Off to the White Continent again

With my sister having been over from Hong Kong for the funeral too, all three of us were flying out on the same day, so my mum drove us up to the airport.  With only going for the couple of weeks this time, we had lighter than usual rucksacks which was rather nice. 

Our route through to Ushuaia was in three stages.  The first was a ten hour flight to Miami.  We arrived there at 16:05 local time, which is 21:05 UK time.  But then we had to get through immigration and customs.  It seemed to take forever to walk from the plane to passport control, but we were pretty lucky once we got there as we got moved over to a shorter queue.  It still took forever, but not quite as long as it might have done.  We went through the rigmarole of fingerprinting and photos being taken, but made it through OK.

We then collected our rucksacks and joined another queue to pass through customs, before making our way outside to try to find the shuttle bus to our hotel.  Just about every hotel's bus passed us at least twice before ours finally turned up, and then it was a good half hour out, so by the time we actually got to our hotel it was about 8pm, or 1am UK time.

The next day was Thanksgiving, but we didn't get to see any of it as we were straight back to the airport for our next leg, a nine hour flight to Buenos Aires.  Because we we flying on a connecting flight the next day, we had a free transfer to our hostel, but it was slow going.  The bus from the airport to town was OK, but then we had to wait quite a while while they ferried us all on to our final destinations in taxis.  So having dropped off our bags and washed up, we were just in time for an argentine time dinner at 10pm.  We decided to hit one of our favourite places from before, so walked the few blocks over to Don Julio and enjoyed a good steak.

 

In the morning we took a cab to the airport for our very early three and a half hour flight down to Ushuaia.  A quick cab to the Antarctica hostel which we had used before meant we were soon relaxing in the same room that we had last time.

 

It was a long trip, but it was made much easier by the fact that we knew BsAs and Ushuaia, so we could relax and just fit back in to those places.

 

We went back to a couple of good places we'd been to before in Ushuaia, a buffet asado and a nice bar, and then in the morning had a long relaxing brunch and a few beers in the hostel before walking down to the docks in the afternoon to pick up the Ortelius.

On board we found we had been upgraded into a suite which was rather nice, and soon discovered that we had three of the same staff on board as last time, Delphine, Jim and Katrine.