Ushuaia - Trip 1 - Catamaran

So, we move into a new phase of travel - on the tourist trail of Patagonia. We seem to be living an oxymoronic lifestyle. Shacking up each night at strictly top-notch accomodation and then railing against the mass tourism trip that we seem channelled towards. Sometimes we manage to grab a more out of the way excursion, sometimes we just shuffle along with the hordes, the main respite being that, as this is low season, the hordes are thinner (though no less annoying).

Our first trip was the mass-market of the catamaran trip on the Beagle Channel. We saw sea lions and birds...

Sealions and Cormorants

We saw a lighthouse...

Lighthouse

We took pretty pictures of each other...

Pretty T in front of a picturesque mountain

We took pretty pictures of ourselves...

P and T - on a boat

All the boats (there were five out at once - there were many more in harbour - presumably for high season) leave the harbour within 30 minutes of each other and perform a well choreographed (and twice daily run) dance around the four stops of interest.

Things I noticed:

• Sealions smell of fish
  
• Sealions piss at boats (OK one did - it was quite funny)
  
• People cannot follow simple instructions (e.g. please be quiet near the animals)
  
• People with big cameras are slightly more annoying than people with small cameras.
  
• People with small or no cameras can still be pretty damned annoying.
  
• People with video cameras are very annoying too.
  
• I guess the last four points can be summed up by: people are, in general, quite annoying when they don't know or care about the other people that they are temporarily inhabiting a shared space with.
  
• T and I, of course, did not annoy anyone, no - not us.
  

We returned to our hotel after booking more trips.

Oh, and we adopted a very friendly big black dog for a bit. He tried to come shopping with us. The staff of the shop shooed him out (we tried to stop him following us, but after a couple of minutes of Mr Bean-esque comedy - trying to run into the shop (which had automatic doors) without our tail - we just gave up and let him follow us in.)