes of the previous decades and the rise in outlaws in Patagonia.  Butch Cassidy?  Where did he end up eh?

Los Niros and the view
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It was an unusually sunny and hot day, and on the tour we saw the ‘Tren del fin del Mundo chug by, and I realised I hadn’t missed anything by not going on it – I was seeing more this way! So we toured the park, stopping en route for a delightful Argentinean barbeque meal (not so exciting for us vegetarians, omelette again I think it was!) got chatting to our companions for the next 12 days - majority nationality American, mostly with OAT â€˜Overseas Adventure Travel’ but there were English and Dutch and Swiss and Columbian and Japanese and Australian and I can't remember all the nationalities but we were a good mixed bunch like that and age wise too really. Anyway, the beaver thing made the greatest impression on me as you can tell!  But so did the flora and fauna and the mountains and the colours and the water and the views - I hope some of my pictures show that.

Hut where we had our passports stamped!
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After all that we set off back to Ushuaia town and had a couple of hours to do some shopping before walking up the quayside, where this thought crossed my mind that I would know someone on board. The Lubylov

Orlova – our home for the next eleven nights, our base from which to explore… ……. Antarctica!