The Clark Family's Amazing Adventures

Visiting the end of the world was great fun and luckily not the end of the world for us!

We were in Ushuaia, in the far south of Argentina, Tierra del Fuego, not so far from Antarctica and where there is a lovely national park to explore and three excellent museums to visit. Museums aren’t always fun, but I really liked the ones we went to in Ushuaia.

Museo del Fin del Mundo

First we went to the Museo del Fin del Mundo (that’s the ‘museum of the end of the world’) The building was once the National Bank in Ushuaia and there is a display of the bank with boxes of gold coins inside the old safe!

Museo del Fin del Mundo was Ushaia’s first bank

Aside from this, we saw a video and displays about the Yamana and Selquen people who lived in the lands before the Europeans came, lots of interesting tools and gadgets from those times, loads of stuffed birds and interesting stuff about the sea, including the figurehead of an old boat. Its not big but full of interesting stuff.

Cool exhibits – some of those artefacts are over 6000 years old!!! and AP means Antes del presente (before now)

An amazing fact I learned there……

This is a jar of krill. They’re not very big, about the size of small prawns!

krill

There are alot of krill in the oceans around Antarctica and Tierra del Fuego. Can you believe there are so many krill in the seas that together they weigh more than the total weight of all the 7 million people in the world?

Next we went to a tiny museum called the museum of The Yamana it had amazing displays about the Yamana and Selquen too made by someone who specialises in model making in the film industry and some fabulous maps showing the evolution of the world, the continents, how Tierra del Fuego was split from the bigger land mass and of people migrating around the world.

Working out where different people probably came from!

Another day we went to the Maritime Museum. It’s inside the old prison and has a brilliant collection of model ships, stories about the prison when people were shipped here from Argentina and all about Antarctica – each prison wing and cells have different things inside! So you walk around visiting all the cells! I could have stayed all day but the others were tired and hungry!

Ushuaia’s maritime museum. My sister Lara even managed to have quite a conversation with that model convict!

Going to the national park Tierra del Fuego was great too – we did some lovely walks and saw a beaver dam. You could see their teeth marks on the trees they cut down!

The beaver dam – look at the teeth marks!

We looked around town, found a great chocolate shop, and some great playgrounds and restaurants. We tried to visit the Malvinas museum (Falklands) but it was shut and the windows were smashed! It would have been interesting!

We met some travelling French families – one family had driven from Alaska to Argentina in their campervan and the other family were about to go the other way! I met some fishermen from Ushuaia who let me fish with them but we didn’t catch anything and eventually it got cold and we had to leave!

I saw a lot and I learned a lot about how this place at the tip of South America came to be and the people who came here, explored, settled,were imprisoned, died out. It was an excellent few days on our family gap year journey around SA.